You Have to Break a Couple of Eighths to Make a Blanket

Change is a good thing.  Having worked as a cashier, I know this for a fact.  There was one night when I ran out of quarters, then dimes, then finally nickels.  By the time my shift was over, I had two pennies left.  Counting out ninety cents worth of nickels is not easy, but coming up with ninety cents without any change is imposable.  But weather you are changing dollars into cents or making changes in your life, change is necessary.  As the old saying goes, you have to break a couple of eggs to make an omelet.

One criticism I have heard about quilting is how ridiculous it seems to take perfectly good fabric, cut it up and sew it back together.   I will admit that this does seem impractical, but sometimes you have to break a couple of eighths to make a blanket.  If the goal was simply to make something to keep you warm, this could be done with a whole lot less effort.  But quilting is about more than that, it is an art form.  It is about making something beautiful.  No one who looks at a well crafted log cabin or English paper piecing quilt could think that the fabric or the time had been wasted.

The truth is, often in order to make something beautiful, you have to cut up what you already have.  This applies to quilting, writing, and even our lives.  Sometimes we have to “cut up” the life we know in order to make something better.  We have to make changes in order to keep growing.  As hard as it is, change is a good thing.  Sometimes we need cut up our security, cut up our complacency, or even cut up our expectations in order to make something better.  It may be easier to keep things as they are, but then we will never know what we could have made from it, what beautiful patterns will emerge or what surprising twists and turns we might find.  The only way to know what we are capable of is to keep challenging ourselves.

Attitude of Success

There is a great power in positive thinking.  Before an athlete comes up to bat he will visualize hitting the ball in order to help him actually do.  We are taught from the time we are younger that we need to believe in ourselves, as though this alone is enough for us to reach whatever goal we may strive for.  There are numerous books on the subject that explain everything from the psychology to the karma to the physics of the issue.

I don’t know how productive positive thing is, but I know how damaging negative thinking is.  It only makes sense.  Imagine that same athlete coming up to the plate with the attitude of Eeyore, “Well I probably won’t hit it anyway, but I guess I’ll go up there.”  Or worse yet, he never even gets up to bat because he’s certain he will strike out.  He has failed before he’s even tried.  Positive thinking may not guarantee success but negative thinking does seem to guarantee failure. 

Perhaps the real strength in positive thinking is that it keeps us going even when we do fail.  A quilter’s best friend is a seam ripper.  This seems to be a universal truth. No matter how good a sewer they are, mistakes will be made sooner or later.  The mark of a good quilter is not the absence of mistakes, but the ability and persistence to fix them.  More than anything else, you can’t give up.

There is a famous quote from Thomas Edison that says, “I have not failed, I’ve just found 10,000 ways that won’t work.”  In life we may get up and fail thousands of times, but we only have to succeed once.  That can only happen if we never give up trying.  Perhaps what we were told when we were younger is true, we can do anything if we just believe that one of these times when we get up again we will in fact succeed.