That was a nice thing to do on a Saturday

Yesterday my friend Kri and I went to our fiend Joann's with our quilts-in-progress. Kri and I are both beginners, but Joann has made many beautiful quilts, and she had offered to look at ours and help us move forward with them. We had a great time; I always like seeing the things people make, so there was a fair bit of just hanging out gazing at things in admiration. I like seeing people's different approaches, the ways they use color that I'd never think of, the wonderful ideas they have. I'm as structured in my quilting as in everything else I do; the quilts I've made have all been very symmetrical, repeating patterns. So I love to see crazy quilts, or quilts where the blocks aren't all the same, or quilts where someone launched the project without necessarily knowing what it was going to look like or what it was going to end up being. Other people's boldness inspires me.

I also have a tendency to think I have to figure everything out for myself, so it was good for me to reach out to someone more experienced. For one thing, Joann was undaunted by mistakes. She always knew right away what could be done to fix them, or how they could be worked around, or she'd say cheerfully, "That will work out in the quilting," or "oh, that will leave a little pucker, but that won't matter." If I didn't know better, I'd have suspected that this was not the first time she'd dealt with uneven seams, or blocks that didn't quite turn out the size they were supposed to.

Last year, I took my quilt top to Quaker meeting with me to show Joann, because things that were supposed to line up weren't lining up. Joann isn't the only quilter in meeting, so after worship I had a couple of really talented people looking on as I laid my quilt top out on one of the tables in the social hall. I was nervous. To my amazement, not one of them thought that it was a big problem that things weren't lining up; instead, these women who've created beautiful, perfect works of art all jumped in cheerfully suggesting various ways I might proceed to make a perfectly nice quilt-top in which things did not line up on purpose. And they treated this kind of mid-stream course change as a perfectly ordinary and expected thing.

It's not always like that; Kri and I have both had experiences in the past with more-experienced quilters being less than kind about our early efforts. So it was lovely yesterday to be with someone who seemed really happy with what we'd done, and who wanted us to continue with it, whatever the flaws that had crept in. I felt encouraged and appreciated, and inspired by admiring some of Joann's quilt-tops to imagine what I might be able to do someday, with enough practice.

My quilt-top isn't quite done; I need to put a border around it (not the border I planned; we decided we liked something else better). Joann has offered to come over during Yehva's nap one day to help with my quilt sandwich, and I might take her up on that, not only because I could use the help, but because it was so much fun doing this kind of work with friends.