Respect your work

In an online group I belong to the question 'Do you make quilts for show?' came up.
A lot of people felt their work wasn't good enough. I know that feeling and for a very long time my quilts weren't good enough. I was ashamed of my mistakes, my quilting, my points not meeting etc etc. What was I doing producing stuff that I was ashamed to have scrutinized?

Two things changed my attitude to my work.

I did a course with Barbara Barber, www.barbarabarberbritishquilts.com , she suggested you should tidy the edges of your quilt by zig zagging before you started quilting. This was showing respect to your work, keeping it clean and tidy. If you didn't respect your work, who would? (BTW I did this for a while but now I prefer to have a bit of extra backing to 'hang' onto when quilting the edges).

That word respect stuck. I hadn't even considered respecting my work before this.

Later I did a course with June Barnes, www.cjunebarnes.co.uk/ . Her work is wonderful. She was talking about what to do with thread ends. She said she used to clip them off. Then she imagined her mother talking to her in the way she had when she was small and her mother said 'Are you happy with that?' Then she started burying her threads.

At this point I started to have a different attitude to what I produce. My unpicker became my friend. It gave me a chance to put things right. I made a space on my wall so I could look at the work in progress and see if I was satisfied.

Unpicking seams which don't come up to scratch, makes you sew and cut more carefully. When appliquéing, it takes a little longer to put in smaller stitches but it is less painful than having to redo it. We're not in a race (unless it's a quilt for an event like a wedding or a birth). The more you correct your mistakes as you go, the less mistakes you make and the more you are happy to have other quilters not just look at you work from a few feet away, but also to get up really close and personal with it.

You wouldn't serve your family lumpy gravy, so why would you give them a quilt with mistakes in it? It doesn't matter if you design the work yourself or use a bought pattern, go for quality over quantity.

Respect your work, respect yourself and you will find you produce work which not only are you not ashamed by but you can be proud of.

BTW when I mentioned this to June Barnes a few years later, she had no memory of it at all, but it has stuck with me for all these years.