Do you remember way back in April when I wrote about creative goals and how I need to have deadlines, or at least be accountable in order to get things finished? In that post, I said that my sewing goal for the year was to make three quilts by the end of the year. As of today, I have completed two, so only have one more to go. I also talked about the value of finishing things, and how this can be a struggle for me when I spend all my days at home, and while there is always work to be done at home, that work is also constantly being undone. Washing, cooking, cleaning. All of these things will always have to be done and re-done from now until the end of time. I read a quote at the weekend which really resonated with the thoughts I have had this year about the need to do creative things, but is articulated so much better than I could manage:
'Perhaps some days unpredictability and variety overshadow the responsibility of motherhood. You can hardly imagine what you do in a day that stays done. That is one reason to get involved in a hobby or project or class. In such things, you can see and feel progress or permanence. Unlike the laundry or the dishes or the cooking, they stay done.”
Permanence. That is exactly it. I value the permanence of things I have made (except for cakes).
Quilting is so much about stages, and always keeping the end goal in mind: A beautiful quilt that will be used and loved for decades. It can be easy to feel disillusioned in the early stages where there is so much cutting to do. This quilt is made up of 160 triangles. That is a lot of cutting of lots of pieces of fabric. But I always find that once the cutting is done, it only takes a few hours of sewing for the quilt top to be completed.
My least favourite part of the process is making and attaching the binding. It's fiddly and I can never get it to look as neat as I would like to. My lack of love for binding is the sole reason these two quilts have sat ready and waiting for their binding for the last two months. At the weekend, I saw a friend's photo on Instagram of a beautiful selection of fabrics she had just bought from my favourite online fabric shop - M is for Make. I gave myself the incentive of buying some new fabrics as a treat for completing these two, as a way to try and motivate me to just get through the last stage of sewing to complete them. Well, my resolve to wait did not last, and I ended up buying the new fabrics before I had even started the binding! But I did finish them, so there's always that...
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