Helper Bee

Yesterday I had a little one-on-one class for a woman who wanted to make a baby quilt but didn't have any 'tools' since they were all in Florida. So I did the 'C'mon Down!' act and she showed up with about 20 yards of batting and 6 or 8 yards of fabric. She has done this before and handled rotary cutters so I got to skip the yakkedy yak beginners speeches.

But. (And I say this with the upmost respect and admiration.) She had been taught 'old-school' and wanted to measure everything, draw out the plan, figure out how much fabric she would need mathmatically. Of course I am standing there ready to strip that fabric up and told her that there is ANOTHER WAY! Ands talked her into at least considering NOT figuring how many squares of each of three fabrics to cut. Instead I directed her to just cut.

She about had a coronary in my studio.

But as she turned out a little pile of squares I would slap them up on the board and she could see where it was going. Her fabric choices, in my opinion, needed a bit of a jolt, but she would have none of that so I didn't push my few pink oddities off on her. What I DID do was talk her into two borders with the darkest fabric outlining the quilt blocks for drama, and a lighter border around that. I was pushing to use the same dark fabric as the binding but since she had three fabrics and there were essentially three go-rounds she wanted to use the third fabric instead. I did have my way with using the stripe sideways around the edge, and fussing cutting one of the toiles to show complete scenes in each block. So the blocks line up 1-2-3-1-2-3-1 in the first line, then 3-1-2-3-1-2-3 in the second giving a nice diagonal. The size is to be used for a carriage, so I also talked her down from making a crib size. Whew.  It would take me about 6 hours to finish, including the quilting, but she hopes to finish it by fall.

These things are so natural to me that I don't even consider what I am doing- just fly by the seat of my pants. By now I just know what works and how to make something really cool by breaking a rule or seven, but she was still on worrying about doing something 'wrong'. I tried to explain that the 'wrong' parts are always the most wonderful in a quilt because they are what tells the story. But prior to this experience, her only teacher has been a very accomplished traditional quilter who does excellent- OK, I will say 'perfect' work. I can only bite one ass a day.

She left happy with her huge bolt of fiberfill and a whole day of being immersed in the dark side. And I complied and took a picture of the project on the wall and emailed it to her so she won't MAKE A MISTAKE putting it together. She is going to print it out as large as she can and post it near her machine.


Some days you eat the bear, somedays the bear eats you.