Excellence Versus Perfection in Quiltmaking
Quiltmakers are amazing artists and crafters! Here is a group of people who choose wide arrays of colorful fabrics to cut up into smaller pieces then sew them back together in intricate patterns and shapes! Then they layer the top with batting and backing fabric and either sew through the three thick layers with painstaking hand-stitching or feeding the unwieldy creation through a sewing machine to quilt in myriad designs!
We should be so proud of our efforts! Yet so many quiltmakers, when complimented on their work, immediately point out the small errors – a skipped stitch here, a stitch out of alignment there, a point that is not quite perfectly sharp…
Why is that? Perhaps it’s human nature to focus on the flaws out of a sense of modesty or honesty, but it’s time to resolve not to do that and to celebrate the success of your quiltmaking!
Perfection is Overrated
Many years ago, I read an account of how some pioneer women would purposely make a flaw somewhere on their otherwise unblemished quilts. Wait, what?! Make a mistake on purpose?
Here were women who found time to stitch for the sake of beauty, despite their grueling days of drudgery and hard work. Creating a beautiful quilt, even if pieced from scraps and rags, proves that humans have a desire to surround themselves with aesthetically pleasing objects rather than just functional items (like a ratty old blanket would be!).
The reasoning for the purposely done flaw, apparently, was that the pioneer women believed only God was perfect and that humans should not presume to be on this same level. So, even if the rest of the quilt was a pinnacle of perfection, they humbled themselves by making a small flaw to confirm that they were human and not trying to encroach on higher, hallowed territory!
Perhaps this is a good point for everyone to remember in their creative pursuits. You are expressing yourself through your craft, so be proud of your unique talent and let perfection go!
Strive for Excellence
As a public-school classroom teacher for twenty-seven years, I have always encouraged my students to strive for excellence. Excellence does not mean perfection. Excellence means your work represents your best effort and that you know there is nothing you could improve on.
Let’s apply this mindset to quiltmaking. As you created your quilt, if you measured and cut your pieces carefully and pieced them together with the best accuracy you could yet they still don’t quite meet at a perfect angle, let it go! Likely no one will notice unless you point out the small imperfection. The overall impression your quilt will give will be one of quality work.
If you are stitching a quilt motif and you go off the line here and there, stand back and assess how big a visual impact this really has. If it was done with a contrasting thread color that truly detracts from your quilt’s beauty, then by all means take out the much-maligned (but necessary!) dreaded seam-ripper, remove those portions and redo them. But if the stitches blend in, move on and continue to do your best as you keep sewing!
The rectangular border of the leaf shown here was done without marking or measuring, an experiment in spontaneity I regretted due to the inconsistency of the sizes of the rectangles.
But when viewed as part of the whole quilt, from a bigger distance…
The uneven stitching becomes almost undetectable when viewed from further away.
After all, if a quilt was completely perfect, it is most likely to have been created by a computer, not a human!
Maintaining Quality While Letting Small Things Go
Each quiltmaker must decide their personal threshold of allowable imperfections. If you are making something to enter into a competition, obviously your focus on trying to do things with excellence will be much higher than someone making a throw quilt for a family member to use while watching TV. But even the throw quilt must live up to the quiltmaker’s own personal sense of integrity for doing their best work, so there are no regrets about how the project turned out.
Here is one time I took out the dreaded seam-ripper, to remove all the free motion quilted leaves in the top left corner of the quilt, Chrome Rhino in Color. I was dissatisfied with the original leaves, with their casually done stem inside each leaf.
The new leaf design included a smaller leaf echoing the first one. The neatness and uniformity of the finished project made it worth the while.
The Problem with Perfectionists
It’s been said that perfectionists never finish anything because nothing is ever good enough, trapping them in a frustrating cycle of redoing and rejecting the results. This could describe some quiltmakers and why they don’t finish a project. Of course, everyone is entitled to abandoning a project now and then because it isn’t turning out as you hoped and you’ve lost interest in it. Life is too short to force yourself to finish it if your heart really isn’t in it anymore. But if discarding unfinished projects into a charity bag becomes a pattern, perhaps you just need to give yourself credit for getting as far as you did, release yourself from perfection and go on to finish the project the best that you can!
Focus on the Positive!
So the next time someone is “oohing and aahing” over a quilt you made, bite your tongue if you are on the brink of cataloguing its minor flaws and imperfections! The world doesn’t see them! They see your artistic effort shining through your design and stitched into your quilt so it glows with the beauty of a unique creation made with excellence by YOU! Excellence wins over perfection, so just smile and say “Thank you” for the well-deserved compliment!