I Don’t Function on “Yes, and…”

Source.

It hit me this morning just what an intolerably long time it has been since I’ve gotten on here and actually finished a post. Because like any good blogging person (something which I am not), I have been on here many times to write a few sentences, hit the backspace button, and try again with a new and witty approach. None of that ever actually leads to a finished blog post though, so I’m making that one of my goals for today.

This is a blog post that has been a long time in the making; since late April, actually. I think what bothered me about it (and why I was stuck in the miserable cycle of writing three sentences and backspacing two) is that I was trying very hard to give a story to a slightly more introspective project and then debating if whether or not what I wrote wasn’t actually quite shallow. This habit of planning has a lot to do with what I originally wanted the blog post to be about so let’s get on with it. 

Last year, I wrote a part of a catch-up blog post on wanting to patch over the six-year-old Sharpie designs on the underside of my summer quilt. I was adamant about the idea of lifting the pattern for every single individual white design patch on the underside of the quilt with tracing paper, transferring that shape to a new piece of white cotton fabric, tacking onto the quilt, and then hand sewing it into place by copying the meandering quilting stitches that run throughout the quilt. Ridiculously labor-intensive I came to find out when I was halfway through my first piece. So when Ann Wood came out with her hexagon project, I unintentionally jumped on. The clean corners created by the paper piecing were incredibly tantalizing and I loved the idea and got hooked on stitching together little two inch hexagons. The timing was wonderful because as it turns out, my quilt went bust without me and has been running ragged for the past few months and it is really time to start looking for a new one. Why not make one myself? I wondered as my stack of hexagons kept growing, and so I embarked on a completely new project. 

The first three.

Ann Wood wrote about a “Yes, and…” approach in her original post and I loved the idea of following it. That concept to me has always held a certain charm because the results are so unpredictable, and yet often come out so lovely. Except that for me, aside from those first three hexagons which got thrown together because they were first pieces of fabric I grabbed, I don’t function well on “Yes, and…” I’m a planner. I like to lay things out in advance and know where I’m going before I get there.

“Yes, and…” approaches introduce a certain amount of guilt in my projects because after I spend a good amount of time comparing the merits of two or three ribbons without having a definite decision on any of them, I feel backed into a corner over the length of time I needed to come to any sort of a conclusion. The same goes for this quilt, except that because of my determination to militantly follow a “Yes, and…” approach, I end up spending a lot of time agonizing over whether or not a decision I made on the fly was the right one and if that piece should be taken out altogether. See that embroidered snowflake on the bottom edge of the last picture? That one came out after three days of debating, while the obnoxious St. Patrick’s green piece in the center right drove me nuts for days before I shut my brain off and stopped thinking about it.

I admire the people who can randomly put this and that together and end up with a result that is wild, unexpected, and lovely. But the reality is that I am just not this sort of person. I fall more into the “No, but…” group rather than the “Yes, and…” Telling myself that I’ll figure something out when the time comes can often leave me feeling somewhat stranded. My instinct in this quilt is often to save pieces for “when they look better” instead of just going with a piece because it looks good now. Which is why I say that I’m a “No, but…” person, because even when I promise myself that I won’t plan, I still do.

It’s very hard for me not to plan, but that was the whole point of this project and so I keep trying to stop my brain from working ahead of me. I got good at just winging it for as the piece above grew bigger, only coordinating something if I wanted to change the configuration of a pattern on one of the hexagons. But when that piece got too hefty to comfortably work with, I decided to start a new section. In other words, a blank slate.

This piece came out much cooler and composed than the last one, and I focused on interspersing my brighter pieces with solid, unpatterned ones. I used a lot of the fabrics I got in Ann Wood’s scrap swap back in February, and so the slate was truly new because so many of the fabrics weren’t mine. I still did plan, but this time I limited it to the overall feeling I wanted the section to have with the stipulation that I would allow it to develop on its own and let its mood be defined by the hexagons I decided to include. In other words, I still allowed myself to plan, but I did so by setting certain parameters for myself (one of these was that if I added in a piece that I didn’t really like afterwards, I would make it work instead of taking it out).

This compromise works well for me. It’s the midway point between “Yes, and…” and “No, but…” and has given me a balance between my need to plan and my desire for something a little more unpredictable. So here’s hoping that I can keep it up and come out with a working quilt that I love. The deadline I’ve set for myself is to have the hexagon top done by New Year’s, so I’d best get stitching.

Source.