In my head, every project I seek to undertake has a fabulous, perfect outcome. The watercolor quilt I begin to piece will be a work of sheer genius, the individual color blocks syncing up their color schemes into a symphony of fervent expression; the stitches I have already set in my mind are neat, straight, the threads blend perfectly where wanted, and pop with unexpected presence on command. Everything about this quilt is planned and perfect, an award-winning work of art that I will casually show off to family and friends, noting that oh, I just figured it out myself and went from there.
Unfortunately, what begins in my head as the Pieta of projects generally ends up as a paper mache manger that a 7th grader slapped together. What is so frustrating is that there really is a true work of art in my mind, but I am no operational artist, and struggle to translate the mental image to the material world.
This slow acceding of my work of art to the realities of my abilities is something I generally refer to as "the whittling process.". From the first snick of the scissors to the last harried stitch in the quilt, there is generally some piece of perfection lost in each step to the growing desire to just get the damn thing finished. A case in point would be one of the six unfinished quilts stored in a trunk upstairs...
For those who are unfamiliar with the term, a "watercolor quilt" is one in which a variety of fabrics are chosen because of complementing color schemes from one pattern to the next, so when the fabrics are laid next to each other, a distinct progression between color and pattern emerge. The effect is generally the same as colors bleeding into one another so that none is distinct, although in this case this is done with patterns on cloth. I first saw one of these quilts in a fabric store I frequented. It was gorgeous--perfectly color-compliments, with the square blocks blended so subtly you couldn't tell where one piece began and the next ended. It was like seeing Monet's "The Water Lilies" rendered in repeating patterns in textile. The store owner, noting my admiration, told me that I could join her sewing class (for a fee) and meet with the group to learn how to piece such a quilt and pick colors that would work. Because I dislike waiting and am buoyed by the naive-yet-encourgaging work ethic of "I could do that myself," I elected to skip the classes and just figure it out on my own. I stood there and memorized the pattern in the color blocks, and the five watercolor quilts to follow are history.
Except that THREE of them are a full fifty percent of those aforementioned unfinished quilts. The one with the most work done, which starts from mostly-white-with-black-patterns and progresses to mostly-black-with-white-patterns, is the one which is in the midst of the whittling process. The fabrics I picked were SO COOL, and in my head the repeating patterns in the quilt move from light to dark and back again fluidly and without interruption. The trick of it, though, is that you don't get to see what will actually emerge until after you have sewn all those fabrics together into small chunks.
For folks unfamiliar with quilting, the general assumption is that people actually cut out and sew together eight hundred tiny squares to create the one big rectangle that makes up the face of the quilt. More experienced sewers will know that if you are trying to create repeating patterns in the face of the quilt, rather than cutting a bunch of tiny squares, you cut long strips of cloth, sew them together in the correct order, then cut across all those strips to get all those little squares already sewn together. You ultimately then match up each of these strips of blocks to their sibling strips, and over time your pattern comes together as you sew ever larger sections of these blocks together.
In the creation of this white-to-black quilt, I have already gone through one major stage of the whittling process--accepting that I made a mistake in the selection of the fabrics. While watercolor quilts blossom when large irregular fabric patterns are chosen (because one small square of that larger pattern will interact differently with each neighboring square depending on what part of the pattern is revealed), I tragically picked a pattern that was too repetitious on too small a scale. It does not "blend" the way I saw it in my head. Considering that there's a really good chunk of change in textiles in this quilt as well as a "vision" of artistic intent, the miser or the artiste would not settle, and would rip out the color blocks with the offending pattern. I am neither a miser nor an artiste, and would rather lessen the perfection of my original idea than go through sixty blocks of sewn strips and rip out the bad pattern and start over. The mentality of "I'll be damned if I have to..." sets in, and the whittling process begins!
I am currently contemplating stage two of whittling, which is a bigger break from my Pieta than even I am ready to make yet. Inevitably, for those of us who are committed multi-taskers with three (or nine, or twelve) projects going at once, mistakes are made if proper and complete attention is not paid to the task at hand. I have discovered that, after hours and HOURS spent cutting, sewing, ironing, piecing, pinning, sewing, and ironing again, that I MADE A MISTAKE with one of the strips in the strip-piecing, and now have scores of cut and pieced strips in the WRONG PATTERN. The miser or the artiste would not stand for this, because if the pattern is off by only one square it creates a ripple effect through the entire quilt, knocking everything out of order and ruining the flow, making it not a watercolor quilt but instead just a big mess. Rather than going back and fixing the mistake, I'm thinking of just assembling large pieced blocks where the pattern still holds, and then just cutting large squares of the original fabrics and sticking them in. The end result? A watercolor quilt? No. Something much, much easier and with the potential to be passed off as intentional with the right pretentious phrasing (like, the large fabric blocks interrupting the flow of color represents a syncopation in the melody of the pattern)? Absolutely.
This whittling takes place in almost every project I undertake. I'm making great time on my soap project, and will have it completed by the deadline with time to spare, but I'm conscious of the whittling I've done so far, such as accepting that a piece of an egg carton would probably make just as good a soap mold as the more labor-intensive hand-assembled one I'd started off the vision with (although, again, with the right pretentious phrasing...).
So, an artist in the pursuit of perfection? No. A damn fine whittler? Yes, indeed.
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