Have you ever made a mistake? Yeah, me too. Lots of them. In fact, I have a quilt top on the shelf in my sewing room that is a mistake. The parts are nice, but together, not so nice. It’s pieced very precisely. The fabrics are very nice. But the composition doesn’t work. In my “free time” I will take it apart and make something totally different with the precisely pieced parts. A mistake.
Everyone makes mistakes. Sometimes they’re accidental. But sometimes they’re intentional; like not thinking before you say an unkind remark. Often it comes from not doing the necessary “hard work” and other times someone just blows into the back of your car on the freeway changing the course of your life for a year or more. Everyone makes mistakes. It’s how we handle the mistakes we make that makes a difference.
When my children were young and they would make a mistake, I wouldn’t get upset with them. I would say “What are mistakes for?” And they knew to answer “Mistakes are for learning.” I would say “what did you learn from your mistake?”
When we make a mistake and do not learn from it, then we are doomed to make similar mistakes over and over. That’s because we don’t do the hard work. We must admit that we goofed up, and make amends to whomever may have been harmed, including ourselves. We must understand why and how we made the mistake and take different actions to not repeat our mistakes. Sounds easy, right?
Since this is a blog about quilting and sewing, I’ll tell you about a quilt I made in January of 2018. I wanted to make my motto, “Mistakes are for Learning”, into a light-hearted quilt. I had recently been gifted a new embroidery software program for my new sewing machine. I found a font I liked and embroidered it onto a large piece of fabric. I like to embroider onto fabric that is much larger than what I’ll need for the eventual quilt. Then I can cut it down to the perfect size.
I printed copyright free pictures of 60’s pop art flowers and traced the flowers onto fusible backed fabrics. I cut and placed the flowers onto another piece of fabric and played around with the placement of the flowers and circles until it had the look and flow I liked.
I didn’t want to sew around each little piece of fabric so I decided to quilt it with a half inch grid of a neutral thread. After I got the grid work done, I dropped in some lines of colored thread that matched the flowers. After binding the quilt, I hand sewed buttons and squiggles with some new shiny thread I bought. Isn’t it cute?
See, making a mistake is not a bad thing and does not make us a bad person. Unless you don’t do the hard work to make sure that the mistake doesn’t happen again.
Thanks for stopping by. See you later! geneva
PS. This and other wonderful quilts are for sale.