Purposeful Imperfection

When I finished up my embroidery yesterday, I told myself I would finished the latest Wine Country block this morning, and I did.

This being Sunday, I'm linking up to

This is the fourth of 12 blocks. Here are the ones I've finished so far.

This latest one has an error. Do you see it? I didn't notice it until I'd completely finished stitching the little area I was working on. Just then, Mike walked up to say something and I showed it to him. "I made a mistake," I said. "Do you see it?" He stared for some time, and he has pretty sharp eyes. He couldn't find it. Can you?

So, this is going to be my "humility error". You might already know that the Navajo intentionally weave errors into their rugs. That's where the spirits move in and out. You can read about it right here. When I volunteered to teach art literacy at my sons' school some years ago, I learned that the sculptor Auguste Rodin was once accused of using casts for his life-like human sculptures. The detail was so rich, it was believed impossible to do something so perfect. To save his reputation, he began making his sculptures either smaller or larger than life.

Well, no one is ever going to accuse me of doing something so perfect. Whenever I think of perfection, I remember something a psychiatrist colleague once said to me: A perfectionist is someone who's always looking for the flaw. I decided right then and there that perfection is highly overrated. Certainly we should strive to do our best, but there's also merit in not sweating the small stuff. As for the error in my embroidery, it's definitely small stuff. It stays as a monument to the value of things created by imperfect human hands.

And while we're talking about things that are imperfect, let's just talk about the stylized stars, shall we? Actually, I'm pretty happy with these, imperfect as they are. The next challenge was deciding how to position them on the quilt. With this being an edge-to-edge design, I worried about how to space the rows of stars and stripes on the quilt. I didn't see how I could achieve symmetry, nor was I sure that it mattered.

Finally, I got the idea to quilt them diagonally onto the quilt, and that dispensed with the need for any kind of vertical symmetry. My next concern was whether I could keep the rows relatively straight. Would they fan out? And since my practice piece still had plenty of room, I decided to try it there. As it turns out, none of my concerns were realized, and so I was ready to move on to the quilt.

Gulp.

I can't remember when I've worried over the quilting of something so much. (Maybe I always say that.) Finally, late in the afternoon, I summoned all the courage I could muster and started in on the upper left corner. I'm happy to say, so far, so good.

The variegated thread is doing just what I hoped it would do, which is to fade into the background. The quilt blocks are the real stars of this show (pun intended), and I wanted them to be the first thing seen.

Because of where I started, I have the bulk of this rather large quilt sitting in my lap, and it's a little hard to maneuver it. As I move across row by row, of course, it will get easier. For now, I'm experimenting with rolling, wadding, bunching, etc., trying to find the easiest way to manage it.

Here's how it's looking from the back. I've had a hard time getting the tension adjusted right, and I'm afraid this is another place where I'm going to have to live with some imperfection.

The entire back doesn't look like this. It changes about halfway down, and so I'm hoping it will still look nice as I move into the lower regions. Here's the back I pieced together for this quilt. As I mentioned previously, these are bee blocks. I made two of them and the rest were made by five others. One of the bees in the hive made her first blocks in the reverse colors of what I'd asked. She sent me those too, and they were added to the quilt back.

So that's where it stands. I'm hoping to get some more quilting time in today, but we're heading out early this afternoon to go down to the kids' house for a family get-together. As I'm writing this, an angel food cake is baking in the oven. I'm making a dessert created by Giada DeLaurentiis called Angel Food Cake with Espresso Mascarpone Cream. It's so simple and so good. It's been quite a while since I made it, and so it seemed like a good choice for today.

It's still cold and we're still looking out at a snow-covered landscape. It's supposed to warm up at long last tomorrow, and then we're expecting lots of rain by Tuesday. As Tuesday's rain approaches, the concern over flooding increases. We're in no danger at the top of our hill, but I fear those in the valley may be in for some high water.