David and Goliath

Yesterday, I had a quilt pass under my longarm that has been around for an eternity.

(Ok, six months…. but for a dinky little charity quilt, six months is really an excessive amount of time for me to work on a quilt.) I have been thinking of this quilt as a “teaching quilt,” because I have used it in a few blog posts (some of which have been published…. others….. well, this won’t be the last time you hear about this charity quilt!)

Anyway, because of the number of blog posts that are half written about this quilt…. it has sort of felt like….Goliath.

For such a small quilt, it has been a GIANT of a project…..

lingering in my sewing room since MARCH.

Here is the quilt:

Its little… its modern, and its made completely of “whatever is on hand.” (I’ll do another blog post on that concept…. later….)

This quilt should not take six months to finish… hence…. Goliath.

But, as I was loading the quilt:

And then reloading the quilt to make it fit on the backing I had:

I remembered a Ted Talk I had listened to this summer about David and Goliath.

Malcolm Gladwell delivered the speech, based on his book, David and Goliath: Underdogs, Misfits, and the Art of Battling Giants (2013). The book looks at the story of David and Goliath from a historical perspective, and rather than viewing Goliath as the obvious topdog, Gladwell assess David, the shepherd to be the predetermined winner of the confrontation between David and Goliath.

David uses a sling (not a slingshot like a child would use, but a sling…. a precision weapon designed for distance), which gives him the advantage of superior technology.

So, how can I leverage superior technology to finish this quilt?

Ok, for speed, I can use the long arm…. yay me.

But, I wanted to use this quilt to practice pebbles.

duhn duhn daaaaaaa…..

So, how can I use superior technology on pebbles?

Pebbles have scared me as a freemotion long arm quilter. They’re hard because you need to make perfect circles, and they are hard because half of your seams are oversewn, which is also hard when you are sewing freehand.

So, like David, I found a way to leverage my advantage as a quilter so that this charity quilt could mask my clumsy attempts to practice a challenging long arm design.

The grey ground on the front of the quilt has a lot of movement, which masks the long arming. Here is a closeup of that print:

Then, I had a very busy backing to also de-emphasize  the long arming:

And, lastly, I chose a variegated thread for the front of the quilt, so that the light would catch the stitching unevenly, further masking my clunky pebbles.

And ultimately, because of the design choices I made, the quilt turned out… quite well for a first attempt at pebbles.

It will be a long time before I start using pebbles on my client quilts, but I am ready to practice them again and again… because I know that I can use design choices to cover for the lack of skill until I am good enough to let my pebbles shine.

How can you make choices in your sewing room that ultimately predetermine your chances of success?

Happy Quilting!

Janellea

PS: Here’s the link to the Ted Talk if you are curious about the story I referred to in this post!

PPS: If you want to join my newsletter to hear all of the Quilting Shenanigans, click here.