Saturday, June 8, 2013

Cutting some slack

I suppose this should be Creativity, Part Two.

I haven't given up yet on making things, apparently.  I am currently in the process of attaching my quilt blocks together.  It looks pretty ridiculous.  My blocks are all different sizes, with crazy patterned fabric that maybe sort of coordinates if you squint a bit, and the seams are all wonky and all over the place, and clearly I didn't cut right to begin with because everything is so lopsided.

But I'm okay with all that.  I'm definitely not worried about perfection with this.  I tried to learn how to quilt once before just out of high school, and I gave up because no matter how hard I tried, I always cut something crooked, or made a wobbly seam, or otherwise horked it up.  Everyone always says how quilting is a math-based precision hobby, and they're right, it totally is.  So I gave up.

With this quilt that I'm apparently making though,  I'm not worried about any of that.  I'm making it, flaws and all, and it'll probably never lie flat because of all the weird angles.  When I see something hanging crooked, I leave it.  When I know I cut a weird angle, I leave it.  It's not that I'm not trying to cut and sew straight, it's that I'm not putting a ton of pressure on myself to get it perfect.

Brian doesn't get that - his philosophy is to do your absolute best and take pride in your work, which seems to say that you can't take pride in something that didn't take everything out of you.  The thing is, the pride I'll get from this quilt will come from the fact that I actually pushed through it and finished.  That's enough for me.  I don't even know if I like quilting - why beat myself up over it the first time through?

With knitting though, I can't seem to let perfection go.  I've completely ripped apart everything I've attempted to knit so far.  I haven't even gotten past a fifth row because I'll find some flaw (like the fact that I've randomly picked up 6 extra stitches) and start completely over. (Part of this is due to the fact that I haven't yet learned how to fix mistakes any other way.)  I just can't let myself make a lopsided, full of holes, weirdly-tensioned, clearly-first-time scarf or whatever.  It's ridiculous, because like quilting, I don't even know if I like knitting.  I'm certainly starting to hate it.

So what's the deal here?  Why am I totally cool with a terrible quilt but not a terrible scarf?  This is my second time picking up knitting, same as quilting, so it's not a need for first-time-perfection.

Fuck it, maybe I'll just switch to crochet.

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