Talk about shiny balls ...

... my mind is all over the place this morning! On our quilting blog, Living in Stitches, Nonja talked about achieving perfection in her quilting, and her quest to take it easier on herself, to enjoy the process as well as the finished product. I've spoken about my epiphany before -- the time I realized that I was way too stressed over "getting it perfect" and that this was actually preventing me from enjoying the process of learning!

This new awareness happened during a week in the autumn in Vermont, when I visited the Shelburne Museum with my friend Kerry who was visiting from Australia. The museum has at any one time over 100 of their 400 quilts on display so we went to view the selection. Well, of course they were gorgeous -- they were in a museum, for heaven's sake!!! But what I really noticed was that not all the seams matched up, not all the points were perfect, and even the quilting stitches weren't totally even. Wow! And these quilts were in museums! They had stories ... made for parish preachers, made for friends moving away, moving to keep warm during the cold winters, some had even been entered in World's Fair competitions ... but they sure weren't perfect!

Later in that same week, Kerry and I traveled down to Bennington, Vermont, where the Jane Stickle quilt is on display for one month only each year! This quilt was made during the Civil War and has been made famous through the charting work of Brenda Papadakis in her book, "Dear Jane" ... The blocks are about 4 1/2" finished, and Brenda did a great job "normalizing" the blocks so that they all fit together. Thus, when I actually viewed the quilt for the first time, I was absolutely shocked lol!! Not horrified -- just surprised!!! Some of the blocks in the actual quilt are different sizes, and she added muslin strips to them to make them fit. The applique is wonky at times, and perfect at others; the seams work well sometimes and sometimes not. It was such a relief to see this beauty in person!! I've seen many, many reproductions by friends in the quilting world, and they are absolutely gorgeous and perfect (to my eyes, anyway), but seeing the original somehow gave me the freedom to learn, to grow, to experiment, to just try!! And I'm so fortunate that these memories stay with me so that I no longer fear trying something new, or giving myself permission to do something even though I'm not skilled enough to do it perfectly. So, thank you to the generations of quilters before me!