One line at a time

Quilting is one of my least favorite parts of quilting. I love making the quilt blocks, making the front as one giant piece from all of these small pieces, and I love getting to free-hand the back fabrics with scraps or new material.

But sitting down at my machine and slowly feeding the sandwich of fabrics through is mind-numbing, never mind that I get extremely frustrated.  I'm never satisfied with the quality of my straight lines. I sew slanted lines. The fabric pulls and puckers. All the safety pins that I painstakingly put in are all off because it was fed wrong.

Because I've learned how to sew just through experience, I don't really feel confident in my actual knowledge of the machine. What does the tension do? What if I don't use the top feeder legs? It took me 45 minutes to sew one line down my most recent project.  Granted, part of it was keeping the dogs out of my work space, but the rest of the time was that trial and error learning curve. I needed more desk space, so I added my ironing board to the backside as an extender. But the quilt was still too heavy and pulled the work down.

Austin Kleon's books Show Your Work! and Steal Like an Artist have been so beneficial to my confidence. I feel less pessimistic.  More encouraged by the track I'm on.
In ShowYour Work! he quotes one stupefying statement by Russell Brand.

One day at a time. It sounds so simple. It actually is simple but it isn't easy: it requires incredible support and fastidious structuring.

Whatever it is, you have to start small, to start somewhere, to build up from that.  So I say to myself today, "One line at a time." And that, friends, is how I quilt.

Acting like I'm not frustrated in the least bit.