Let's Start at the Very Beginning...

I'm sending myself back to school. The last couple of quilt projects I've worked on have ended up a little hinky here and there, and I'm not entirely sure where I'm going wrong. I'm doing my 1/4" seams correctly, and I feel like I'm cutting accurately. Pressing may be an issue--I have a suspicion that I'm a bit too assertive with my iron. But altogether, I figure it's probably not such a bad thing to stop what I'm doing and go back to basics for a bit.

I've ordered a DVD for beginning quiltmakers that got rated very highly. I'm looking forward to when it comes--should be in another couple of days thanks to Amazon Prime. I am more of a visual learner--although I can, and do, certainly rely on books quite regularly, it's always helpful to be able to watch someone actually doing something and with DVD, I can back them up and make them repeat themselves as many times as I want without them getting annoyed at me. My mom taught me how to quilt that first summer--she walked me through many of the basics, and I still occasionally call her up with the "What do I do now??" whining or the quick check on "how do you handle..." questions. But I don't live close enough to her to have regular in-person training sessions and I can only occasionally take classes at my local quilt store. An academic at heart, I figured that it was probably time to take myself back to school and walk step-by-step through some of the beginning skills to pick up those little niceties that I've forgotten or missed along the way.

It's not that I want to become an award-winning quilter. I have a friend that has entered her (excellent, fantastic) work in shows a few times and hearing her talk about trying to get something done on time or re-reading the regulations about size and sleeves and all that just makes my stomach hurt. I don't need the stress. But I have come to the point that for me to be able to push my own artistic envelope forward I need to be able to rely on my own skills. I want to get into art quilts, and doing more with photo transfer, and funky things with wedge rulers and fusible webbing and Angelina fibers. I've dabbled, but have always ended up running head-long into the wall of my own inabilities. What I can picture in my head and what I have the technical skills to actually create don't quite meet yet, and I find that frustrating. I'm holding myself back from really being able to allow my creative self to explode.

So how does that relate to life? Well, I suppose, in that there are times when perhaps we need to take ourselves back to basics. We still have new landscaping that we're slowly filling in--and I'm finding myself having to relearn much of what I thought I already knew about planting and growing because the soil and water levels are so much different here than in our old yard just a few miles away. I'm in the process of watching dog training videos (see the last post about Cesar Millan!) to take myself back to the beginning with our current dog to see if we can get rid of a couple of bad habits, and hopefully pick up tips for when we get a second dog which we're hoping will happen sometime this summer. I'm in a slightly slower period at work so I've been spending time in some of my layout and photoediting software programs trying to fill in the gaps of my technical knowledge there too. So I suppose there are several areas in my life at the moment where I'm taking advantage of the opportunity to go back to basics, review what I already know, fill in gaps, pick up new tricks, and get myself on a more solid foundation to be able to expand from there.

I remember in college registering for a music theory "101" class. In addition to being in band and chorus throughout my elementary and high school career, I had taken private lessons in violin, piano, flute, and a smattering of other instruments through the years--flute being my primary instrument and the one that carried on into adulthood. But I'd never learned formal music theory--I only knew what I had picked up by playing. So I decided in my freshman year in college that I should really learn music theory and registered for the class. I went to the first session, read through the syllabus that was distributed, and realized I knew 3/4s of what was going to be taught. It felt like it would be a waste of time waiting for the last couple of weeks of the semester when they'd finally get to the parts I wasn't as clear on, so I dropped the class that afternoon. To this day, I carry a vague regret that I didn't tough it out. For one thing, it probably would've been an easy A! But more to the point, to this day, I still only know about 3/4s of the beginning music theory level knowledge--probably less by now through the natural attrition that occurs when one doesn't use it. To this day, strangely enough, I still occasionally find myself in conversations with practicing musical colleagues and once in a great while I still have to nod my head and smile and pretend I know what they're talking about. Because heaven forbid they find out that I don't. After all, I was an accomplished flutist for many years. I should know these things despite the fact that my flute has been gathering dust in my closet for about five years now.

I suspect most of us are in a similar position. Because of our busy-ness, the need to produce quickly, we learn what we need to know to accomplish whatever it is we need to accomplish, and then we move on. Which is fine--I've learned a lot that way and become fairly proficient in some things. But sometimes it behooves us to round out our knowledge, go backwards for a time to fill in gaps, or to simply dedicate ourselves to continued learning just for the sake of learning. That's what I like best about quilting, I think. There's always new things to learn. So I'm dedicating myself over the next several weeks to simply focusing on the basics to lay a good foundation for learning all the wonderful, fun techniques that are out there in front of me.