I spent some time today hand quilting. I've got four kaleidoscopes finished,
doing a petal design in each section. Hand quilting is much slower, of
course, but I find it much more relaxing and controllable than quilting
with my home sewing machine. Now if I had a long arm machine.... :-)I took the top to my local quilt shop a couple of days ago to match some border and backing fabric, and whenever anyone brings a quilt top in or a quilt gets picked up after being quilted, there's always show and tell. So some gals were looking at my kaleidoscope top, and as we all do when we see a quilt, they oohed and ahhed. Then one of the gals said something like, "I see you got all of your points matched; no, there's a couple there you missed." Well, of course, that was a little deflating, and I thought a bit tacky to say!
I was going to start the quilting yesterday, but as I thought about the comment, I was back and forth with, "I'm not stuck on it being perfect," but "I could take the time to make the correction, but "I didn't think it was that noticeable," but "now I see it right away myself whenever I look at it." Argh!! So I got to thinking that if she noticed it right away, that it was probably more noticeable than I thought.
So, I decided to fix the mis-matches and then found a hole in one of the pieces where I'd apparently torn it with the seam ripper. So I had to replace that piece in the middle of the quilt before I could get started. Actually, it turned out to be a good thing that I was reworking a row or I wouldn't have noticed the hole until I came to it for quilting, which would be a lot more work. And if it had gone unnoticed, at the first washing it would certainly have made itself known.
The comment and subsequent fix got me to thinking how much like that I am with some of my own weaknesses. Especially when one is pointed out to me, and I have that deflated, defensive response. I struggle with amending my ways because I think they're not so noticeable. To me, they aren't. To others they may be.
We're often blind to our own weaknesses, and it's really to our benefit to have them pointed out.
Hopefully, though, not in a tacky way.
