In my old age and the wisdom I’ve gain through the years . . ok, I’ll get serious . . I’ve learned to never say never. Not only should I never say never but I’m beginning to feel like I should not be definitive about anything. As soon as I say I’m not going to do something . . I do it! As soon as I say I’m definitely doing something (losing weight) . . it doesn’t happen. Sometimes, I still say never and then I say to myself “Why did you say that?”.
This is not a tendency I’ve developed lately. I know I’ve told this before but when I first began quilting it was hand piecing and hand quilting. Pieces were traced onto the wrong side of fabric. A quarter inch was added (and drawn) around the piece and it was cut out with scissors. Yes, I’m old! 🙂
As machine piecing and machine quilting became more popular, I swore I would never do it. NEVER! I can’t say for sure when or why it happened. Maybe i was all the fabric I wanted to buy and use; maybe it was all the quilts I wanted to make but I justified to myself that if I machine pieced but hand quilted, no one would know that I had “cheated”. I suppose most of you know how this story ended. Everything I do now is on the machine . . even the binding, which had been the last holdout for handwork.
It’s the same thing with yarn. As I sit and knit, and ooh and ahh over the lace shawls I’m working on, I remind myself that I totally disliked working with lace yarn. I think I even said “I’ll never buy lace weight yarn!” Now, I can’t stop buying lace weight yarn! It’s all I want to do . . knit with lace weight yarn and add beads. I just want to sit and knit so I can finish one and start another one.
Lace and Beads
I tried taking a picture with the big lights off and the flash, hoping the beads would show up and they do a bit. There are only 20 rows left on this project but . . with beads and 500+ stitches per row, it may be a few days before this is finished. I hope to have it finished by Friday’s knitting report.
Another thing I’ve avoided has been patterns that are charted only. After doing the first Anna Victoria’s pattern, which is charted only, I much prefer charts to written instructions.
I suppose the statement I made to Vince 20+ years ago when I said “I’ll live in any state in the south except Texas” just proves that Vince was right when we first met and he said “You don’t know what he heck you want!”
karenfae says
well I was always a hand piecer and hand quilter – now I do machine piecing, hand piecing, hand quilting and machine quilting we do evolve and once I thought it was cheating also to work by machine – now I know better – it is just different.
How is your mouth – did you get the tooth pulled and lived to tell
Kathleen says
Oh, how I can relate!
Dottie says
LOL – when I started quilting, I said/did the same thing. I did manage to hand piece a couple of quilts, but continued hand quilting. After finding SO many tops unquilted, I started sending them out. I figured that’s the ONLY way I could ever get everything done. AND, surprisingly, I’m satisfied with the long arm quilted quilts. As the old commercial used to say, you’ve come a long way, baby :-).