Inner dialogue while making a quilt

I often have a conversation with myself inside my head and sometimes even out loud as I work on a quilt. The conversation goes from positive to negative to positive to negative to positive…..well you get the idea. Here’s a bit of those conversations.

I love planning a quilt. What am I going to work on? I love thinking about it. Thinking about it is so much easier than doing it!

This is exciting. I’ve picked a fantastic idea.

This quilt is going to be great….really great.

This is going to be the best quilt ever. I might even win a prize for it. Finally!

I can picture how it will turn out in my head.

Crap.

This is not going as well as I wanted it to.

I can’t figure out what fabric to use. Stressing out.

Relax I’ll figure it out. Do I need to buy some fabric? Maybe the perfect fabric is out there just waiting for me. 

Maybe I  should just make due with what I have. Let’s go through the fabric stash again.

I’ll figure it out.

Let’s walk away.

Yes! Yes! Yes! I figured it out.

Ok I’m good now.

Things are not straight. How could I have missed that? Should I take the piece out and do it again?

Nope it is what it is. Keep going.

Why didn’t I look at the photo closer. The details are not right. How could I have missed that?

I do this every time. I don’t pay enough attention to the photo. Why do I do that? You think I would learn.

Too late.

I wish I could start over and do things differently.

I would do things very differently. 

Live and learn. 

Maybe this quilt is not going to be that great. 

It’s time to start the quilting.  

Did I choose the right thread? Now I’m not sure. Should I rip it out?

I hate to rip out quilting. I absolutely hate it. Maybe I should rip it out.

Should I have quilted it differently?

Let’s walk away for a while.

Am I doing this right? Not sure.

OK let’s just go with it. To rip is too painful.

Neck hurts, let’s take a break.

Quilting is done. No turning back now. 

Now onto the hand stitching.

French knots…are they too big?

Rip them out and start over. 

Still too big.

Rip them out again. I’m good at that. I’ve had lots of practice.

Starting to stress out.

Am I doing this right? Why do I always have doubts??

Let’s go smaller and different sizes.

Better now.

Keep going.

Not sure this is looking good.

Oh well let’s just finish.

Done. I wish I knew how it was going to turn out so I could have planned better.

I hate this quilt right now, but I’ll get over it. Eventually I will like it.

This happens every time.

So what would I have done differently in the Pittsburgh pieces?

We stitched in a lot of the features of the buildings. I would have used fabric to create those features. 

We did value studies and picked one. The ones I picked did not really fit the idea of a snow storm. The buildings in the distance should be fainter and features like windows would have been closer in value to the buildings. The painting of snow helped create this effect, but adding that effect with fabric as well would have made me happier. The pieces came out well, but I wish I could have known what I know now when I started. I was taking a class and followed the rules of the class. I think I’m done with classes for a while.

New photos of the streetcar piece. There are about 2000 French knots in it  

Linking to Nina-Marie.  http://ninamariesayre.blogspot.com/

Do you have conversations with yourself. What are yours like?

Thanks for reading.

Chris