Lessons Learned

My parents left yesterday and my in-laws arrive tomorrow, but I've managed to find a bit of time to play. I used Neocolor II pastel watersoluble wax crayons to add color to a piece of pink-on-pink floral fabric. I didn't know what to do next, so I cut up the fabric and added some red lines because I wanted to emphasize the red roses I had outlined in the fabric. It looked like a garden trellis at that point, so I quilted a rose in the center, but ARGH -- it looked awful! The thread was too light to stand out and it made the middle look like a mess.

What to do? Well, I decided to subscribe to one of Jeanne Williamson's personal rules as she went through her journaling process: " I could not throw out the original piece and start over with a new one if I didn't like how it was turning out. I would not obsess over the aesthetic of the piece - the goal was to create." (Jeanne Williamson, in the introduction to her book, "The Uncommon Quilter") With that in mind, I went over the quilting lines with a red crayon, then a brown one, to consider how the piece might have looked with contrasting quilting. Surprisingly, when I finished with the brown, I started to like the piece better. After misting the quilt a bit with water to soften the lines, the rose started to look like graffiti....which suited my mood. The end result: another piece for my Flowers on Pink series called "Rose Graffiti". My journal and series should chronicle lessons learned / failures as well as successes, right?

Just in case you're curious, here's what the original fabric looked like: