Helen Kelley | loose threads

    It All
    Depends

It's always hard to know where to begin. Being organized with a defined starting point, a middle, and an end is, without a doubt, the ideal process. Some people are blessed with the talent to get themselves in order and some people aren't. I have one daughter, for example, who left lists tacked to the wall around her bedroom from the time she was little. She was neat and efficient and thought in lists. Another of my daughters is less structured, and she lives her life on the edge of confusion.

Where you end up depends on where you begin. One friend tackles her housecleaning in an orderly way, tidying a different room each day. Her house is always spic and span. Mine is not. If I made an itemized list, I could probably clean with efficiency, but I delay the chore, racing around only if I find that I have a guest coming. The results are barely adequate.

Grocery shopping is another challenge where a plan is essential. If I just run into the store "for a few things," I'm likely to come home with potato chips, fancy fruits, and frozen pizza-things that are certainly not what I needed. The results depend on how you begin.

It's the same story with my quilting. When I go to the quilt shop and buy a long length of an eye-catching fabric, my first impulse is to rush home and get out my cutting mat. I want to get started now, to whip my rotary cutter across that delectable fabric and pile up neat heaps of little triangles and squares, all ready for piecing.

Helen Kelley is a quiltmaker, lecturer, author, and teacher from Minneapolis, Minnesota. You can visit Helen on the Internet at her website www.helenkelley- patchworks.com or email Helen at this address: helen@helenkelley- patchworks.com.

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making the best use of the fabric. If I don't I may very well end up with fabric remnants too short for the border pieces or only enough left to cut the large border triangles I need with the bias on the long edges. I've learned that I must sort out my geometry and take the time to plan the shapes and the spaces on paper. The place where I end up depends on the starting point.

Starting in the right place when one begins piecing a quilt block is important, too. Like the proverbial floor painter who painted himself into a corner, I know that if I plunge into a new block design without looking where I am going, I am surely going to sew myself "into a corner." With no place to go, I sometimes have to applique difficult seam points or hand piece odd parts into inaccessible areas, and sometimes I just give up and rip and stitch and rip and stitch. The same is true for my quilting. Books abound with advice about where to begin your quilting. Some teachers advocate starting in the middle of the quilt and stitching from the center to the outer edges. Some recommend that you begin on one side of your quilt and work across to the opposite end. Some say, "Don't worry about ballooning areas. They will all quilt out." Early on I learned that if I wanted to avoid long parallel lines that bow and waver, I don't dare plunge into quilting without planning first. I need to be disciplined and baste first, laying out my quilt sandwich with lines straight and basted to the straight of grain of the backing fabric. If I spend the time initially, my edges will be true, corners will be square, and my quilt will lie flat.

I love making quilts. The prospect of a new quilt excites me, but always, always, my results are better if I can restrain myself long enough to plan ahead. How my quilt finishes depends upon how I begin.

©HK 2006