SOARING STITCHES: CREATIVITY SNIPPETS FOR QUILTERS
By Patricia Belyea
Music can carry us away. With voices and instruments intertwined—we can stay in one place while our whole beings are transported to another. We can get caught up in big movements, staccato details, resounding repetitions—all made with talent and intentionality.
Creating quilts that make music would be quite a feat—and I’m not talking about stitching a music box mechanism into our bindings! Using all the tools of design—asymmetry; the contrast of dark and light, ponderous versus tiny; the impact of color and pattern; and more—we can move beyond traditional blocks into whole new territory with our quilts.
Why would we want to reinvent the quilt? The answer is simple: because we can. But more importantly: because working out new ideas can transport us to a whole new place as we stay focused.
Dropping our preconceived notions of what we should be making sets us free. Every step we take—the fabric we choose, the size of our pieces, how we arrange all the parts of our compositions, comes entirely from each of us.
This is not a willy-nilly approach to throwing fabric together. This is finding our way through the limitless possibilities of the universe to our own single resolve.
This is OUR job—to become wholly engaged—taking our quilt projects from the start to the finish. Will our quilts look very different from other quilts? Perhaps. Perhaps not. But the experience will be genuinely freeing to our spirits.
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SOARING STITCHES is a blook (blog book) by Patricia Belyea.
To read the Introduction +click here
To read other Creativity Snippets:
Learner’s Luck +click here
Holy Messes +click here
