Exercise Your Stash to Break Free
Like exercise, our creative spirit benefits from shake-ups and challenges.
The fabric companies and quilt shops have done a wonderful job in making our lives as quilters easier. They’ve got each line of fabric cut and cut again into cute little bundles. All the fabrics together, cuddling like they were never meant to be separated. It is so easy to just grab a bundle and then put it on a shelf and admire it like art instead of thinking of it as fabric to be used.
Designers and publishers responded with patterns and books all made for these precut bundles of fat quarters, 5’’ squares, 2.5’’ strips, and every other shape now imaginable. This is beyond all the prescriptive patterns that suck us in with their windblown quilts on the cover.
While both the patterns and the precuts are great, they don’t do a lot to exercise our creative muscles. Instead, they can keep us in a rut. A pretty rut, but a rut nonetheless.
Now, I’m not out to disparage the industry and its precuts. Nor do I want to criticize the pattern designers and quilters out there using prescriptive patterns. There is something terribly easy about having all the guesswork taken out of the process for you. Not to mention, everything is so pretty! A little push, a big change, and a whole lot of opportunity await the quilter willing to take on the challenge to break free from patterns and precuts. It is about finding the creativity we all have and encouraging the personal expression of each of us as a quilter.
Sometimes it takes a radical mind shift to get us to break up our routines and standards. The following tips and tricks will encourage you to look at your fabric and quilting practice differently.
Sort your fabric by colour
Take apart the bundle
Buy double to use more
Shop from your stash first
Be inspired by a single fabric
Accept orphan blocks
Focus on learning techniques, not making a specific quilt, when taking classes
Try improv piecing
Like any good exercise program we need a variety of activities to keep us engaged, energized, and seeing results. Quilting and exercising our creative muscle is no different. You start with the charm squares, move on to half square triangles, try a new pattern, and with a little push are tackling improv and designing your own quilts. It doesn’t happen immediately or instinctively for many quilters, so take these tips and try out a few. I guarantee more energy and a whole new perspective.