Helen Kelley | loose threads

    Little
    Drops of
    Water

I am a detail person. I was raised on that old poem about little drops of water making a mighty ocean and grains of sand making a pleasant land. I am intrigued with the little things in life.

Being a detail person, however, is a trap.

Many years ago, my mother-in-law asked me to make a block for her to give to someone she knew for a friendship quilt. My father-in-law decided that the quilt square should have a picture of the family's antique cider press on it, something that he felt was near and dear to them all. He made a drawing for me to follow. Being an engineer, he carefully included all of the hardware and all manner of technical parts. This precision was important to him.

I translated this drawing into the quilt block as best I could, using fabric that looked like wood and a bit of embroidery in a few key places. His disappointment was evident when I showed him the block because I hadn't included every one of the nuts and bolts and screws and cogs that was in his original rendering. I explained that it was not possible for me to include all of the tiny details as he had drawn them. In the limited space I had, and given my capabilities at the time, I couldn't put the slots on the heads of the screws or the threads around their tiny stems. It was simply not possible to include all of his minute details.

He didn't understand. He was sad.

On my latest quilt, I am making a forest. I wanted to show lots of pine trees on it, all laden with billows of snow. I struggled with those trees, and nothing that I did made them look the way I wanted. They were sadly deficient. They lacked the pizzazz that a lovely forest should have. I cut. I shaped. I appliqued. I embroidered. And I ripped out all of it.

Then the obvious occurred to me. I was trying to make pine needles and snowflakes. Instead, what I should have been making was the depth of the woods. My forest should be a mass of trees, not needles, and they should be blanketed with billows of white, not flakes.

What I was doing was laborious and distracting.

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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My embroidery skills are not elaborate. Mostly I sew an outline stitch; when necessary, I make one or two french knots. The solution to my problem, I decided, was to applique a mass of green for my forest and then outline sketchy trees with white thread, just enough to give the feeling of snow-covered shapes. Now my forest is beginning to happen. The outlines of trees bent with moonlit snow are emerging, and I love what I am doing.

Detail work can become an obsession. I wanted to create the impression of trees on a cold, frosty night, but in my original version, I could not see the forest for the trees. Now the clutter is gone, and the shapes and shadows are clear and unconfused. This quilt, I believe, is far better than my original design.

I am a detail person, and I originally pictured this forest with too narrow a focus. What I've learned from this quilt is that if I can step back and simplify, I can achieve freshness in my quilting, a clarity and subtlety. I have discovered that if I can shake loose from a plan and put aside my preconceived images, I may find a new direction. Sometimes something wonderful happens with the least amount of planning.

©HK 2007