Bonus Day
What would you do if you got to do a day again, or if you got a bonus day in your month? Most of the time this is a theoretical question that leads to some talk on how to prioritize your time or personal beliefs, but in just a few days it is going to be an actual reality for me. I am going to live the last day of May twice. It won’t of course be the exact same day being lived over but as far as the calendar is concerned it is the same day. How do you ask? Well right now I am sailing across the pacific (west to east) and crossing the International Dateline this way means you gain a full day when you cross. It’s such a strange idea, that just by crossing a completely theoretical line/idea you get an additional day. And has led me down a rabbit hole of questions: how do I put a second 31st into my calendar? Is it going to be a 24 or 23 hour day (after all we are still heading east during the day)? Does traveling by two different means (flying west versus sailing east) mean I am really gaining more time? And if so does it mean that I am in fact a day older than I otherwise would have been? By the time I got to that last question I was pretty far down the rabbit hole and exhausted for anything after that to make sense, though I vaguely remember coming up with a thought experiment about living in a town split by the International Dateline.
So what exactly does all of this have to do with sewing? It just goes to show how much measured time is a construct, something that we created to keep order in the world. Sometimes these make sense and help (I might argue time zones help but that they don’t always make sense), but other times they are holding us back from thinking outside the box and really letting our creativity flourish. Sewing/quilting has a lot of these constructs or rules, that can be difficult to let go of until you realize that they are just someone else’s idea of what a quilt should look like and start letting them go. Start thinking about all of the “rules” you have been taught. Which ones are actually helpful versus which ones are just someone’s ideas being imposed. For example “quilt edges should be finished” is useful, “binding should be sewn onto the back by hand” is not. There are so many different ways to finish the edges of your quilt from traditional handsewn binding, to machine sewn binding, a facing and more. It really comes down to finding what works best for you and your project versus what the “rules” say you should do.
Go ahead and make a list of every quilting “rule” you have heard. Circle the ones that are actually solid pieces of advice that help you make a better quilt (it’s okay to circle to everything or nothing depending on where you are in your quilting journey). For everything that is left, see if there might be a positive rule within the piece of advice, and rewrite the piece of advice into a positive rule. Finally anything that isn’t a solid piece of advice and can’t be rewritten as a positive piece of advice, cross it out. You don’t need to follow rules/advice that doesn’t work for your quilting project (get that negative feed out of your head). Now go out and start creating!
