tennessee

More book love. This is another of the swag that I picked up at Bellevue Library a week or so ago - Quilts of Tennessee: Images of Domestic Life prior to 1930 by Bets Ramsay and Marikay Waldvogel. I've only had time so far to leaf through and look at the photos of the quilts and read a few captions and sidebars but just that experience has been wonderful. The work(wo)manship, the make-do-and-mend mentality, the pride and most of all the incredible amount of time that went into making these quilts. And best of all the reassurance because I tell you, some of them are really lumpy!

As I am sure the astute reader will have picked up, I have a few issues with perfectionism, namely with letting go of it. I would say that, apart from time and energy constraints, it is the thing that has held me up the most in the past with my creative endeavours. You know, that it wouldn't be good enough, that it wouldn't work out, that it ... blah blah blah. It is reassuring to see that wonderful works of creativity have a few unique bumps in them. When did it become the case that quilts were supposed to be perfectly smooth and orthogonal? When did idiosyncracy go out the window and machine-made precision became the requirement? Point of all this being that I'm a little anxious about some of the rumples that I expect to see in my quilt as a result of some puckering in the batting. I could just say that I'm going authentic (although I did receive some great advice from millymollymandy about reducing the pressure on the foot - I can see how this would help the fabrics to glide through more easily).

Anyway, a wonderful book, even just to look at. The premise that quilts can tell a story about domestic life is also fascinating and I hope that I manage to read just a bit of it before it's due back.