A Leap Day Fabric Collage Leap of Faith

It’s Leap Day in this Leap Year, and it’s gotten me thinking about metaphorical leaps: Leaps of faith.

One of the most popular type of posts in my blog are the Finish Line posts, where people from all over send in pictures of their completed fabric collage quilts. I think they’re such a hit for a couple reasons. First, of course, the quilts are beautiful and accomplished. But also, it’s clear they give inspiration to those who have been sitting on the sidelines and haven’t yet tried fabric collage. They think to themselves, I believe I could do that.

In the comments of a recent Finish Line post, I received three comments in a row from people who were still summoning up the courage to try fabric collage:

Karen
For 2 years I have had a picture of a gorilla I took in Uganda. I’ve been scared to death to start it because of the dark black and grey colors. The value changes and textures In this posting have given me hope. I definitely need to collect more fabrics to get this going.

 

Sharon
Always a pleasure to check out these works of art and their process. One day perhaps I will be brave enough to start one! I need to learn more about creating depth and shading. It is all a wonderful journey with this wonderful medium we work with called fabric.

 

Lytle
I am so impressed with all of these remarkable collage quilts! I have not started mine yet—haven’t had the courage, I guess. These beauties have certainly given me a little push to get going!

Here are three people who are approaching, at their own paces, a leap of faith.

I don’t know these ladies, so I don’t know what has prevented them from trying fabric collage before now, perhaps it’s just a matter—like a lot of us—of not having the time. But when they mention that they don’t feel brave enough, I have to ask myself: What else could I do? What else would they like to see from me to help them take that leap?

Because that’s my job. What I’ve chosen to do is to try to provide people with enough information so that they can be successful (at whatever level they choose) in fabric collage.

In essence my job is to encourage people to jump off a cliff while assuring them that they will have built their parachute before they hit the ground.

In class I can give coaching and encouragement right then and there. I don’t really get to do that online, whether in the blog or in my Fabric Collage Master Class. But if I could, here’s what I might say:

Start with a Small Cliff

Pictures of my own quilts and some of the student Finish Line quilts can be misleading. The complexity of some of these quilts can either be intimidating or give people unreasonable expectations of the level of work they should be able to do as a beginner.

In both these cases I would suggest you find a smaller cliff from which to take your leap of faith. If you are intimidated by the quilts you see, just remember that I didn’t start there, and we don’t always know where others have started either. My collage work was much more simple to start. I learned and experimented.

At the beginning of this post is a tiny quilt I created for play. It’s not a 20-foot long crocodile quilt or a pink rhinoceros, but I like it. It’s one of 5 or 6 little quilts I made to loosen up and take a break from being too exacting with my collage work. It was a matter of looking at leftover scraps from a project and seeing how many of the little “pre-cut” pieces (aka “scraps”) I could re-arrange to make little butterflies. I tried not to think too hard about any of them, just have fun. I highly recommend the exercise—little oddly shaped fish would be quite fun as well.

Many very accomplished people attend my classes: doctors, lawyers, engineers, business people. When they get frustrated I like to gently remind them that I wouldn’t expect to walk into their operating rooms and do surgery or be able to run their business on day one. And neither did they. 

They need to cut themselves some slack, go easier on themselves, and adjust their expectations.

In the Fabric Collage Master Class (and in Serendipity Quilts as well), I provide a simple spiral as an exercise. It teaches users to cut and glue and blend colors and patterns in a low-key and low-risk sort of way. Many (though not all) follow my advice and start there or with another simple design such as a fish or butterfly. When they jump there’s little chance they’ll go splat with subjects such as these.

 

Another, slightly larger cliff is in the works and due to be released later in March: The Susan Carlson Fabric Collage: Sea Turtle. This eWorkshop presents a simple but satisfying project. I walk users through the process with text, photos, and hours of video instruction. This project is low-risk but potentially high return as it can be as complex and detailed as you want to make it.

Don’t think you have to start with the triple black diamond slope on the ski run—maybe the bunny slope is the place to start. Considering my skill at skiing, my personal aspiration would be relative success on the bunny slope. I’d be quite happy with that.

Leap Anyway

A leap of faith is the act of attempting something whose outcome cannot be proved.

Quilters have the reputation of being exacting (might I dare say, perfectionistic) folk. They like to plan, prepare, and then execute. They buy a pattern that shows the picture on the front so they know pretty much exactly how it will turn out.

While there is much you can do to to prepare for making your fabric collage quilt, the process really is one of serendipity, of discovery as you go along. Which means if you wait until you are sure you will succeed, you’ll never start.

Start anyway. Put down that first piece of fabric. Then the next. Before you know it, you’re on your way.

Keep Leaping

So maybe you do go splat. So what?

I’ve seen repeat students, either in person or online, the more they do, the better they get. Lightbulbs go off along the way and they get what I’ve been saying all along but they weren’t at the point to understand. Then they take a big stride forward.

I think everyone understands that. For any expertise you have to start where you are and add skills and knowledge to get better. Then you can expand. If you just start with something, something simple like a spiral, fish, butterfly, turtle and you like the fabric collage process, you will begin to figure out if you want to go farther or not. I made fish for years and years, gaining more skills all along. And I still love them as subjects.

If you try and persevere—if you keep taking the leap of faith—you’re going to get some sort of results. It’s really more important that you like the process than the outcome you achieve. Because if you like the process, you’ll do more and get better. If thirty years ago I hadn’t liked the fabric collage process, I would have dropped it and moved on to something else. But I didn’t. I kept going. I’m where I am today because I kept playing with fabric. Playing should be fun, playing should be experimental. Who doesn’t like to play?

Don’t Look Before You Leap

It helps to have a good dose of blind optimism. This is true of starting anything new, I suppose.

A good example of this was when I was writing my first book, “Free-Style Quilts.” The final chapter of the book was to show the progression of a large coral reef quilt I was making (“Up from the Depths”, below). At the time, we didn’t have the capability of doing the photography ourselves so I was traveling back and forth to a photographer as I reached each stage. Eventually the photographer asked: “How do you know it’s going to work?” What? It was a question I hadn’t even considered. Of course it was going to work. It never occurred to me that failure was an option. The confidence was based on knowing that it would get done successfully even if I didn’t know exactly how it would work out.

I’m having a similar experience, lo these twenty-odd years later. The sea turtle quilt example is being created start to finish as we’ve been writing and shooting video for this first eWorkshop. I couldn’t have foreseen the final outcome. What if the turtle didn’t come out right? Again, it wasn’t even on my mind.

For a couple of reasons. First, I do have a bit of fabric collage experience and this will probably be my fifth or sixth sea turtle. But also, fabric collage is very forgiving of mistakes. So you put down the wrong fabric. Pull it off and try another or just glue another piece of fabric down over the first. You can correct almost any “error.” In fact, you might find that what you thought was an error is really a happy, unexpected success.

The point here is that you can’t really plan your way to successful fabric collage. You have to work your way there one piece of fabric at a time. One of my favorite quotes along this vein is from the writer Anne Lamott. In her book “Bird by Bird,” she says:

E.L. Doctorow once said that “writing a novel is like driving a car at night. You can only see as far as your headlights, but you can make the whole trip that way.” You don’t have to see where you’re going, you don’t have to see your destination or everything that you will pass along the way. You just have to see two or three feet ahead of you. This is right up there with the best advice about writing, or life, I have ever heard.

It also sounds a lot like taking a leap of faith.