Friday, October 24, 2008

Seeds of Doubt

Olga made this comment on my post about the Anything Goes Exhibit and my past struggles to find my creative voice: "I think that finding one's own voice can be very difficult, especially if one is the kind of person who is used to listening to others." One of my great loves is doing research - a form of listening to others. And I often ask others' opinion in an effort to clarify my own thoughts, not necessarily to find answers. But she is right that by listening to others, we may allow seeds of doubt to be sown about our own vision.

I thought I'd regain my focus this week, but it hasn't happened. I thought I'd dive right into one of two projects that I'd found clarity on, but that didn't happen either. I thought if nothing else, I could get the binding on my tie quilt, since binding is a no brainer for me and I knew what fabric I would be using. And yet...

...I found I was hedging on my decision to use the orange fabric all of you enthusiastically recommended (see this post). I was pretty sure that was the way I wanted to go before asking, but it boosted my confidence about my choice to find others that agreed and for similar reasons. Then I hauled the quilt down to Hood River to be sure I was getting the right color additional binding fabric from my friend and ended up showing it to her and three others whose opinion I value, not to confirm the binding color, but to ask about my idea to add labels and beads to the top. Imagine my shock when the first comments were all a thumbs down on the binding color!

In spite of my brave, "I don't agree & neither do others I've shown it to - I'm using it anyway" response, those comments from women I respect sowed seeds of doubt that have been eating on me ever since. No doubt, the foot dragging stems from that, and I've been mulling the issue over all week. Last night it occurred to me that I might use the orange as piping in a darker binding which would address several of the issues I had with the other color options I tried. So today it was more auditioning, pulling out fabrics I thought I was done with on this project and laying them to expose a narrow strip of orange. No good - all those other binding colors just didn't work, fell flat, even with the zing of orange next to them. I put them away and with some trepidation cut my binding strips of orange.

When I draped them around the outer edge to make sure I'd pieced together a long enough length, I felt a rush of excitement. Yes! The orange was doing exactly what I wanted it to do and I didn't feel it was overpowering the piece at all (which was the warning of the Hood River group). WooHoo! I was suddenly energized to get this binding sewn on so I could continue to the next step of beading.

So Olga, thank you for planting your own seeds in my head. Your comment was more timely than you could know.

1 comment:

Exuberantcolor/Wanda S Hanson said...

Yes you have to remember that it is your vision, not everyone else's. That is the problem with custom orders, you are trying to create their vision instead of what comes from your heart.