Sometimes in Quilting, the Journey IS the Reward

For today's feather-themed project, I hand-pieced this abstract feathery block, a variation of Practice Petals from Judy Dale's book, Curves in Motion.

I wanted to push myself to try smaller, tighter, more tortuous curves than my previous efforts with this technique using Judy's Bird pattern.

It was a challenge and if you take a close look, you can see a lot of imperfection.

After I finished sewing it together, my immediate reaction was that the design would have been much easier for me, and the result would have been better, if I'd used appliqué instead. Then, I thought about Viki Pignatelli's technique for curves and thought it would also be a candidate for a design like this.

One of the things I love about quilting is that there are often many ways to accomplish a design idea. And sometimes, when I realize, after the fact, that I could have chosen another, easier, path, I beat myself up a little.

But, the upside is that I love that there is always something new for me to learn about quilting.   And so while I WAS beating myself up a little for painstakingly making templates, marking fabrics, aligning seams and registration marks and hand-stitching it together instead using a technique within my comfort zone, I also was reminded that sometimes the journey is the reward, and the result of my effort is that I am learning a new way of dealing with curves and that with practice, I will improve and have a new tool in my quilter's box of tricks ... and that realizing my idea for those bird blocks may actually be within my technical grasp.

In the meantime, my sad feathery abstract effort has become a journal cover and a reminder that sometimes the Journey is the Reward.

You can read more about it on today's blog post on The Daily Feather.

The theme for the Linky party on the Block Lotto this weekend is love/hate, best/worst or good news/bad news.  I suppose I am an incurable optimist because I always seem to find the silver lining.  In quilting, often the silver lining of a "bad" quilt project is the lesson learned .... even if the lesson is that you hate a particular technique and, in the future, will find another way :-)

But for me and this particular effort, I feel like the journey was worth it and that I'm making progress on this particular learning curve.   Bonus: I have a little finish to show from one of my Daily Feathers.  Can I get a whoop whoop?

I'm also going to join the parties at Richard and Tanya's Link-a-Finish Friday and Finish it Up Friday on Crazy Mom Quilts.