moonwise | Yay for fabric

I just feel the need to gloat about all the lovely Japanese-inspired fabrics that have just started showing up at Joann's. Japanese fabrics and batiks and silk dupioni seem to be all the rage in current quilting, and they were all over the quilt show the other weekend. Last weekend I went a little nuts and bought a half-yard to a yard of several gorgeous fabrics.

My mom and I also went out to get fabrics for a quilt to make for my uncle. She's just starting to learn how to piece a quilt and is not doing all that well with it. It's a behavior I recognize well in myself - instead of taking something from the bottom up, mastering one skill, and then moving on to a new one, my mom's trying to learn it all at once and is frustrating herself as a result. The quilt block she picked as a learner is a fairly advanced pattern, and she's spent a lot of time putting it together and taking it apart.

For lack of a better descriptor, it's a Myers-Briggs thing - my mother's got a lot of the S (Sensing) quality, and she needs to be brought through something in small steps because she won't make that iNtuitive leap. It's what made her a good elementary school teacher, since someone who "gets" things in a snap can't always describe how they got there. So, my poor mother prints out every single thing she can find on quilting instead of thinking about what she's trying to do, and she feels like a failure because she can't grasp it yet. (She's lived all her life with me and my dad, both of us strong NTs, and constanty compares herself instead of looking at her own strong properties. Insecure? Yes.)

I kinda go back and forth on my N and S qualities, with a strong tendency towards N, but one-on-one I can teach. So, we picked a pattern that was EASY. It took some time for my mother to understand that EASY was GOOD because it would allow her to learn, and wasn't a reflection on her skills. I took her through the basics of strip piecing and chain-piecing and taught her how to put the blocks together properly so the patterns would match up. She learned a lot and was much happier.

..Unfortunately, she didn't measure the blocks out right on subsequent strips and will have to rip it all apart. Sigh.