Feedback

I crave feedback... but I like it to be gentle and generally positive.  It's not that I want people to lie to me but I'd like them to be reasonably not mean or too critical.

So, of course, I ask my husband for feedback.  This hadn't been going so well.  He wasn't really understanding this whole quilt thing.  But then I had him read a section out of Spike Gillespie's book Quilting Art: Inspiration, Ideas & Innovative Works from 20 Contemporary Quilters.  The particular artist that I picked is also a full-time software engineer (which is my husband's profession) and I feel like she spoke about quilting art in a way that would get to him.  And it seems like I was right.  He still doesn't quite "get it" but I can see that we're making progress.

One of the things that made it especially obvious was his feedback on my current quilt top (which I will post pictures of later).  I was stumped.  I had sewn strips of different fabrics together and I'd planned on cutting out the letters of my daughters name and piecing them into a quilt top.  It just wasn't right, though, and I couldn't tell exactly why.

When I showed the pieces to hubby, he immediately got excited and asked if I was going to cut them up again and make a checkerboard type grid thing with them. I explained how that wouldn't work because the strips weren't equal sizes (which he realized immediately as well) but talking about it like that made the lightbulb go on for me and I figured out what I needed to do.  I did cut them up again and sewed them together upside down and rightside up and slightly off from one another, still with the idea of cutting them into letters.  Finally I realized they should stay as blocks in a plain fabric background and I could find something that worked better to piece her name with some other day.  It was such a ureka moment!

I wouldn't have thought to write about this except that I read this blog post at Blue Elephant Stitches which talks about her husband's feedback.  The woman at BES talks about her husband not thinking about his taste in color and design and (to me at least) seeming to say that he doesn't really have good taste.  I hear this all the time about men but my husband has excellent taste in color and design and thinks about it a lot.  He also seems to have a better ability to distinguish color than I do (something else BES complains about with her husband.)  It worried me slightly with this project for my daughter because there are some similar colors in it that I wasn't actually sure looked good together.  I don't trust myself.  But, hubby seems to think they look good so I guess it's alright.  I know he'd tell me if they didn't - in a nice, gentle, not-mean sort of way.

So, as much as I sometimes crave another quilter's opinion, I'm super grateful to have hubby around to tell me what he thinks, even if he isn't quite as enthusiastic as I'd like.