Finished is Better Than Fancy

Angela Walters often says, “Finished is better than perfect”—meaning that one should not agonize over quilting mistakes that likely won’t be seen when the item is done. I’m adding a corollary. Sometimes “Finished is better than fancy”—meaning that I opted for simple but finished instead of extra piecing that runs the risk of the project languishing.

I took the rooster panel I bought in Missoula last week and cut it apart. The sides of the panel featured smaller squares of rooster art. The owner of the quilt store had added flying geese to those smaller squares and turned them into placemats. I’ll probably make potholders out of them. I could have gotten fancy and added extra piecing to the big rooster, but I opted for a simple border of red chicken wire fabric with a dark blue print in the corners to pick up and echo the blue in the rooster’s tail:

Simple, but closer to being done. This is all basted and ready to quilt. It is intended for me, so it doesn’t need to be fancy, just finished.

I pulled that red chicken wire out of my “animal fabric bin” and realized that I have a lot of chicken fabric. I have a plan for some of it that involves a Poppins Bag.

This is the original Poppins Bag pattern:

The bag is huge and has a wire frame at the top. It’s large enough to hold a small sewing machine. I haven’t made the large one—although I know people who have made literally dozens of them—but I did make myself a Mini Poppins bag in 2020:

This bag carries my English paper piecing supplies back and forth to sewing on Thursdays. I like it, but it occurred to me a few weeks ago that it would be nice to have a slightly larger version of this bag. The wire frame keeps the top open, and that would be handy for knitting projects.

My prayers have been answered. I was at the quilt store north of town the other day and saw a sample made up for the Medium size. The pattern has just been released. Kathy, one of the employees, is teaching a class on it in mid-November. I signed up and let Tera know in case she wanted to join me.

“Why are you taking a class on something you already know how to make?” asked the husband, which led to a discussion about the differences between men and women. Men take classes to learn things. Women take classes to socialize and learn things. Kathy joked that she wasn’t sure she wanted me in a class, but I said that I was just happy to have a day of sewing with a few other people. And I always learn something new.

Then Kathy asked me, while she was ringing me up, if I would be interested in teaching serger classes at their store. They are a Baby Lock dealer. The other store is a Bernina dealer. The Janome dealer is at a third (sewing/vacuum) store that I don’t patronize, which is why I visit the Janome dealers in Missoula or Spokane.

I don’t think it’s going to be a problem to teach at both stores. I am teaching as an independent contractor, and I don’t sense a lot of competition between the stores; in fact, I’ve heard employees at each store refer customers to the other store to find items or fabric lines that one of them doesn’t carry. I’ll let the owner of the first store know, though, before I set anything up at the second store. Also, I need to find 24 more hours in the day, LOL.

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I went to sewing yesterday. This is the group that meets a few miles up the road at the old schoolhouse. (The history of that schoolhouse is a long and rather convoluted story for another blog post.) The members of this group make up the bulk of the Mountain Brook craft-co-op. Many of them also belong to the Mountain Brook Ladies Club. Not all of them live in Mountain Brook, but that’s not a requirement for membership.

I invited Sarah, who just moved here from Seattle, to join us. Sarah is a spinner, knitter, and weaver, and even if she doesn’t join the craft co-op, I thought this would be a good way to get her plugged in to the community. She brought an electric tabletop spinning wheel and sat with us and visited. I suspected she would fit in well and I think she had a good time.

The more time I spend with that group, the more I enjoy it. That really is a cooperative—there is a lot of sharing and very little, if any, competition. Everyone takes joy in seeing other people’s projects. If somebody needs a certain kind of fabric, someone else in the group probably has some and offers it up. The wealth of knowledge about virtually every kind of fiber art is astounding. We call it “sewing” for simplicity’s sake, but it’s so much more.