Essays

There's a reason the quilter's sewing room looks the way it so often does, and that's not because we quilters are inherently sloppy people, unable to control our fabrics, or our pattern books, or our tools of quilting. Nor is it because we have "too much" fabric (or quilting books, or other quilting tools). As all quilters know, there is no such thing as "too much" fabric. No, the reason why it is impossible to walk from one end of the sewing room to another and step on floor (without stepping on fabrics and other odds and ends) has to do with quilters' creativity.

It happens this way: you're planning a quilt. Naturally, in order to do that, you need to get out the pattern books. It is impossible to decide on which quilt you want to make just by looking at one book. You need to compare, to consider alternatives. Sometimes you need to consider many alternatives. And most of us don't have a photographic memory, so we need to have the pictures close at hand, for such comparison purposes. That's why there are five quilt books and three magazines out, all open to different pages. And let's face it, you do have to hold the books open in some fashion. Sometimes you have to layer different books on top of each other, to keep your pages. Sometimes you have to use other objects: scissors, or rotary cutters, or rulers. That's why they're out in the middle of the room. They're not just sitting there; they're holding a place!

And let's say you're choosing fabrics for a particular project. You're not usually going to make a quilt out of a single fabric; usually you're using more than one color. Sometimes you haven't entirely decided on the particular color way of the quilt. That means you have to try different combinations of colors, to decide what looks good with this blue, for instance, and also what looks good with this gold, in case you decide to go for the gold theme rather than the blue one. You have to pull the fabrics out of wherever you store them, so that you can lay them next to each other and decide whether they work together as a group. Certainly you can't do that in storage. Your storage space is much too small for that (this is the case no matter how you store your fabrics; it's a law of quilting that you never have enough storage space). So you have to lay the fabrics out on the floor, or on your table (if it's not already covered by pattern books, sewing machines and the like), or on the ironing board, or on any other horizontal surface. It's not that you're a slob, you see; you just don't have enough horizontal surfaces!

And it doesn't get better when you're in the middle of a project, either. Then you have to keep the fabrics and the pieces you're using in some organized form. No matter how small the quilt is, you can't put all the pieces on your sewing table. There simply isn't room (this is another law of quilting; your sewing table magically shrinks once you set your sewing machine up on it). So you have to lay them out in your special order on the floor, next to the sewing table (you can't put them on the ironing board, because that's covered with fabrics that you need to iron before you put them away). When you've actually made some blocks, naturally you want them to be somewhere where you can see them while you're working on the rest of the blocks. Obviously you need to keep track of what you've already done, so that you won't duplicate the blocks you've made, and so that you won't make any mistakes. It's quite possible to have several piles of pieces and blocks laid out carefully on the floor for just one quilt, and how many quilters are working on only one quilt at a time?

It isn't that you don't try to clean up, either. Of course you do. When you're finished with a project, or when you're finished with part of a project, or when your significant other starts making those sarcastic comments about your personal habits and your housekeeping abilities, you do make the effort to straighten up the sewing room. It's just that whenever you try to put fabrics away, you run into troubles. For instance, you discover that the fabric has gotten wrinkled; it now has to be put on the ironing board to be ironed with the new fabrics. You can't just put it away wrinkled, can you? Of course not. And when it's there on the ironing board, you can't help noticing how it works with one of those other fabrics that's waiting to be ironed, and then you have to see if there aren't some other fabrics in your collection that might fit with that combination, and then there should be a pattern that would work well in that combination of fabrics, only you have to find that pattern, so you have to take out the pattern books again. Or even if you don't happen on a wrinkled fabric in your cleaning efforts, you try to put the fabrics away, but that requires you to put them in the right spot in the fabric storage area, and it always happens that you have to move other fabrics around to make space (another quilter's law: fabrics change their positions when your back is turned). It never fails that when you're moving other fabrics around, you suddenly discover a fabric you haven't looked at in a long time, and when you see it, you remember that you bought it for a particular quilt. There were other fabrics you thought of for that quilt, too, you suddenly remember, and then of course you have to see if you still have them, or if you used them for something else, and then before you know it, you've dragged out half a dozen new fabrics in your efforts to put one away.

There really is a simple solution to the problem of the messy sewing room, and I highly recommend using it whenever complaints are made by significant others. You're not a slob. You just need a bigger sewing room.