Since I last wrote to you I’ve made some exciting progress. After months of creating silicone molds, followed by weeks of technical difficulties, I’ve FINALLY STARTED POURING THE RESIN FOR A QUILT!
Wow, that was a long time coming. And you know what? These new molds do make the process a heck of a lot faster! It really was worth it!
I’ve made a sweet little time lapse video of my first pour so you could see how it all works. Enjoy!
I’m going to test one more way to make temporary molds for unusual sizes of quilt squares, then do the final resin pour of the remaining squares. Then it will be time to sew it together!
If you don’t already know from previous posts, this quilt will be called “All the things my children gave me in May” because it is literally a collection of the beautiful temporary ephemera that my young children gave to me in May last year. It’s a tribute to the simple joy they find in life and the open hearted, loving way they share it.
I’m looking forward to seeing how it turns out, especially since there have been so many hurdles to overcome in creating it.
So much of sculpture is trial and error. It’s a series of educated guesses, attempts, evaluation of results, then based on those results you make the next educated guess and so on. Hopefully, hopefully you get to a useful conclusion. It’s really very similar to scientific enquiry. It’s similar to life, too.
Talk about an exercise in maintaining a positive attitude!
My oldest son and daughter both take martial arts. Every lesson their teacher reminds them of the three qualities you need to become a black belt leader:
- Best effort
- Good attitude
- Perseverance
We’ve been talking about this a lot at home and I find myself carrying this with me into my studio. I’ve been teaching my kids to evaluate their performance on these three criteria, NOT whether or not they had a successful outcome. After all, these three things are what they can control.
When I take my own advice it certainly frees up a lot of energy! Suddenly it doesn’t matter whether or not the attempt works. All that matters is whether or not it was a genuine, useful attempt and what I learned from it.
That sure does feel a lot better to my soul.
I hope it feels better to yours too.
Take Care,
Jenny
My favorite part of the video was that satisfying pop pop pop sound as the needle hole bits popped out of the resin squares. Very cool way to capture and share your process. I can’t wait to see the finished quilt.
Thank you, Becca! I love those popping sounds too. They’re so satisfying! Thanks for commenting!