Whenever you teach, people want you to give you rules. Directions. Patterns. A safe way to get results.

That’s fair. That’s what they come to class for. What they’d really like is a formula. Add a plus b, divide by six and get your result. I do understand. And underneath it all, I have a list of odd rules as well.

But I do know that they’re odd. They’re based usually on experience. But sometimes they’re annoyingly limiting. And every so often, I test them out. I push the borders, just to see if it’s a superstition I’ve made for myself, or something really helpful. Or if the materials have changed.

This is a process I call gilding the lily. I take a really lovely print or rubbing and accentuate it with thread. I’ve taken to doing it a lot with oil paint stick rubbing.

One of the tricky things is working with metallic, of all sorts. Metallic goes with metallic, right? I used to be quite strict about that.

Until I had something I was embroidering there just wasn’t enough metallic colors for. And then I found my rule was silly. Of course I could dust something with metallic.

So lately I’ve been working with metallic oil stick paint. I’ve been embellishing rubbings with straight stitch and metallic thread, a technique I call Gilding the Lily. Did I have to use metallic thread? I thought so. I thought the poly thread would cover it up too much. I thought it needed the shine.

But I had to work the metallic thread from the top. And metallic thread, even the best metallic thread is touchy in the top of the machine. It goes through the needle 50 times before it lands in your fabric. So I tried it.

How silly of me. I sat down with a pile of rubbings and some beautiful poly neon. The look was different. But lovely. And my rules were so much eye shine.

It’s worth not shutting the doors of creativity because we have a safe sure method, a path we know. Sometimes we simply have to stumble past our safe path to experiment outside those possibilities to something new.

So if I waffled teaching you in class and couldn’t give you a complete formula for a perfect quilt, I hope you understood I’d given you permission to try anything your heart desired. Me too!

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