Recently, one of our reels took off a little more than usual.
It was the reveal of our Femme Fatale quilt made with Fanfare batiks. It’s a gorgeous quilt with some unusual piecing techniques, and our quilter put a significant amount of time and effort into making it. We quilted it, bound it, filmed the reveal, and sent it out into the world.
And people loved it.
Then, somewhere around 20,000 views, someone noticed something we hadn’t—a block near the bottom had been rotated.
And you know what? She was right.
There was a block turned the wrong way.
For a moment, it was easy to look at that beautiful finished quilt and see only the mistake. But the more I thought about it, the more I wondered why that one block should matter so much.
The quilt was still beautiful.
All of the hours that went into making it were still there. The challenging piecing, the fabric choices, the quilting, the binding—all of it was still worth celebrating.
And it made me think about how we treat our own work and the work of other quilters.
We can be awfully hard on ourselves. We notice the point that disappeared into a seam, the corner that doesn’t quite match, the pucker on the back, or the block we wish we could do over. Sometimes we notice those things in other people’s quilts, too.
But quilting isn’t about achieving perfection.
It’s about making something.
It’s learning a new technique. Choosing fabrics you love. Trying something that stretches your skills. Ripping out a seam and trying again—or deciding that seam is perfectly fine right where it is. It’s putting hours of yourself into something that didn’t exist before.
There is absolutely a place for advice and constructive criticism, especially when someone asks for help. That willingness to share what we know is one of the things I love about the quilting community.
But I hope we can also give each other a little grace.
When someone shares a quilt, maybe our first instinct can be to see what they created rather than what they could have done differently. To recognize the effort. To celebrate the finish. To remember that none of us makes every quilt perfectly.
Our Femme Fatale quilt has a block turned the wrong way.
We’re not fixing it.
It’s beautiful just the way it is.