themadpatter

I once had a second job as a food processor demonstrator. You know what makes it look so easy? Practice and repetition. I did it over 30 years ago, and I can still remember my patter. ("It can crush ice, whip cream, and you can even make your own mayonnaise! Let me show you how.") For years I had my machine facing the wall, because I was used to using it facing the audience, and if it was facing me, the buttons were in the "wrong" place, lol. That used to make people wonder.

Sometimes I have a fail on stuff like this, so I have to watch the video over and over again, sometimes freezing it after each step, until I figure it out. I was a knitter before i was a quilter, and I hated purling. Ugh! It seemed sooooo inefficient to me! So, I taught myself how to knit backwards. It took over an hour til I understood the exact mechanics of how the purl stitch was formed going frontwards and then to reverse the motions one by one in reverse. Then it took about an hour of practice until I quit getting lost in the middle of the stitch when my attention wandered. And then it took a refresher course when I wanted to do it after not doing it for a few weeks or months. And of course, it took hours and hours of practice until I could knit it as fast as I could going frontwards. My tension is not exactly the same going frontwards and backwards , but then it wasn't the same knitting and purling, so it doesn't worry me. I mostly knit socks and scarves, so any tension problems seem to sort themselves out after the item is washed. Or they're invisible when it's in a shoe, so win- win!

I guess my point is that like knitting, quilting has a lot of different skills and tricks and whatnot that are not all created equal. But, through the magic of our big brains and muscle memory, with enough practice just about anything can be "easy." The part that's always left out of that is the amount of practice. In his book "Outliers", Malcolm Gladwell says that it takes 10,000 hours of 'deliberate practice' to rise to the level of expert at a task, as well as natural ability. Lol, and didn't that​ start a huge brouhaha!