Unintentional intentional mistakes
 

Just curious. Does anyone else make unintentional mistakes in your piecing but then intentionally leave the mistake in the finished top? Maybe I'm just weird, but I have a psychological aversion to perfect quilts. If I make a minor mistake (i.e. turning a sub-unit the wrong direction in a block), I usually undo the seam and correct it. But first I evaluate how it will look in the finished project. If it isn't going to be a huge, glaring distraction from the overall pattern/layout, I'll leave it in. I try not to leave more than 1 mistake; I do care about the quality of my work. And, as any quilter knows, there are sometimes mistakes that we don't detect until the project is complete. So some of my projects have more than 1 mistake but I don't consider it the end of the world.

My apologies to all the perfectionists out there who are cringing right now. You do you. It is what it is.

No problem... it's still a quilt, right? Still warm, still snuggly. If you can live with it, so be it.

I've never had a perfect quilt yet, some have been close... but I've never had to make a deliberate mistake plenty happen on their own. Sometimes the mistakes get left in, sometimes they get fixed.

I did a scrappy Storm at Sea and it had been quilted and hanging in a guild show before I noticed one of the fabrics was wrong side out. Now, we have two sides to fabric the one we intend to use and the one we did use -- I planned on the other side. I figured I had handled each block about 24 times during just the construction part and never caught it, quilted it all over and didn't catch it, did the binding by hand.

Short form: had I noticed this one, I would have fixed this one. But no one else has noticed it and the gifted owners never mentioned it either. I feel ok about not fixing it... working with scrappy style I will put in special fabrics with my own meanings for the recipient. Sometimes I put them in without mention, sometimes I let the people know. I think nowadays (20 years after that Storm at Sea) I would say that "Btw there is one piece in there that's backwards -- gives you something to look for when you're sick in bed".

When I get a fabric turned wrong side up I leave it. IF someone points it out, one guild member did once, I said, I know isn't it fun?

I might fix it if it's before the binding has been put on.

I "cringe" when someone says that he/she "deliberately" made a mistake. Really??

Just like me I don't make mistakes I do alterations

I "cringe" when someone says that he/she "deliberately" made a mistake. Really??

I don't cringe, I mentally put them on my ignore anything this person says or does forever.