Thursday, March 31, 2011

Birth order characteristics of fabric

I had this weird idea the other day. Mark's eyes kind of glazed over when I told him about it. A few minutes ago I finished reading the Blue Elephant Stitches blog post, "writing while pinning," where she says: "I often find myself thinking in the form of writing, and I can write some quite interesting, informative, well-thought out and even witty stuff in my head... but you'll just have to take my word for it, cause it rarely gets any farther than that."

I do the same thing. Usually in the shower. Or if I wake up in the middle of the night. Usually those middle-of-the-night ideas sometimes seem weird in the light of day. This may be one of those very ideas. But I'm going to go with it anyway.

I don't even know why I was thinking about birth order character traits. Mark and I have one son. Clearly not an issue for us. But it's still interesting to read about different traits children may possess based on their "place" in the family. At the same time, I was kind of obsessing over fabric by Denyse Schmidt, probably because I just finished Pop Beads, my quilt top using Flea Market Fancy, and I've got two quilt tops in the works using Hope Valley.  I came super late to the whole FMF party. And as I mentioned, I have paid more than I care to admit to build my collection. Why? Because I really REALLY like it. I like a lot of fabric lines, but this one probably tops the list.

Pretty much missed out on Katie Jump Rope too, so I've been collecting that as well. And I like it. Not as much as FMF, but KJR is pretty social and plays pretty well with FMF.

When Hope Valley came out, at first I was kind of "ehh, whatever" about it but she has really grown on me.

When Denyse's latest line came out, well, I'll be honest, I have not purchased a single fat quarter of it.  I've seen some cool quilts made with it, but I think was more intrigued with the quilt design than the fabric. (My apologies to all of you who consider it one of your favorites.)

I don't know why the birth order traits correlation (from here) popped into my mind, but here goes:

Flea Market Fancy (the first-born child): natural leader, high achiever, organized, bossy (not sure about that but someone was telling me to buy, buy, buy!), adult-pleaser. "First-born children desire control and they will typically become a compliant nurturer or a more aggressive mover and shaker." Seems pretty accurate. I don't believe I have seen any other fabric lines that caused a a write-in campaign to Freespirit Fabrics begging them to reprint.  But they decided to move on...

Katie Jump Rope and Hope Valley (the middle children): flexible, easy-going, social, peacemakers (or substitute piecemakers!). "The middle child(ren) will demonstrate the greatest variety of character traits, but they will usually be opposite of their older sibling."


Greenfield Hill (the last child--although I'm sure this only temporary until the next "child" comes along): risk-taker, creative, self-centered, competitive, bored easily. "They are also often driven to catch up with their older siblings and follow in their footsteps." We'll see.

(image from Freespirit)

If you are still here, then I think you deserve a little compensation for your attention. So how about the scraps from my Pop Beads quilt?

What makes our hearts race a little faster when we see certain fabric is so subjective. That's why we sometimes have to perform CPR on our credit cards (to quote a commenter from yesterday).

Here is the question to answer: Where do you fall in the birth order in your family? Any characteristics you feel like sharing with the rest of us? You can also comment on whether or not this was too weird a topic that I should have kept to myself, but it won't give you an extra chance at winning. (hehe)

I'll  pick a winner on Saturday at 6 p.m. PDT.

ETA: I mean no disrespect whatsoever to fabric designers or fabric lines. I'm glad they are out there designing fabulous fabric for us to work with, something I myself could never do. I also realize the pressure to do something different and wonderful each and every time must be phenomenal. I have just been spending a lot of time with these specific lines lately, and my mind kind of went off on a little tangent.