Pieces

Trivets (Etsy) From large to small to perfectly-sized pieces.

One thing I love most about working in my shop is taking large pieces of rough lumber, turning those into smaller pieces and then, in many cases, putting them back together to form larger pieces to create an interesting finished product. 

It is actually the milling of the parts where I find the joy in the work. Of course, delivering finished pieces and knowing they will be around for decades to come is a great part of the process as well.

I also have quilters in my world. Watching their process, I find the experience and the joys are the same. Taking large pieces of raw fabric, turning them into small pieces, followed by recombining the small pieces into a finished project. Then handing off the finished project to someone who will love and cherish it for a long time to come.

As I was thinking of this last weekend, while standing in the shop cutting up pieces of plywood for a library project I am working on, I wondered if there were other examples of this same kind of work. I am sure there are, but the situation I really landed on was with intellectual quilting.

I hope we've all had the opportunity to know some really smart people in our lives. I have known some who are very smart from the point of view of "book" learning, and I've known some incredibly gifted with the practical world around them. But when I consider similarities between the groups, I discovered that they have the ability to take small pieces of knowledge and quilt them together into bigger and better understanding. 

The other thing I was struck by is the variety of potential sources of information we have today to learn little things we can  turn into larger pieces of information. I'm not talking about sources of opinion out on the Internet, but true information sources. The best examples and comparisons of this come from a couple of different acquaintances and conversations years apart. 

The first is from a family who decades ago bought a funeral home. When I asked how Brad how a person learns to run a funeral home, I was told they had gone to the bank, signed the paperwork, and  realized there was no choice but to figure it out. They obviously did, as the business has been successful for years now, but that's a really tough way to learn.

On the other hand, a friend decided to open an embroidery and screen-printing business. When I asked how they had decided to start the business, I discovered that he and his wife watched over sixty hours of YouTube videos, and then bought the necessary equipment. They had learned the best ways to be successful at it. And, by the way, they are successful.

These two stories, separated in time by decades, point out what we have available to us in the time we now live. What is available to us is literally unbelievable. Of course, like everything else, the real question is how we use the information. I believe it is up to each of us to take the time, do the research, and come away with the best understanding we can find.

Now, I am as guilty as any at finding a bite of information and going off believing that what I found is the truth, but this is the point when we all need to be intellectual quilters. We need to know there is not one unequivocal source of information. We take bites from all of it and piece it together just like building a quilt, or a piece of furniture. When so many voices are trying to move us one way or the other based on a comment or a picture, we must look deeper. Do the research to inform ourselves as well as possible. Do the hard work of quilting the information together.

After the research and work is complete, it is still possible we will come to the wrong conclusion, but at least we have a much better choice than believing everything we hear. As I said about my woodworking, it is the work of milling the parts to fit them together I enjoy the most, and I need to be more comfortable with doing the same with the information presented me on any topic. It is my responsibility, nobody else's, to make sure I am armed with the best and most complete information possible.

I am committed to be the best intellectual quilter I can be. Will you commit with me to do the same?