The Best Fluffy Pancakes recipe you will fall in love with. Full of tips and tricks to help you make the best pancakes.
When you’re working with new fabric, there may be a mistake that you can’t see until someone else has pointed it out. As a beginner, it can be frustrating to look at a swatch, seam, sample, or piece of dyed fabric and know that something is wrong, but not know where to begin. Helpful feedback is not an insult or a compliment. It’s simply a helpful observation that can help you relate something that you can see or touch in your fabric to something you can do about it. When it comes to working with fabric, getting this kind of feedback is important because a lot of mistakes start out small. And the sooner you correct them, the less likely they are to become a permanent part of your technique.
The key to getting helpful feedback is to ask the right questions. Instead of asking someone if they like your sample, ask them if your selvedges are even, if your stitches are lying flat, if the dye took evenly, or if the finish affected the texture the way you had hoped. When you ask a specific question, you’re more likely to get a specific answer. One of the biggest mistakes that beginners make when asking for feedback is to show too much of their work at once and ask for general feedback on everything. If you’re looking at weave, tension, color, and finish all at once, chances are the response you get will be too general to do you much good. If you limit your sample to one item and your question to one item, you’re more likely to get a helpful response.
It can also be helpful if you share some information about how you got to where you are. When you bring a swatch to someone for feedback, it can be helpful to include some information about the materials and settings you used, how you handled it, and what you changed between this attempt and your last one. Sometimes your process can tell someone else more about what’s going on with your fabric than the fabric itself can. If you have a dyed swatch that’s splotchy, the problem may not be with your dye, but with how you wet your fabric before you put it in the dye bath. If you have a sewing sample that’s puckering, the problem may not be with your thread, but with how you’re handling your fabric as you sew. If you approach your fabric as data rather than as a finished product, it’s easier to get helpful feedback.
If you want to learn to get more helpful feedback without having to go through the process of making a formal request every time, try this 15 minute exercise. The first five minutes should be spent choosing a sample and deciding what question you have about it. The next five minutes should be spent comparing this sample to a previous one, feeling the fabric, looking at the edges, and trying to find repeated mistakes. Finally, spend five minutes asking for one observation about your fabric and one suggestion for how to change it, and then apply that suggestion to your next practice session. This exercise can help you keep feedback grounded, rather than letting it float away as opinion.
One of the most common mistakes that beginners make when getting feedback is taking one suggestion and applying a lot of changes at once. This can result in a new swatch that looks different, but doesn’t teach you what made the difference. If someone is telling you that your tension is too loose, try tightening your tension before you change your yarn, your swatch size, and your finishing technique all at once. If someone is telling you that your color is too uneven, try changing your preparation or application time before you switch to an entirely new dye recipe. The point of feedback is not to drastically change your work, but to make your next attempt more readable.
As you get better at soliciting feedback, you’ll start to notice that you’re approaching your textile work differently. The texture of your fabric will become easier to read. You’ll catch flaws in your structure when you’re in the middle of a project rather than when you’ve completed it. Little notes and comments will start to take on more significance because you’ll see how they help you make better fabric with fewer mistakes. Your textile skills will improve more quickly if you learn to ask for feedback with purpose, accept it with grace, and apply it to your fabric, not just to your theory.
