How to Work with What You’ve Got: Acceptance Practices for a Richer Quilting Life 

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The practice of “making do” is something I learned to embrace long ago in order to live a beautiful life in spite of chronic illness. As a hyper-scrappy maximalist quilter, it’s also something I do in my creative life. I bet you do, too!

Learning to work with what we’ve got eases ALL kinds of suffering—sudden injury, job loss, misplacing our favorite shears, you name it.

Today, I’ve got tips to boost your acceptance practice—so you can exert less energy railing against what’s bad and instead put that energy into creativity.

Acceptance means making friends with hardship.

You may be asking yourself, “How the heck can I make friends with the hardest things in my life?” I use this simple practice:

If I wake up in the morning and I’m having a symptom flare-up (for example), I observe what’s going on. I remind myself that while flare-ups stink, they’re part of me. It’s like having a challenging friend—we all have those, right? For better or worse, this friend is part of my life.

Then, I give myself a moment to feel sad, angry, whatever comes up. This is essential; bottling up our feelings does not work. 

Once I’ve taken a moment to honor those hard feelings, I ask my friend: “How can we collaborate and get it together, babe?” I look in the mirror and say those words out loud. 

I try to imagine holding my friend close, recognizing how hard it is for her to be in pain every day. That compassion I feel for her—for that part of me that has illness—helps take the edge off, and then I’m able to consider workarounds to make the most of my day. 

This is how I make friends with illness, and I do the same thing when I run out of a recipe ingredient or if I’m trying to finish a quilt and cut my backing fabric wrong. Instead of wasting energy being angry, resentful, or jealous, I work with what I’ve got.

You’re not “giving up”.

Throughout my years of advocacy work, people told me accepting chronic pain was tantamount to giving up. 

But if we think of acceptance as giving up, we start to view acceptance as defeat. This view turns our hardships into a war. In this paradigm, we are fighting all our limitations in health, space, finances, time, creativity, etc.

I understand the impulse to fight. It takes courage, and we’re hardwired by Mother Nature to fight for our survival. While that impulse works great when we encounter a coyote on a dark street at night, we don’t need that survival energy in our sewing rooms; it just adds unnecessary stress.

If we live in the mentality that our experience is a fight to be won, we start to see every limitation as a loss. Can’t afford a fancy sewing machine? Guess I’ll never improve my technique. Cut the fabric wrong? Might as well throw it away. Can’t travel to a quilt show? I’ll never get to meet that cool teacher.

Can you see how when we fight our limitations, we’ll always feel like we’re losing?

Instead: “Yes, and”

“Yes, and” is the cornerstone of improvisation. It accepts the premise that certain things exist and that you can then add to them or manipulate them to fit your needs. 

Like “YES I don’t have extra money for new fabric, AND I can cut up a bunch of old shirts instead.” Or “YES I can’t make it to the big quilt show, AND I can ask friends to text me photos of their favorite quilts.” Acceptance is all about “yes, and.” 

When we start to view limits as a “yes, and” situation, our minds open to new ways of thinking and creating. 

Now, these things don’t magically happen for us just because we say, “I accept.” I don’t want to be too simplistic. But learning to work with what you’ve got opens doors of possibility. Every time you breathe out the stress of a fight for your creative survival, you breathe in opportunities to get creative with the resources that you do have.

Case study: Financial limitations

A few years back, one of my friends was frustrated because she couldn’t afford to hire a long-arm quilter. After a period of sadness, she started researching and found a shop nearby that rented long-arm machines by the hour.

She trained at the shop and began long-arming her quilts. For much less money than hiring a long-armer, she creates beautiful quilts AND enjoys a feeling of accomplishment because she does the work herself. 

Case study: Lack of space

When I first started quilting, I would drool over the studios I saw online. In my small Chicago condominium, I had a dining room table and a couple of square feet in my home office (which I shared with my husband). By working with what I had at the time—instead of bemoaning what I lacked or giving up on creative work—I learned to economize. 

I got better at organizing my tools and materials and learned how to pack up quickly so we could eat a meal at our table in between quilting sessions. I became nimble and flexible, and I came to see those as positives in my creative practice— instead of focusing on what I lacked. 

Because I accepted my situation instead of fighting it or giving in to feelings of jealousy and deprivation, I freed up mental space to innovate and figure out how to work ambitiously. 

Half of Americans live with chronic illness; one-third live with chronic pain. One of my friends has a handful of painful conditions that don’t allow her to stand or sit for long periods. 

She could have given up sewing as a hobby, but instead, she structured her life so sewing is her part-time work. She focuses on hand stitching and teaching, which allows her great flexibility when it comes to time and location. She makes less money than having a traditional job, but she’s happier, she can take time off to care for herself, and she gets to sew a lot.

Next Steps

When we practice working with what we’ve got, we get calmer and more anchored in reality. We get back some mental energy. And we expand our ability to embrace creativity. 

For next steps, consider these questions:

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Jenni Grover is a journalist, quilter, and wellness coach for makers. She’s a past president/current communications chair of the Chicago Modern Quilt Guild.

Jenni has lived with chronic illness and disability since 1997 and has devoted much of her life to advocacy. Her book ChronicBabe 101: How to Craft an Incredible Life Beyond Illness has helped countless folks feel better. You may know Jenni from our ongoing Designer Q&A series appearing in Quiltmaker magazine.   Learn more at coachjennigrover.com.

Article written by Jenni Grover and featured in Quiltmaker July/August and September/October 2024 Special Color Issue.