The Beauty of Imperfection

by Kiri Jorgensen-Publisher and Senior Editor

Sewing quilts is something I love to do. The amount of time I’ve had to spend on quilt making has ebbed and flowed over the stages of my life, but it’s always something I’ll treasure as a creative piece of me. I love designing quilt patterns and selecting the right fabrics and piecing all the parts into a beautiful whole. I’m quite a perfectionist, so I work hard to make sure each block fits just right, and each seam leaves matching lines.

I also have a love of history, so of course I applied that to quilts too. I have quite a collection of quilt books that focus on antique quilting styles, methods, and patterns. I’ve made many of them, even using reproduction fabrics from the period. Part of this study was of Amish quilts, and I learned something that I’ve taken to heart. In every quilt the Amish make, they purposefully create an error in the pattern. They turn a block backward or flip it sideways. This represents that only God makes things perfectly.

As a publisher, I make a lot of mistakes. For every step of getting a book from draft to published form, there are thousands of ways to make errors. I’ve made most of them at least once. Sometimes twice. In marketing and promoting our books, there are hundreds of ways to ‘do things wrong’, and I’ve done that too. As I push myself to the limits of my productivity, my natural inclinations step in and cloud my view sometimes, and I don’t ‘see’ the imperfections until it’s too late. Then the whole world gets to see them first.

There’s something very humbling about discovering mistakes late, and then instantly seeing the markers along the way that had been ignored. Sometimes I beat myself up about all that. Why couldn’t I have been more on top of things? Why couldn’t I have been more thorough? How could I have missed that?

Then I remember the quilts.

I don’t deliberately make mistakes in my book publishing, but in reality, it’s an extremely creative process from beginning to end. And with creativity comes imperfection. We learn as we go, and the more we learn, the more we know how much there is still left to learn. In creative pursuits, we will always make mistakes.

And like the Amish quilts, there is incredible beauty in the whole, imperfections and all.