Today, on America’s Thanksgiving holiday, I am grateful for opportunities that come my way. To be sure, they are often disguised as *bonk!* on the head, occasionally causing some consternation. I am also grateful for hot and cold running water, a snug house and a garden where lettuce is growing, reminding me again of the harvest, but in a green way, not a gold-and-amber way. I open my spice cupboard and I am richer than the ancient kings of Egypt, with spices all arrayed in their glorious pungency and flavor. I have clothes in my closet–a variety, to be sure. I am grateful also for comfortable shoes, socks with no holes in them, and enough fabric to last me for quite a few whiles. . . and then some more.
I am grateful for family, for my six brothers and sisters, and for parents who instilled in me a sense of excellence, of purpose, a love of education and reading and doing the right thing. They also gifted me a love of the arts, of the decorative, of the intrinsic qualities of nature’s beauties. I am grateful for my husband–can’t say enough about him–and our four children and their families.
I am grateful to be a writer, a quilter, a maker, and to have found quilty friends in this lovely online community. I am grateful that you reach out to me, too, with glimpses into your lives and how things run for you. I am richer for it.
I feel the crisp air now of California, now that it’s finally mid-November (apparently the effect of climate change) and coming soon is Turkey Day. (For a turkey prep that will change your life, see *here.* We did it last year and I’ll never do anything else now.) And then, you know, The Big One, and I’m not referring to earthquakes in California. Yes. . . Christmas. My friend has already sewn multiples of her gift for family and friends, and I’m just now kind of thinking about it. I am already behind.
So I’m skipping all that, and going right to the New Year and its projects. Because it’s never too late to focus on something in the future, where I’m going to live, than to spend time moaning over the fact that I have nothing sewn for Christmas, which will soon be in the past. All this is because I seem to be an expert at procrastinating. According to Timothy Pychyl, interviewed on *this site,* I have demonstrated several of the key unproductive responses to a dreaded task (from *his book*)[my comments are in brackets]:
Distracting yourself, and thinking about other things
Forgetting what you have to do, either actively or passively (usually for unimportant tasks)
Downplaying the importance of what you have to do
Giving yourself affirmations, focusing on other your values and qualities that will solidify your sense of self [even though you aren’t getting your work done!]
Denying responsibility in order to distance yourself from what you have to do
Seeking out new information that supports your procrastination (e.g. when you tell yourself you need to have more information before you get started on something)[a classic grad school trick]
So, in order to model for you number 1, 3, and 5 nearly all of them, I hereby give you:
Projects for the New Year (or earlier, if I want):
Unpin Shine: The Circles Quilt after I spend close to 3 hours pinning it, take it apart and layer on another layer of wool batting, and then re-pin it in order to quilt it, or merely obsesses about quilting it, as the case may be.
Start the Spelling Bee. I’m still trying to think of a theme or a pithy phrase to have my beemates make for me.
Continuing Chuck Nohara block creation. There is no date by which these have to be finished, so it’s pure sewing enjoyment.
I’m the Queen Bee for Mid-Century Modern Bee in January and I already have my idea (I’m not telling). We’ve had some changes, and have 2 openings for quilters who have their own blog –or– a body of work on Instagram/Flickr. You also have to be over 50 (the Mid-Century thing), be vetted by our committee, have a modern tilt to your sewing, are a capable sewist, and love to be on time with your bee projects. Leave a comment if you are interested.
Four-in-Art has a new yearly theme (Color) and Simone has announced our first quarterly challenge: Microscopic. I’m totally jazzed. We also have a couple of openings, and the same criteria apply — except for the age thing. We’d also like if you would be willing to be creative and try new approaches to quilting. We make our quilts and post them on our blogs/Flickr accounts (we do not send them anywhere, so perfect for international participation). Up to this point, they’ve all been in the 12″ square format, but we are now leaving the size open to the artist. Leave a comment if you are interested. The guidelines we came up with are:
1. Members should have a desire to expand their creativity. 2. Have a body of work on line that members can review via blog, Flickr or Instagram. 3. Make a year commitment to the group, and do their best to make deadlines- unless some crazy life occurrence happens. 4. Be willing to review other Four-in-Art work and leave a comment within the first week of publishing.
Write my pattern for Spectrum, a mini quilt, and get that up on Craftsy/PayHip.
My time with the Traveling Threads Bee is almost finished. Just waiting on one more package from the quilter ahead of me, and then I’ve completed all the blocks for my beemates. My blocks have also been returned to me (all the Alison Glass fabrics in the corner up there) and I’d like to dive into that.
Plan out the Halloween Quilt my friend Leisa and I are doing:
UPDATE: IT’S BEEN FOUND!! Apparently all my readers are more clever than I (but I knew that already) and have located the pattern for me. Thanks very much to Leslie in Rome, and everyone else. You are the best!
It’s called “Hallowe’en 1904,” and is from Blackbird Designs. Common Threads in Wisconsin seems to have it back in stock, which is great news!
See how easy that was? And how I didn’t think about Getting Ready for Christmas once?
But according to Pychyl, one of biggest recommendations to avoid procrastination is simply to get started. “Once we start a task, it is rarely as bad as we think. . . .When you find yourself thinking things like ‘I’ll feel more like doing this tomorrow,’ ‘I work better under pressure,’ ‘There’s lots of time left,’ I can do this in a few hours tonight’, let that be a flag or signal or stimulus to indicate that you are about to needlessly delay the task, and let it also be the stimulus to just get started.”
While I really love the festive cookies sold during Germany’s Oktoberfest, it’s the giant pretzels I really miss.
And who can forget the cute dirndls, wore by the most traditional Bavarian women? (I have three, all made by hand with fabric lugged home from Munich.) But in honor of those weeks of partying they do in the Bavarian Alps, I’ve been partying here in my sewing room, finally gaining enough stamina to put in nearly a full day’s/several days’ worth of work. In other words, it’s catch-up time.
A package of blocks from our Traveling Threads Bee finally caught up to me (we’ve had some delays) and I placed Amber’s blocks (she blogs at One Shabby Chick) all over my design wall to admire the handiwork of my beemates. So often when I get a batch of blocks, I recognize that there is a different goal for those of us at the end of the bee. Those at the beginning work on creating blocks and filling up the holes. But if you are towards the end of the trading circle, a good look at the quilt is necessary, asking: what does this quilt need? In this case, it needs some negative space, the hint given by that lone six-pointed appliqué star there on the turquoise background.
The theme of this quilt is “I love you more than all the stars,” with the request to make pink stars on a range of blue backgrounds. Amber also included this really cool lame cotton, which of course I couldn’t wait to use. I kept singing the lyrics to Good Morning, Starshine in my head, and realized that’s where I needed to go. So above, are three starshine blocks.
I tucked them in around the edges of the quilt, pronounced it done, packed it up and mailed it off to the next partner in our bee.
After two years of saving a few Halloween-themed Polaroid blocks, I pulled them out and put them into a random bordered square arrangement. While I should be working on Halloween in March, or even April, I never feel like working on Halloween then.
This, along with my basket quilt and another quilt Lisa and I finished for a friend, are now at the quilter’s. Yes, I’ll enjoy my Halloween quilt NEXT Halloween.
Except that there may be another quilt joining that one: this is our stack of fabrics from Primitive Gatherings quilt shop (and there are a few more from Temecula Quilt Company) that Leisa and I put together, so we can make this:
However I promised her we wouldn’t start on it until after the holidays, so the fabrics are stashed away until January.
And I’ve made it up to T/t on my Quilt Abecedary project (T/t were too shy to pose for a photo). Only a few more, then I’ll need to start really honing in on the theme of my quilt and what I want my Spelling Bee-mates to make for my quilt. I’m first up in January, so I’d better get cooking.
And then after that finishes next year, I’m game to do another traveling bee. And then after that. . .
It’s nice to be looking far forward once again, rather than just hoping I can make it through a day at a time. I used to do quarterly goals for several online finishing collaborations, but have fallen out of the habit of looking ahead, bogged down as I was in this summer’s detritus of the here and now. I still don’t fill up my schedule book too far ahead, not knowing if my stamina will hold out.
And does it really help to focus on your goals? We’ll never quell that controversy, but according the article, How Goals and Good Intentions Can Hold Us Back on the 99u blog, focusing exclusively on your goals may “spoil your experience of the activities you’ll need to pursue.” Even the first article linked above notes that “relentless fantasizing may actually reduce one’s odds of achieving goals.” But, rather, “adopting the mind-set thatyour strengths and abilities are not fixed, but can improve over time and with effort, can have self-fulfilling results” (99u — always a good site for reading about this sort of thing).
For this reason, I’ve found often that reviewing my achievements often provides motivation to go forward, a sort of “I finished that one, now I can finish this” one sort of process. Or I can say to myself, “I like the feeling of having completed this,” and enjoy the feeling like when I walked out of the post office yesterday, having mailed off a bee-mate’s package of blocks.
Since I am away from the computer for a while, I’m running a few favorite, previously published posts. This one originally ran on July 22, 2010, but is modified for today’s post. ˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚
Here’s the before:
The during:
The after:
Okay, that’s not a very exciting thing to do, right? We want all our sewing tools to keep on working, day after day, no complaints, no breakdowns, no upkeep or maintenance required. But it’s such a little thing to take a few minutes and cheap-o lint roller remover and stroke down the board. And really, is the Before picture really so objectionable? Yet, what surprised me is how many of the threads that came off on those sticky papers were seemingly invisible to me.
But since I did it yesterday, just walking into the room is different. My pin wall is thread-free (for the time being) and it makes the room look cleaner. It made me think of the premise behind Malcolm Gladwell’s book The Tipping Point: that an epidemic can start with one small thing and roll on out from that. It’s like how picking up the towels in the bathroom and rehanging them triggers a cleaning of the sink. Or washing the curtains makes you repaint the bedroom. I’m talking about those kinds of mini-epidemics, that are just one person wide and one person deep. Those changes I make myself.
My sewing room (aka The Study) had been a mess since we arrived home from our trip to Canada and I just didn’t seem to have the mental energy to put the things away. But I cleaned the threads off the wall and now I’m putting away those little naggy things that linger after travel is done.
So maybe, taking time off to take care of things has unintended consequences? That this can, in some ways, apply to our own creativity level? That taking time off to clean out a few cobwebs, have a walk on the beach, or take a minute to sing along to a popular song in between shuttling the family to various places is like cleaning the threads off the design wall?
Perhaps a little mental maintenance on our own selves is why summertime is such a tonic, even if we don’t know what ails us.
OccasionalPiece--Quilt! 