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Ringing in the new year!

Martha
Life, Quilting

I’m not a big fan of new year’s resolutions, I never have been. That being said, there is still an undeniable sense of finality at the end of the year, and a sense of promise to what lies ahead. Like walking through a door from one room to another, I can sense the new year opening in front of me, with all sorts of things to discover.

We’ve already established that I’m a list maker. I have lists and I have lists of lists. I even have bulleted sublists on my lists. That’s how I organize my thoughts, and get my virtual ducks in a row. There’s a meme out there, “I don’t have ducks and they aren’t in a row. I have squirrels and they are at a rave”. Oh how I get that. So my lists are getting my squirrels to at least swing dance rather than running a mosh pit. But I digress.

So this time of year, I see a lot of people making huge resolutions for the new year, and very rarely does anything come of it. To my thinking, a resolution without a plan is like a tent without poles. It’s there but it’s not going to stand up to anything or be very useful. Last year I wanted to accomplish 2 things. I wanted to get healthier (by way of losing weight) and I wanted to quilt one quilt top a month of mine. At the end of the year, I have lost over 50 lbs and drastically improved my quality of life, and I got two quilts done, and those were gifts. I didn’t quilt anything of my own.

Looking closer at the situation over the last few weeks, I realized that the weight loss goal I approached with a detailed plan. I signed up for a lifestyle program and I had a coach and I had weekly check ins. There was a lot of information and each week I evaluated progress towards my goal and made adjustments to what I was doing to keep forward progress. Between January and June, I lost 45 pounds. I lost another 5 since the end of July. I am keeping myself on track by continuing the weekly evaluation and tracking my weight and keeping an eye on my lifestyle.

The quilting, never got past the point of “I want to quilt one top a month”. That’s a grand statement. I did not have a list of tops that needed quilting. I did not dig out anything in the fabric room. I did not make sure that I had backing fabric pieced and ready to load on the long arm. So while I thought the goal I set was reasonable (one quilt every 4 weeks off the long arm) NOTHING happened. I see now that this year, I need not only the resolution of quilting my own things but I need to put the framework in place to see that it happens. I need to tee up 3 or 4 quilts right away that have backing already to go so that I can load them on the long arm with little extra effort. once I get one or two done, I need to keep getting things ready in the pipe line so that I always have several things all prepped and ready to quilt. I also need to put time on my calendar dedicated to quilting with the long arm. Rather than relying on an open weekend here and there to miraculously turn into a quilting marathon, I need to schedule time regularly. I am confident based on how the weight loss last year went, that with a detailed plan and good preparation, this year I will make my long arm goal a reality too.

So what resolutions have been rumbling around in your head? Are they resolutions or are they actually plans? What steps can you take to get those tent poles out and get your tent setup for success?

All of the Trimmings

Martha
Quilting

I love words. This should come as no surprise. I like to talk for sure and I like to write. I like having a plethora of word choices, and I am fascinating how one phrase can have several meanings. Since this is the day before Christmas, I keep thinking about the phrase “all the trimmings” as in “turkey dinner with all the trimmings”.

I was working in my sewing room, trimming blocks to size, which is a wonderful opportunity to let your mind wander a little bit around different thoughts and when I looked down I had quite the pile of trimmings on the cutting table (see the cover photo for this blog post). I actually laughed out loud because suddenly I had a mental image of a beautiful table, all set for Christmas dinner, with a beautiful roasted turkey in the middle, and next to it a serving dish full of my fabric trimmings. I give you turkey dinner with all the trimmings. I’m sure this would not be what my guests would be expecting!

There are parallels, however. With the turkey dinner, the trimmings are all the other things that go along with it that make it awesome. My pile of fabric trimmings were the things that go along with my blocks that make them more awesome because they are squared up. Ok I’m reaching a bit, but it’s funny how in one case the trimmings add to and in the other case the trimmings take away, but in both cases the trimmings are a really good thing. They both represent a lot of effort on someone’s part to make something that was good, even better.

I hope your holiday week is filled with all the trimmings you want, either of the food variety or the fabric variety. I’m planning to have a lot of both during my holiday week!

The Magic of Routine and 15 Minutes a Day

Martha
Quilting

I have a pet theory, that everyone in life would do better with a routine and structure. I have worked with animals a lot in my life, and I find that animals always respond best when there is clear routine and structure. I know I do better myself, when I have a clearly defined routine and structure to my days. I do this at work with good success and I have started doing this in my morning routine at home; now looking towards my writing and quilting to see what opportunities lie there for improvement.

I set up this blog over a year ago. I had great plans of writing regularly. Then life happened. I rarely wrote anything, and that’s a shame. I process my thoughts when I write. I get my head together when I write. I get so much benefit from this, that it really should be part of my routine. The problem was, I didn’t have a writing routine, and I didn’t understand how to get there.

Also this year I have been learning about the power of Fifteen Minutes. Many of the things I want to do in my life take MUCH longer than 15 minutes to do, and the tasks are so big that I can’t see my way clear to getting any of them done. My mother used to use the phrase “not in a month of Sundays” and that’s how I feel. 30 weekend days in a row, wouldn’t be enough time to accomplish some of this stuff. I’m so overwhelmed by the size of the task, that I never start and I do know that you can’t finish if you don’t start. This year I started working 15 minutes at a time. I literally set a timer and convince myself to work for 15 minutes. When the timer goes off, I stop and go do something I want to do. At first I was very skeptical. What could 15 minutes do? At first, 15 minutes made things look worse because things were more unsettled, but I kept at it. After a week of 15 minute sessions, I started to see a glimmer of hope. After several weeks of 15 minute sessions I completed a major task in the kitchen. WOO HOO!!! On to the next big task, in fifteen minute chunks.

What I’m trying to do now, is make the 15 minutes part of my daily routine, so that I don’t miss a day, make it so that it’s a habit to do my 15 minutes on whatever the task is. I can also keep a list of the big things I want to accomplish so that when I finish something I don’t waste a week trying to figure out what my next project will be. Maximize the productivity and reinforce the habit.

I have an updated routine, and I have a new goal: a post a week on my blog, (mostly centered on quilting, hopefully encouraging and useful to other people but the main focus is to keep processing my thoughts and keep improving myself) and hitting my 15 minutes of task work. Go see what you can do with fifteen minutes!

Organization Helps

Martha
Life, Quilting

In one of my lectures I make a joke that Organization is a four letter word for me. I like the idea of organization. Ok I love the idea of organization. I see pictures on Instagram of neatly organized shelves, with everything in its place – even the little knickknacks that make the space attractive. There are whole magazines dedicated to getting your virtual scattered sheep into their corral. A whole industry if you take into account stores like The Container Store, who cater to ways to get yourself together.

This has been a life long challenge for me and I’m realizing it boils down to several key points, not just one thing.

First, you will have no help of getting or staying organized if you have too much stuff for your space. Dolly Parton once famously said (when the seam of her dress split) that you can’t expect to put 10 lbs of mud in a 5 lb sack. She’s right and it applies to my sewing room too. If I have more stuff than could literally be crammed on the shelves, it is always going to spill over, there will always be piles and there will never be the sense of calm organization in my space.

Second, it does not have to be fancy or expensive to get organized, but there needs to be a system. Using boxes or containers to get little items under control can go a long way. Putting like things all together in one place rather than scattering them all throughout the space will help keep it hanging together. I have one HUGE exception to this rule in my sewing space, and that is making project boxes for on going works in progress as self sufficient as possible. That means for a particular project, everything needed in that box – the fabric, the pattern, the thread, specialty rulers, and other tools like triangle papers etc required for that project. This gets me two benefits. One, when I am sewing at home, and I only have 30 minutes, I don’t spend 25 of those minutes looking for the correct ruler, I just pull the box and get busy. Second, when I go to sew on the road (retreat or small group), I know if I grab the project box, along with my sewing machine, I will have everything I need to work on that project. It streamlines packing for the retreat as well as ensuring when I get to the retreat I haven’t forgotten a critical tool or component of the project.

Third, and possibly the most important, organizing is like laundry. It is a myth that you can get organized and then you are DONE. Organization has to be a constant and ongoing activity. Every time something is touched, it has to be put back into its spot. Everything has a place and everything in its place is a Victorian proverb and how right it is. That is the heart of organization, so it requires a new habit of putting everything back in its place when I am done using it. Even with my project boxes, when I stop working on a project, EVERYTHING needs to go back in the same box so that the next time I reach for it, it is all there ready and waiting for me. If several projects use the same tools, I will look at investing in multiples of an item if they are not expensive, so that I can have one in every box. My time is very valuable and more than one retreat has gotten sidetracked because I left something critical at home. A couple of dollars for a duplicate tool is worth it to me if it can maximize the time I sew.

Putting all these ideas into practice is an ever evolving project. I still have way too much stuff. The other day I was looking for 9 yards of a blue fabric. I can’t find it. Still haven’t found it. NINE YARDS of fabric is not a trivial amount. I am not picking it up in a handful of other things. I have no clue where it is. That tells me I have a long way to go on my push to streamline my stash and make it so that I can find things. My project boxes are setup and are working pretty well, I just need to maintain them as I work on different things through the year. I will get there, and when I do you can bet there will be a couple of photos on Instagram of that beautiful moment when it all comes together. I will probably also take a couple of photos along the way so I can #honestcraftroom my post and show that it’s not perfect all the time.

Changing Tides and Changing Tastes

Martha
Quilting

I’ve been seriously quilting for 28 years now, almost 29. I’ve learned a lot about quilting and I’ve learned a lot about myself during this time and one of the most important things I’ve learned is that I am constantly changing and evolving. When I first started, my tastes focused on reproduction fabrics. The brightest thing in my stash was some 30’s fabric, otherwise, it was all about dark and dreary. Those fabrics still hold a place in my heart, they are warm and inviting to me, the visual embodiment of wrapping myself in a quilt and snuggling down in that warmth. The last five years, there has been a growing love of bright fabrics, especially fabrics from the Kaffe Fassett collective. Oh my lamb chops, the bright quilty goodness there! Those fabrics are like having the sun suddenly come out on a rainy day and just brighten up the whole world. They take warm and inviting to a whole new place!

At the same time, I’ve noticed that what I used to call scrappy has also been evolving to a new level. I’ve enjoyed following Bonnie Hunter for a while now, and she has a very scrappy eclectic style. She works from an impressive stash that has been a lot of years in the making, and as such, not all the fabrics are the most recent, stylish fabrics. What she does with a riot of color and print is, to my eye, downright amazing. There is a practical side to this style too – if you are short a bit of fabric for a quilt, adding to a very scrappy quilt is much easier than adding to a two color/two fabric quilt. Pretty much anything will go to get you over the finish line.

There’s one more change in my quilting life, that has been coming along the last several years and that’s the intricacy of the piecing. I used to want to focus on quilts that I could piece in a weekend. It was fun and easy and I got the satisfaction of finishing a quilt top very fast. Over time, however, this process takes a LOT of fabric over a year and results in a lot of unquilted tops. As I get closer to retirement, I joke that I need to make my fabric dollars stretch for as much entertainment I can get out of them. For this reason, I have been making much more intricate blocks with smaller pieces that take a lot more time to finish. I sew 10 times longer to finish a quilt top, but that just fine. I have always enjoyed the process a lot more than the finished product (the giant stack of UFOs is a testament to the fact that I’m a process person, not a product person).

I am finding there is a synergy between my enjoyment of very scrappy quilts and this enjoyment of the intricate piecing. I can put all of my stash into a project and since the pieces are cut very small, everything plays nicely. It becomes more about the contrast of light and dark than about the specific color used. One of my favorite projects right now is a quilt made up of 6″ pineapple blocks that have 10 rounds in each block. Tiny pieces, lots of contrast and everything but the kitchen sink thrown in. I need to find a fabric with sinks on it just so that I can say I included the kitchen sink… but I digress.

So I’m changing and I’m growing, I’m expanding my horizons to include things that I never would have looked at or attempted 10 years ago. I wonder where I will be 10 years from now – I know the possibilities are almost endless!

Spontaneity: Scheduling posts vs writing in the moment

Martha
Life, Technology

Two years ago I attended a conference for sewing professionals, which included multiple sessions on managing social media content. Talk about an eye opening event! I had no idea that content could be planned and managed ahead of time. Here all this time I thought people who had blogs were writing in the actual moment and posting at the time when their post was dated on their blog. I am sure that some do, but after that conference I started looking at my blog with new eyes.

I have kept a journal since high school, and my blog tended to follow more of a journal model. Writing has always been in the moment for me, based on things that are happening in my life at that time. I enjoy doing that, and I enjoy sharing my experiences in that manner, but when life gets busy, it gets really tricky trying to make sure I have the time set aside to write and post as things happen and on a regular basis. I would submit the dearth of posts on this blog as evidence of how well this was working…

I have decided to try a different approach this year and schedule posts ahead of time, planning what I am going to write about. I am planning to work about one month at a time. Posts will drop on Monday mornings at 07:00 central time. I am starting a running list of possible topics to use for my post. I can still be spontaneous – I can always change the schedule of a post or I can drop in an extra post in a week if something really grabs me. In this plan, I will write posts in a clump and schedule them to drop over the month.

I have always been a creature of habit and I know my life runs more smoothly when I plan ahead. If I want something to be a success, I map out a plan and a timeline and then work towards the completion. I learned how to do this very effectively at work, and I am now applying this process to things at home. I have gotten to the point where I meet my sewing deadlines this way, so it is just logical to apply this same approach to keeping my blog active and regularly updated. I would love to be one of those people who just wakes up and wonders where the world will take them today, but I am not. I need to be ok with that. I am just wired differently than those people. Somewhere along the line, I equated creativity with spontaneity: if I was not spontaneous, then I was not being creative. I’ve decided they are different things. I can be creative but go about it in a different manner. I can be open to changes along the way but still start out with a plan to get me to my deliverable.

So here’s to planned creativity. Map and agenda in hand, let’s see where it leads me.

Thanksgiving: a time to be grateful

Martha
Life

There are a lot of reasons to be reflective this time of year. The year is winding down; just a little over a month is left in 2018. The holidays are upon us and in the ever more frantic swirl of holiday activities, I find that as I age, I am also taking more time to stop and look at where I’ve been.

This year has gone by in a flash. I don’t know anybody who hasn’t mentioned that at least once this year. I look at my calendar with all the days carefully crossed out in the previous months and I wonder where it all went. I only remember a couple of days clearly, the rest are a blur of work commitments, sewing commitments and housework. Ok so maybe I exaggerate a tad, but I’m doing so to make a point. In order to be grateful, there needs to be an awareness of things qualifying for gratitude. If I can’t remember what all happened this year, how am I going to keep a grateful outlook on my life.

As humans, I think we have a tendency to remember the bad things more readily. Anyone else still easily call to mind those cringeworthy memories from 7th grade? Yup, me too. Like they just happened yesterday. I guess this goes back a long time in human history. I mean if you can’t quickly bring to mind the horror of a wild animal attacking your village, you will find it difficult to be wary of future encounters with that animal. I’m not saying my 7th grade classmates were animals, but in our modern society, the dangers we face are more likely from those around us and our daily situations, as opposed to the dangers that faced prehistoric man.

I’ve also noticed that a large part of my daily life is spent checking for things I’ve missed. At work, what have I missed on my action plan or my check list. At home, what have I missed getting into the laundry or chores around the house, or bills that need to be paid. Our lives are focused on what is missing and remembering what is missing.

It is not a natural thing to immediately pull to mind memories that are really good, or to look at the list of things we have in front of us, yet those are the seeds of gratitude. For a while I kept a gratitude journal. It’s an easy enough thing to do, once a day write down 3 things for which you are grateful. They can be anything – big or small. Some days I was grateful to wake up without a headache. Other days I was grateful for friends. Every day I made myself write down 3 things, so that in addition to all the negative lists I have to keep going, I was actively keeping a positive list. I need to go back to this practice. It is easy enough to fit in my bullet journal, and I find the act of writing with a pen and paper really makes my brain sit up and take notice of that information.

This holiday was based on the Pilgrims having food for the winter. I’m thankful for the roof over my head and food on my table. I’m thankful for my friends, be they local or electronic in nature. I’m thankful for fabric and yarn and color and a chance to smooth my soul with things that I create. I’m blessed a thousand times over, and I need to remind myself of that every day, not just once a year.

Tied to the past: a 1700 year old sock

Martha
Quilting, Technology

The other day while perusing interesting articles online, I ran across this photo from the British Museum of a 1700 year old sock from Egypt. Yes, 1700 year old knitted sock for a child. The left foot apparently, found in a trash midden if I understand the article correctly. This puts us smack in the Roman occupation of Egypt and they were knitting socks.

I have always felt that my sewing hobby tied me back to women through the ages. Before metal needles, women and men were using bone needles to join things into useful items. I knew knitting had been around for a long time but this was a 1700 year old sock. Someone had decided that a child needed a pair of socks and that the socks should be interesting enough to have different colored stripes in them. They took the time to knit a left sock so presumably there is a right sock somewhere in the universe. On a side note, I think this destroys the myth that dryers eat socks, because they didn’t have dryers 1700 years ago, yet only the left sock was found in the trash pile, making me think that it was tossed when they could no longer find the right sock. Let that sink in for a minute. The chase for the missing sock has been going on a lot longer than any of us realized.

Anyway, back to my original thread (yes, pun intended). I enjoy my needlework hobbies very much. They let me create things that are both beautiful and useful at the same time, but they also give me a very tangible tie back to previous generations of women, using their needles (both sewing and knitting) to bring beauty to every day items. That thread just goes back farther than I realized in knitting.

Setting goals for myself. Again

Martha
Life

I have had a blog for a while now. It gives me an interesting snapshot into my life. I have noticed two very big patterns. First, I have goals that never get realized and second, I always come back to this blog in November.

On the first point: goals. Goals are interesting. Just having a goal doesn’t make anything happen. You can own a car, but you won’t go on a single road trip if you don’t make some plans, get in that car and turn it on. My blog has been like my car sitting in my garage. It’s there but it’s not going anywhere. Without me putting some planning and effort into this, it will be more of a dream than a goal and nothing will ever come of it.

On the second point: November. I know this is when fall starts to show its face in Texas. Sometimes we get lucky and get touches of fall in October but November is when it really settles into fall here, and I get re-energized again for my quilting and my knitting. Part of that rejuvenation is my desire to write and communicate about what I’m working on as well. So every year around this time, I start to ramp up again both in my studio and at my keyboard.

I have decided that this year is going to be different. I have to be the reason that it is different. I have to take my dream of an active, regular blog, and turn it into a goal that has a plan. I have been learning a lot about blogs the last year – especially how I can write content ahead of time and schedule it to be posted. This should make my blog much more flexible in terms of fitting into my schedule, but without a plan, this hasn’t happened. So I’m going to try something new this November. I have laid out a plan for blog posts for the next two months. One post a week – I don’t want to get so overzealous here that I push myself to the point where it’s not sustainable. I have come up with a post topic for each week. There’s 9 of them! (December has 5 Monday’s so there’s a “bonus” post in December). If this goes well then I will continue the plan and continue to post and see if this coming year will be any different.

The one thing I do know, is that if I don’t make a plan and take action, I will arrive at November 2019 writing yet another “I really want to write this blog” post and that’s not in my plan.

Me and Ado Annie: The Lure of New Projects

Martha
Quilting

Lately I’ve been hearing a tune in my head from Oklahoma!* “I’m just a girl who can’t say no, I’m in a terrible fix. I always say “come on let’s go”, just when I oughta say nix!”. Ado Annie was singing about the fellas, but oh boy this describes me looking at new projects to a T. So many new things. The Quilt Asylum has a Kaffe Fasset Hexy Diamond project!! Bonnie Hunter is gearing up for her next mystery and I love the color theme!! So much new stuff!! I can’t say no and I’m in a terrible fix!!

Back around 2000 or so, I read an article that talked about people being either “project” oriented or “process” oriented and it really resonated with me. I could look at the quilters and sewers in my life and see the distinction clearly.

Project people tend to work on one thing at a time. They work it to completion before starting the next one. In a quilter, that would translate to one quilt at a time. They might have several things going, but that would be because there was one machine piecing project and one hand piecing project going on. The completion of the project is what keeps their focus and drives their structure. My mother was a project person in her sewing. She would finish what she was working on before starting the next project.

Process people are focused more on the doing than the finishing. They find joy in the activity itself, rather than the completed project. Process people tend to have a lot of things in work. If the process is very enjoyable, the quilt gets finish. If the process is not enjoyable, the quilt will probably remain a UFO in a box for the rest of time. The doing is what matters.

I am a process person. Oh how this clicked with me. I like the doing. I like trying new things. I’m very distracted by shiny objects. I have so many UFOs I’m afraid to count them. Over the last 17 years, I have taught myself how to focus and actually finish things. I’m nowhere near being a project person, but I can imitate one in order to meet a deadline or complete a gift. I’m getting better about looking at something to see if I think I will like it enough to see it through. I will never be a person who works on one quilt at a time, but I am getting better about finishing the things I am working on, even if it is done in a rather disjointed manner.

So I see these two new projects, and I know I will enjoy the process of working on them, and I am energized by something new and shiny, So I signed up for the EPP hexy Kaffe with the Quilt Asylum. In preparation, I have purchased the supplies and ACTUALLY COMPLETED a Mega Dream Bag to carry the in work project with me. This is huge. When I went back to the shop with the finished bag in less than a week, I think everybody was surprised, me included. I’ve gotten half of the fabric for the Bonnie Hunter mystery out of my stash, and purchased only half of the fabric. I will make the smaller size, so I have a more reasonable shot of keeping up and finishing. If I really like it, I can always make more pieces and make the larger size.

So here I am. Humming that little tune, looking at my lovely project bag, waiting for the mail man to bring the first installment of the paper piecing project so I can get going. Because I really need two new projects in my life right now. I do. The joy it brings is worth it, and I will finish them eventually.

* Rogers and Hammerstein 1943

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