Popping In…

January 20, 2022Leave a comment

…to let you know that I am still here and I haven’t abandoned blogging. My back went out last week, and then there was another thing that I don’t want to talk about on the internet, and then I went to the doctor yesterday to talk about the thing I don’t want to talk about, and he was like, “Hey, you didn’t get your flu shot this year, would you like to do that now?”

And I was like, “Yeah, sure, that’s probably wise.”

And then he said, “Do you need a COVID booster, too?”

And I was all wide-eyed with disbelief and said, “You have those?! I haven’t been able to schedule one online.”

“Yeah, we’ve got them, you want one?”

“Um, YES.”

So now, on the day that I thought I’d finally get back to doing some sewing or knitting after way too many days of not sewing or knitting, I’m nursing a very sore left deltoid and feeling slightly sick and feverish as my body figures out how to deal with the injected germs. Which is the absolutely best way to spend today, but it infringes on my crafty goals and I feel a little panicked that I’m totally going to miss the mark on a few of them, but then I remind myself that they’re just benchmarks in the air that I thought would be nice to achieve and nothing bad will actually happen if I don’t finish them on time, and geez, calm down.

I might try knitting a little today, just to try to work some of the soreness out of my shoulder, but I might not because it’s boring knitting that I’m really bored of and geez, I need a new knitting project. So many people are making awesome sweaters right now and I want to be like them. But noooooo, I’ve decided to be responsible and stuff and finish UFOs and dumb stuff like that. (It is so hard to keep that commitment when you feel like crap and decide to do a little online window shopping because you’re too worn out to really do anything else.)

(I may or may not have fallen down a retail therapy rabbit hole at a certain online fabric store…the anticipation of receiving a package in the mail is pretty much the only thing that has brought joy into my life this past week. #selfcare)

Alright, head on off to your lives. I’ll just be here, doing that greasy sick sweating thing and stalking people’s crafting-in-progress photos on Instagram. Leave a comment if you’ve got some good in-progress photos for me to look at. Tell me how to find them. I beg you.

3 Ideas for More Organized Quilting in the New Year

December 30, 2021December 29, 20211 Comment

I have a nifty little project rotation schedule in my mind that I try to use to work through old projects and not let the scrap bins get out of hand, and it’s just not working. I sat down to figure out what was going wrong, and just decided that I needed to make it work alongside what I want to do, instead of it being the main operating system of my craft room. As I’m sure you’re aware, every new year and month brings up new potential projects that you need to decide if you’re going to pursue or not. New babies, weddings, graduations, a crazy pattern that comes out that NEEDS to be made ASAP because it’s amazing, a new dress because of fifty thousand reasons…there’s just a lot that you can’t plan for, and it wreaks havoc on a system designed to corral the creative madness.

So…Idea #1: Each month will have its “must makes” that I will work on until they’re done, and then the remainder of the month will revert back to my UFO/Project Rotation schedule and I’ll make headway on the projects collecting cobwebs until the month ends. It’s simple, far too simple, but until I wrote it out I couldn’t see it as my solution.

I came up with this idea in October and finetuned and planned it out, but it felt like something was missing, and I finally realized what it was whilst lounging in my bed during the Great December Sickness of 2021–I’m not making enough scrap quilts. At all. The scrap bins no longer close, and I don’t have time for scrap quilts even though I won’t be able to use my craft room by the end of the year if they keep multiplying like they have been, completely unchecked. And then I randomly remembered that I came up with a weird little system for THIS EXACT PROBLEM back in 2019: Scrappy Thursdays.

Scrappy Thursdays were devoted to working on scrap projects and block of the months. It didn’t matter what I was working on outside of Scrappy Thursdays, I’d set it aside and work mostly from the scrap bins for that one day every week. I have four separate storage bins that held the fabric and patterns for four separate projects, and each week had its Project #1, #2, #3, or #4. It was still in experiment form when it dissolved out of my life, but it was a rather successful experiment while it was in progress! I just got really busy with the Blank Quilting ambassador thing and had no extra time for play, which was fine because I was having a lot of fun with all the yummy Blank fabric. Ah, memories…

Idea #2: I’m going to reinstate Scrappy Thursdays in 2021. I’m really looking forward to it. My chaos-loving brain really enjoys the break from my serious “get ‘er done” projects that I work on for the majority of the week, and my “obsessed with productivity” brain loves that I’m making progress on so many different things.

Beautiful Mammoth Flannels being cut for one of next year’s Christmas quilts!

I had another good idea during the Great December Sickness of 2021, which is my Idea #3: Use my leaders and enders for greater Christmas productivity. As in, cut the fabric for the Christmas quilts I want to make for Christmas next year NOW, and use them as my leaders and enders throughout the next year. When it comes time to work on said Christmas quilts at a later date, I’ll already have a ton of the piecing done. I’ve even set up an annual reminder that the week after Christmas is for cutting next year’s leaders and enders!

I’ve got the fabric for two of next year’s Christmas quilts prewashed and in the process of being cut. I have at least one more, if not two more, Christmas quilts I want to make this upcoming year, but no idea what pattern and/or fabric I’m going to use just yet, so obviously can’t precut anything for those quilts.

I’m excited for this extra bit of organization to help things run smoothly in the craft room! Do you have any good tips or tricks for quilty organization? I’d love to hear them! Happy New Year!

My “New & Improved” Plan for Battling UFOs and Scraps

January 1, 2018January 1, 20185 Comments

Last year I came up with a plan that would allow me to work through more UFOs, whittle down the overflowing scrap baskets in my craft room, and allow me to work, guilt-free, on some new projects. In the past, I always start the new year with grandiose plans to blast through all of my UFOs, and the white-knuckle willpower would only last about six weeks because the textile world is constantly releasing new fabric, yarn, and pattern collections. So, I came up with this project rotation:

The Original Project Schedule

And it worked really well for about six months until I discovered a glitch with my system–I never chose fabric from my stash when it came around to make a “new” project, choosing instead to use new fabric from a new collection that excited me. The stash was starting to grow faster than normal, and I had this weird reluctance to cut into any of it because it was dear to me. You don’t buy fabric or yarn with no plan unless you’re really in love, which makes it hard to use said fabric or yarn. But, as a wise homeschooling parent told me about art lessons with my kids, “Art supplies is meant to be consumed, not conserved.” The same is true of fabric and yarn. USE THEM.

Plus, I’ve been noticing a lot of my contemporaries breaking into the pattern market, and they are killin’ it, which made me start wondering if perhaps I should start at least trying to write my own patterns for my use? I know how patterns work by this point in my creative “career,” and the challenge involved excited me as well.

And then we did some charity blocks in quilt guild and it just made me feel good to make those.

So my project rotation schedule needed a few tweaks:

And it’s been working WONDERFULLY. I love the challenge of coming up with my own patterns, and I really love the idea of #everytenthproject being a service project–it’s like paying tithing on my creative abilities, for which I am so grateful to possess.

I kept a spreadsheet detailing my projects for last year, and it really helped me with my stash management and with branching out of my comfort zone:

(It also alerted me to the fact that I tend to only knit with new yarn, which led to the decision to stop stashing yarn completely…because once it goes into the stash, chances are high that I’ll not be interested in using it EVER after that. Interesting.)

It worked extremely well until I started sewing again for Fat Quarter Shop–by the very nature of those projects, they are always “new” fabric projects, which very quickly started eating up the next available “new” slots in my plan. I’ll have to watch out for that this year, and possibly come up with a plan to accommodate those projects–the turnaround time on them is tight, so it’s not possible to actually have a “plan” to include those projects into my schedule. I might leave them out of the “rotation” altogether, actually, and just enjoy the ride when I’m asked to ride along…because, duh.

Oh, another important note: Babies and weddings don’t have to follow the schedule because they are also impossible to plan around. I just plug them into the spreadsheet where they belong and then work around them as necessary because I LOVE BABIES AND WEDDINGS. I’m a gift-crafter at my core.

What I find, though, is that this schedule greatly reduces the chances of acquiring more UFOs. I’m horrendously distracted by the new-and-shiny, but when I’d start thinking about cutting for or casting on a new project, I’d consult my spreadsheet and see if it could fit into the next category up for grabs. If it didn’t, I’d tentatively schedule it; but more often than not, when I came up to its turn in the rotation, my excitement for the new pattern would have waned and I could move on to something that had been on my bucket list and would truly bring me pleasure. I started 2017 with thirty-eight UFOs, finished (or donated or frogged) nine UFOs, and am taking in two new UFOs–that means I now have thirty-one UFOs, which is totally an improvement! I have never ended a year with less UFOs than I had at the beginning of it. Feels good.

And now it’s onwards to a productive 2018! Happy New Year, and may you find a little time each day to move forward on your projects.

And if you’re looking for an idea for a service project, maybe you want to consider joining Fat Quarter Shop’s Clementine Quilt Along? I’ve committed to it, and it would be lots of fun to have some more friends quilting along, too!

You can find more information about the Quilt Along by clicking here to visit the Fat Quarter Shop Blog. Proceeds from this quilt along will benefit St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital.