Tag: goals

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More on Those Lovely New Threads

I am continuing to have trouble keeping up with my planned daily and weekly projects, mostly because I keep allowing myself to goof off with other things and run off schedule.  Well, not everything that I get distracted with could be considered goofing off, I have many time consuming interests.  I’m simply ignoring my own goals for scheduling and time management.  I have been working on my art and craft… here are some of the sides for a series of pink and brown mini boxes:

These box sides are commercial print fabrics that I stamped over with acrylic paint, using rubber stamps and antique wallpaper stamps.

If you’re attempting a daily creative commitment, don’t overlook the obvious: start small.  Take ten or fifteen minutes a day at first.  When you can keep that up without skipping for a couple of weeks, add five more minutes.  I recently embarked on a daily stitch project that takes no more than fifteen minutes daily.  I am creating a series of postcards to document each color in the House of Embroidery line of perle cotton.  Each group of three colors stitched out in chain stitches, three color groups per card.  I am nine days into the effort:

This is a nice way to warm up into my creative groove, and when I finish the project, I will continue to do three lines of stitching each day on some crazy quilt squares that I assembled a few years ago.  One thing is certain, when I complete the House of Embroidery samples, I will be great at the chain stitch, not to mention really tired of it!

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Time Flown Away

Where is 2019 going?  It is April 2, and I am looking at my list of goals and looking for evidence of progress.  I am not finding it.  Sadly, I have missed all of my planned entry deadlines, but I still intend on finishing the collages that I started or planned… someday.

I have written about this before, but I will keep bringing it up, being creative is not easy.  I struggle to balance creative time with everything else in my life, and the creative time itself does not always go well.  Most of the fabric collages that I make go through an incredibly ugly stage that I have to fight through to keep working on them, and eventually, they usually work out in the end.  When I reach that halfway point, it is a huge challenge for me to keep going, and I often have to put the piece aside for a while.  This leads to missed goals and deadlines, but I am not letting it discourage me from learning more and trying to continue in my creative journey.

While I am grumbling about my lack of progress this year, I must address my plan to create an 8 x 10″ art quilt each week for the year.  No, that project is not going as planned.   I have managed to finish this little riot of texture:

Pink and Brown Something

I am going to revamp this project slightly.  In hopes of helping myself with this goal, I am going to attempt to give myself more direction and go back to the projects that I have flagged in my collection of Quilting Arts magazine, and use those as a means to create the 8 x 10s and reach two goals at once – the regular production of small pieces and trying all those techniques that piqued my creative mind.  I’m off to figure out the first project.  I think I will start with the earliest issue.