thinky thoughts

I have a short attention span when it comes to projects. Maybe you have noticed this.

In the past week, I have worked on four different sewing or knitting things. Not because any of them are frustrating or upsetting, but because there’s only so much time I can spend working on something before my brain goes “next!” I finished up a pair of purple hand warmers, got another inch done on the shawl, finalized and sewed together my peony dress, and just last night started another pair of hand warmers that in my head are going with the new dress.

For a while, I used to really fight this urge to have dozens of projects going at a time. I still struggle with it, and it’s very easy to get overwhelmed and buried under lots of half-finished projects that I have no desire to work on. But I think in the long run, it is a better approach to crafting for me.

I’ve tried to be someone who works on only one or maaaaaybe two projects, and keeps with it until they are done. What inevitably happens, though, is that I mess up, or get bored, or see something shiny, and all my project mojo goes out the window. The aforementioned project languishes, and because I’m trying to be good and not start anything else, I just stop crafting. Which makes me not want to craft because I get out of the groove and everything will be difficult when I come back, and uhgggg who wants a hobby that frustrates them? So I end up internetting for hours at a time and not doing anything productive. By the time I get back around to working on The Project, I am grumpy with it and don’t take my time and it ends up being rushed and less-than.

So instead, I give reign to my start-isis, and work on what I want, when I want. It means I may have upwards of ten or fifteen things on the needles/hooks/in the machine at a time, but I am rarely bored or unproductive with my hobbies. If something frustrates me, I can put it down for a while and work on something that is less aggravating. I don’t feel as though stopping a project means “quitting” my hobby, as it kind of used to before. It means that for right now, that project can chill until I’m in a better mood to work on it.

My hobby shouldn’t bore me, or make me angry. It doesn’t make sense to keep slogging through something, cursing it every stitch of the way, only to end up with a crappy finished product. All for what? So that I can say I worked on this and only this for the past X number of months?

Another subset of this is that working on multiple things doesn’t actually take me that much longer to finish. The only time it really effects my output is in my sewing. If I work exclusively on a dress or something, I can get it done in about two or three evenings of dedicated sewing. These garments are always poorly fitted and sewn, though, because about halfway through night one I get frustrated with it and ram everything through the machine in an effort to just Get It Over With. The extra week or two it takes to sew a properly fitted and sewn dress is worth it to me.

All of this is basically a preface to this statement: my new Peony dress is nearly complete, but I had to stop along the way and do some other stuff. It needs the neckline facing, a zipper, and some hems yet.