Nothing says “motivation” like a baby shower the next day and you haven’t even started the quilt yet. We quilters pull this stunt all the time: always waiting until the last minute to start a project, ensuring there will be one or more all-nighters involved. And you thought you were done with those when you got out of college! What is wrong with us? Why do we always wait until the very last minute to start a special project, knowing full well it will be a nail-biter all the way over the finish line? I have a theory.
Quilters are inherently creative people. For any given project, we may have dozens of ideas or interpretations swirling around in our brains, WHIMs as we quilters like to affectionately call them (Works Hidden in Mind). To that, add our notoriously humungous fabrics stashes with an equally large number of color choices and the possibilities become endless! At some point, we have to commit to something because that baby shower is now just days away! However, once we start, that cuts off the potential of all the other projects we could make and it’s just so hard to decide which idea would be “best”. Add to that the trepidation of cutting into the “perfect fabric” from which there is no return and we may very well end up paralyzed with indecision.
I think the solution to this quilting conundrum is really pretty simple: accept that any number of possible project designs would all be equally wonderful. There is no one single “best” idea. Once we can accept this notion, then it becomes so much easier to select a path and just start cutting fabric. Next time you can’t get started on a project because there are just too many possibilities, trust in knowing they all would have been awesome so just pick one and start sewing!