• Cut Down on Cooking – No, I’m not talking about skipping meals or getting expensive takeout. Try making twice as much food as you normally would for one or two meals per week. Then you’ll have an entire meal ready to go for later in the week! No food prep, just heat and eat. Hours saved.
• Go on a Social Media Diet – We all think we have “no time”, but have you ever really taken a look at how much time you waste online, especially on social media? One quick peek and before you know it, you are down the rabbit hole. Same thing with email. When I was a software manager in a previous life, I often advised my harried and overworked teams that they could get more of their day back by only checking their emails first thing on the morning and before they left for the day. This significantly cut down on the running around all day trying to answer every little thing. Note that if it’s really important, they will call you.
• Judicious Punting – When I was a freshman at MIT, the first week I was on campus I was advised by an upper classman that the key to survival at The Institute was “judicious punting”. Not “punting” like on the Thames, “punting” as in football: just kick it away. Decide what is really important, and just don’t do the rest. Do you REALLY need to make something homemade for the bake sale or could you just buy something? Do you REALLY need to answer that work email after hours that was CC’d to forty people? Nothing copied to a huge recipient list is ever legitimately urgent.
With a bit of practice and a little bit of prudence, you can cut your to-do list down to what’s really necessary. And THAT leaves more time for quilting!
Finish What You Started
Legendary America actress Katharine Hepburn once said,
“It’s not what you start in life, it’s what you finish.”
She must not have been a quilter. We quilters have a way of starting a new project before one or more old ones are even finished. What is the motivation behind this contradictory behavior? Let’s take a look:
- Burnout – Many times I’ll take a break from a large, complex project to basically rest and recharge. An easier project where you can quickly get a sense of accomplishment might be just the ticket to renew your vigor in wrestling the more difficult project to the ground.
- Deadline – You know your niece Suzie’s baby shower that is coming up next Saturday? Well, if you don’t want to show up empty handed, you are going to have to take a break from your epic queen-sized quilt that matches your new bedroom paint in favor of some duckies and bunnies.
- I Just Went in to Get Thread – It’s happened to all of us. We just made a quick stop to the quilt shop to “get thread” and we spied new fabric so beautiful we could not live without it. Before we knew it, we spent $200 and started a new quilt that same day. Whoops.
- What Was I Thinking? – Sometimes, you have a project that you grow to hate so much, you’d rather burn it than spend one more minute working on it. Occasionally, it turns out to be too difficult but more often than not, it turns out to be just too ugly. Sure, that tropical teal background and pink hibiscus floral print looked great in the fabric shop, but now…. not so much. I wouldn’t blame you for starting something new and just quietly donating this fabric.
- I Never Wanted to Make This in the First Place – We are looking at you, T-Shirt quilts everywhere. Sometimes, we commit to a project for a friend or a family member that we never would have made ourselves if given our own freewill, but we are guilted into it “because [you] can quilt!”. I have one of these myself. I promised to finish a quilt for a friend who took a quilting class back in the 80’s but never finished her quilt. In my defense, it’s only been on my sewing table for a few months. I think a few more won’t hurt.
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Cooking? I’d Rather Be Quilting
I am not a huge fan of cooking. All that chopping, hovering over a saucepan for hours, sauteing and whatnot. Let’s just say the only “deglazing” I’ve ever done is picking the toppings off a donut. Given the same amount of time, I’d rather be quilting than cooking. Here are the top 5 reasons that quilting, in my opinion, is vastly superior to cooking:
- Didn’t I just do this last night? Cooking dinner night after night is such a tedious chore, not to mention lunches and breakfasts! Quilting, on the other hand, I could do it morning, noon and night… plus a few “snacks” thrown in between.
- Leftovers. You know those “still perfectly usable also I’m saving them” scraps left over from your last quilt? They are not going to turn into a spoiled, quivering, moldy mess if you leave them on the shelf for a couple of years. Try doing that with what’s left of last night’s delicious bean casserole.
- Eat ramen. Make quilts. Cooking, even for a small family of four, costs hundreds of dollars per week. Imagine how many quilts you could make with that same amount of money!
- So many widgets. Unless you are one of those people living in a van, cooking uses a zillion tools which take up an entire dedicated room – the kitchen – to store. Quilting, on the other hand, only necessitates a sewing machine, a few pins & needles and some scissors. If you want to get fancy, thrown in a rotary cutter and a mat. That’s it and you are good to go. Try subsisting with such as small number of kitchen widgets and you’ll ending up steaming spaghetti in a hub cap.
- Blink and it’s gone. You know that incredible puff pastry encased salmon you made last night? Well, it’s gone now. That equally impressive quilt with the scalloped edges that I made ten years ago? I still have it.
So tonight, skip the grocery store and pop by the quilt shop instead. You will be glad you did.
Only FOUR Yards?
This was the very first By the Yard® ever published way back in January of 2018. Like many episodes of By the Yard, it was pretty much ripped from the headlines of Quilt Girl and Train Guy’s lives. Quilt Girl was puzzled by Train Guy’s insistence that she buy and entire bolt of fabric, when she only really “needed” a few yards. She immediately suspected treachery. This incident spawned the By the Yard® comic strip where two crafty people collude in all kinds of hobbies, mainly quilting and model railroading… but they also enjoy knitting & crochet and covering the yard with old junk tractors, respectively.
A Proposed Difficulty Level Scale for Quilting Patterns
- Just Chillin’ & Quiltin’ – Made up of entirely 2 ½” strips or anything that contains all right angles. You can make a delightful quilt entirely from 2 ½” strips, such as the popular Jelly Roll Run and my personal favorite, the Log Cabin – which looks really complicated but it is really just a bunch of strips. There are many quilt patterns touted as “fat quarter friendly” such as the perennial favorite Yellow Brick Road. They are made from fat quarters chopped into various smaller squares and rectangles. With any of these patterns, you could legitimately make an entire quilt top in single day.
- Officially a Quilter – Contains Half Square Triangles (HST). Once you’ve got the hang of those strips and squares, time to move on to the good ol’ HST. From the easy and fun Pinwheel block to the more complicated Broken Dishes, you can really show off your quilting chops with how well you line up those points!
- Ain’t No Geometry Got This Covered – Anything that utilizes Foundation Paper Piecing (FPP). With FPP you can make beautiful flowers like the Bird of Paradise or your favorite puppy like a cute little pug. FPP is for when you can no longer make the design with rectangles and triangles. And you thought you hated geometry in high school!
- Only Because I Love You – Dresden Plates, Double Wedding Ring and the like. Sure, these designs are quaint and the very epitome of quilt-y charm, but no mere mortal would even attempt them unless they were for a very special, “once in a lifetime gift”. My mother didn’t want any more grandchildren after I asked her to make a Dresden Plate baby quilt for my first.
- Even Grandma Couldn’t Finish This – English Paper Piecing and anything appliqué. How many unfinished Grandma’s Flower Garden (GFG) quilts have you seen available for sale online, with the seemingly innocent invitation for you to “finish an heirloom”? Do you know why they are unfinished? Because assembling all of those tiny, hand sewn hexagons is unmitigated torture. As for appliqué, I still have a partially completed appliquéd Christmas stocking my grandmother started for me before Luke Skywalker took on his first storm trooper.
Armed with this handy guide, you are now ready to head out to the quilt shop to pick out a pattern for your next quilt!
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Clutter vs. Creativity
- Design Wall – Quilters use design walls to lay out quilt blocks during the design process. But when you are not using it for that, you can use a design wall as an “inspiration” board. Pin fabrics you like to it to see how well they go with others. Pin up printouts of inspirational objects and projects you find online. Many times, it’s more motivating to see a photograph of something where you can sit back and take it in from a distance rather than staring at it closely on the computer screen.
- Organized Supplies – I find it very helpful to have my supplies nearby where I can see them but not have them right under my nose. I keep my fabric on bookcases across from my desk so I can “browse” through it, just like a library! I keep my supplies such as buttons, buckles and a myriad of other notions in clear plastic bins on a nearby shelving unit. This way its easy to see what I have and easy to come up with ideas.
- Clean Up Fridays – When I worked in Corporate America as an Engineering Manager for a software company, I had a little rule for myself. Friday afternoons I always cleanup up my desk. This was for two reasons:
- By 3pm on Friday I was usually so fried I wasn’t good for doing any real work, so cleaning up was at least something productive I could do
- More importantly, this ensured my desk would be ready to function first thing on Monday when there was usually some crisis happening first thing in the morning
Try cleaning up your creative space on Friday afternoon. Put away patterns, hang up rulers and rotary cutters, sweep up cookie crumbs, toss fabric scraps into a bin and fold up the bigger pieces. Even if you are in the middle of a project, this once weekly re-set will keep your workspace from getting out of control and keep the creativity flowing.
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