Seven days of sewing

Anyone who knows me will tell you in great length how I’m not the best at organising things… as my old papa would say, “You can’t organise a shindig in a brewery!” (well he wouldn’t have said shindig but I thought I’d stick with the PC version). And as as much as I know it drives those around me mad, and there are days when I wish I could be a bit more organised, with less running around headless and a bit more planning, I do secretly like the laid-back approach. Having a slightly more laissez faire approach to life means that I never know where an adventure or activity is going to end up, where I’ll end up going or what a project will end up turning into. We all spend so much time rushing around to get to our goals that I think we sometimes miss out on the middle bit. For me, the enjoying part about sewing isn’t necessarily the finished item, although I do like sparkly new things, but it’s more about the learning of new skills, mastering new patterns and being able to accomplish a new challenge.

That being said, I appreciate that sometimes we need to just knuckle down and make ourselves get on with things. And I also (reluctantly) concur that at these times, a bit of organisation is perhaps the most effective approach. Everyone has different ways of giving themselves a final push but for me, this normally involves setting myself a deadline. Then I can leave everything till seconds before but still feel the much needed pressure to get it finished. Does anyone else find they need these? Sometimes the deadline might be a party or event, other times just wanting to wear a dress for a day-out with friends.

That’s why this week I’ve decided to start setting myself deadlines to work my way through the ever growing pile of work in progress projects (WIPs) completed. Many of these are clothes I’ve made as testers of patterns or clothes that I planned to upcycle but often get stuck on the final stages.

Here are a few examples:

Some of these are items that I want to finish to wear whilst others, like the grey Anna dress in the middle of the photo above, have been made as pattern testers that I want to finish to help me with future makes.

So here’s my plan… for the next week I will complete one project a day

Given the various stages of completion, some of these items will (hopefully) take no more than an hour, whilst others may need a bit more work. When I’ve finished each item then you lucky readers will be able to read a freshly written blog post. So that’s 7 days of sewing and 7 days of blogging.

Do-able? I sure hope so! Wish me luck 🙂