My Pinterest Adventure 2018 – change of plans!

My Pinterest Adventure 2018

WE ALL DO IT: we save pins for everything from cooking to cleaning to painting to sewing to woodworking to health and so on.  And I’d be surprised if I’m the only one with a “miscellaneous” board just to hold all the pins that don’t quite fit on any of my other specific boards!  We organize our pins into categories to keep them where we hope we will find them later on and now Pinterest even offers the option of having subcategories under each board so we can be super anal about where we put all the wonderful ideas we find, either deliberately or randomly, while spending time on the internet.  It’s a great way to quickly save inspiring things we don’t want to forget about, much like the now nearly ancient practicing of “bookmarking” web sites until our lists were so long we couldn’t find anything anyway and it became faster just to “google it”.

Some of us clean off our boards once in a while, going back to review what we’ve saved and ditching the ideas that are either no longer appealing or, in our current mindset, more appropriately filed under THAT’S NEVER GOING TO HAPPEN trash.

THE PLAN

Yesterday, after realizing how often I peruse my quilting board – subdivided of course into various specific project ideas – and imagine how lovely it would be to stitch out the awesome designs I’ve saved for “future” need – I was inspired to come up with a plan for myself.  I actually do WANT to try all the ideas I’ve saved there.  That’s why we save these things, right? 😉

I don’t buy into the New Year’s resolution thing.  I don’t find myself being successful at them for long periods of time and they set me up for disappointment in myself for not having achieved what I set out to do.  For some, they might work very well, but I find I’m better off acting on inspiration when it hits me, no matter what the date is, and trying to come up with a plan that excites me and doesn’t have me beating myself up at the end of it just because one part didn’t turn out.

So it might be the beginning of January, and this post and adventure might involve a plan to do something differently in order to achieve a goal of learning and stretching my brain and my skills further, and I might have put the year at the end of the title, but it is NOT a resolution! LOL

I want to stitch out a design from one of my free motion quilting pins each day so that I’m not just admiring them, but I’m actually USING them and will then continue to use them.  I’m not expecting that in the reality of life I’ll never miss a day.  I’m also not expecting myself to choose an intensely complicated one every day.  What I get done will depend on the day and my schedule, but I’ll be appreciating success each time I do it WITHOUT berating myself for any time that I don’t get it done.

I figure this will mean that I get through a whole bunch of my saved ideas this year and that’s my goal.  No specific numbers, no specific levels of difficulty (although most of my pins are for really cool and fancy stitching!) just productivity.  Let’s face it, I love free motion quilting and doing it every day is already pretty much a given, but working on new designs – especially those that appear to be intimidating –  isn’t always on the agenda when I’m comfortably quilting my current faves.

I’m not going to put limits on whether or not I’m still allowed to pin new ideas, even if I continue to save them at a higher rate than I use them.  I just want to USE them.  By the time I’ve done this even for just a few days in a row, I expect that my “go to” design list will begin to grow and grow and that’s what I’m aiming for because I want progress.  Not perfection, progress.

And because I tend to be anal about organization and list making and … well you get the idea … I decided to blog about this adventure not only for my sake, but thinking that perhaps others might find inspiration to do something like this for themselves as well.  I want to have a place to share what I’m doing and to give others a chance to jump on board and make the Pinterest Adventure their own, according to whatever will work for them.

SETTING UP FOR SUCCESS

There’s no competition here; we all like different things and we have varying skills.  There’s only one rule which is, of course, completely unenforceable but I feel the need to mention it anyway: no negative self-talk.  Whatever your favourite pinned ideas are – cooking, cleaning, woodworking, fitness, home decor, painting, crafting etc. – let’s share and encourage each other to use ideas we’ve already been inspired by and put them into action, whether it’s daily, weekly, or monthly.  And yes, feel free to share the Pinterest fails too!  Because even if what we try doesn’t turn out as we hoped, we still make progress by DOING it and not just looking at it 🙂

I’ll be posting photos of my chosen stitching design practice pieces here on my blog and I invite anyone who wishes to join in to share your own comments, ideas, and even photos in the comment section of my posts.  Please also feel free to share my Pinterest adventure idea and posts with others you think might be interested.  I’m sure there are already groups for this kind of thing – in fact I just found a whole web site called the Pinterest Project! – but I’m not much of a “joiner” so maybe there are others out there like me who just enjoy being part of something that inspires them along the way to doing things they want to do anyway.  When it comes to inspiration, there’s always room for more.

If you want to stick with me to see where this whole thing leads, remember to follow this blog using the option on the right side bar!

**IF YOU DON’T USE PINTEREST you can take this project over to your cookbook shelf, your stack of craft books and magazines, your internet bookmarks/favourites or any other “filing” system you have for ideas you love to save.

DAY ONE

Here is my first achievement:  I’ve been looking at these wide open spirals with dense quilting around them for so long and yesterday when I saw them again, I decided it was time to get moving, so I got my sketchbook out, figured out my stitching path, put some scrap fabric together, marked out my main curved line and I did it! I can’t believe how this little bit of action made me feel so successful.  Yes, there are a few things I will change when it’s an actual quilt, and that’s what practice is all about, but after stitching it out I feel very confident in adding this to my list of favourite design options!

Welcome to Day 2 of my Pinterest Adventure! I learned not only to stitch out a new background filler, but also that trying to save time doesn’t always pay off.

I made the mistake of not drawing this on paper first (I advise my students to doodle lots before stitching to get comfortable with their design path, so this turned out to be a do as I say not as I do situation! haha)

It looked simple enough so I went ahead and put needle to fabric with a bit of an attitude.  However, trying to save time resulted in me not liking the result or enjoying the process.  I eventually got it to a place I was happy with but quickly concluded that I wasn’t ever going to use this design!

THEN I went back to the pinned photo to examine it more closely and discovered that I had been doing it the HARD way! LOL  Once I gave myself time to think it through properly I found the much more obvious path and it was a breeze to stitch.  Lesson learned.