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In general my life is very busy. I have a lot of people in my life and dogs and activities and friends I want to spend time with and my many schemes.
I always have some new project going on in my head. I also have a personality that tends to get over enthusiastic about things. In fact there are moments when I seriously wonder if there is an enthusiasm gap between myself and the world.
I have no shortage of projects I would like to tackle, and if you were to look up "takes on too much" in the dictionary, well that would be my picture staring right back at you.
In fact in the last little while I have been feeling like I was falling behind in my own life.
Do any of you ever feel like that?
No matter how many garments I complete I feel I am behind schedule, or I would be if I actually had a schedule.
This reminds me of one of the smartest things I ever heard, said by one of the smartest people I ever met.
This woman was a social worker in a tough area of the city.
Someone remarked, over a dinner party dinner table, how hard this woman's job must be because the people she worked with must be so down and out and so unhappy.
I remember this social worker looking straight in the eye of the person who made this comment and saying that in her experience it wasn't life events that made people unhappy but life expectations.
The question is does your life meet the expectations you had for it?
This also reminds me of one of my sisters who was often disappointed by her birthdays ("yes these are nice presents, but I was kind of hoping for a room full of balloons. Where are the balloons?")
I have been thinking if I am doing exactly this with my sewing.
So as an exercise this is what I did this week:
I decided to do a time budget of my sewing time and look at it in terms of my expectations.
On index cards I listed the months of the upcoming year and for every month I wrote the things I knew I would have to be making or at least collecting the supplies to be making every month. (Pretty sophisticated system, hope you are following all of this).
I also listed predictable users of time, like teaching a course, Christmas, golf season which has my husband looking at me a lot wondering if I want to go out, summer when I take care of the kids, etc.
This was not a to-do list.
What I listed were things that take my time and how much time. For instance making a shirt for a male in my family I wrote 1 week, because since my sewing fits into my other being alive stuff, realistically it takes me a week to make a shirt properly.
So after I did this prep work I put it all into a school scribbler and looked at what my time available/committed flow for the year looked like.
This is such a simple idea, maybe other people do this, and interesting to me because this is exactly what a person would do at work.
You know if you are an accountant you would know not expect too many other new things to get started at tax season, or a teacher at marking time, or in retail over the holidays. This is just good planning.
Why do we treat sewing, something people like me do constantly if not in reality at least in their heads, in a different way than we do other things that are also serious and important to us?
This whole weird, something you would only do if you were sitting around a lot in state parks with mental time on your hands exercise, has taught me two things:
1. I am OK, when I actually look at all I sew I really am fine. There are only 52 weeks in the year and I am not behind at all. I sew for a lot of people in my family and I can see where the zone of enough, versus too much or not enough is. I shouldn't be feeling I wasn't getting enough done.
2. I have my busy seasons and a few months in the year where I have absolutely no one to sew for but myself. This year in one of those months, August, I will be making my Christmas outfit. I can see it coming. Scrambling to try to make myself something new for the holidays on December 23rd, coming down after 7 weeks of birthday/Hallowe'en/Christmas sewing is just too stressful.
Looking at your sewing time like this can be very illuminating and release a lot of pressure.
Speaking of pressure. My blog posting has taken a hit with my travelling, family commitments, and my ramped up sewing surprises for family. Hope you understand. File it under doing my best.
That said I post in Instagram regularly if you want to keep in touch.
In the meantime a question for you.
How much time do you sew, get to sew, want to sew or manage to sew?
Do you feel you have enough time to sew? How to you make time to sew?
Big thought topic around here at the moment.
9 comments:
Good questions. I'm retired and could sew every day, all day if I wanted to. But I've found I can't do that; too much like binge eating Easter chocolates. If I spend an entire day in the sewing room the next day is often spent doing something else, like trying out the new pear cake recipe I found. I make time for sewing by trying to have a bit of order in the rest of my life. Mornings are for dog walking, cleaning, shopping and laundry. Afternoons are for sewing. Evenings after supper are for fiddling with patterns. And sometimes I just throw it all to the four winds, make a pot of coffee and go read a cheesy novel. I sew enough for me and mine and it makes me happy, but yes, sometimes I do feel the pressure that I have not done enough. I'm trying to ignore that.
Theresa in Tucson
Theresa has hit the nail on the head and could be writing about my life (substitute grand-kids for walking the dog, though!). I am old enough to have learnt that 'ought' is not a word we ought to use. We do what we can, when we can and hope that it is enough. If it isn't, it's not our problem. Other people may have expectations, (like a room full of balloons, with apologies to your sister but it's too good an analogy not to use!). If we have remembered the birthday and made a nice present, our responsibility for their enjoyment is fulfilled. 'Takes on too much' describes most of us, I suspect, and if you ever discover how to avoid that, please let us know! Better to be too much in demand than of no account, though. Enjoy your trip and keep on blogging.
In my first retirement I sewed every day at least 6, more often 8 hours a day and loved ever minute. I sewed in a comfortable space open to a family room with my husband around and a tv or music going on, lots of light, beautiful views. Now I am working part time, have a huge, well organized workroom, but it is far from the maddening crowd. I am in my basement with just myself and my tablet for music and podcasts and such. I have to go up for air and human interaction now and then or it looses the glow, a residual from growing up in a huge family. I try to sew all I can and did 8 hours yesterday and hope to similar today. Weekdays I may do an hour if I am lucky. I plan on a second retirement in a year and we will see what happens. I do mentally plan out what time is available for me to do what I want to do. I tend to keep no schedule as I don't like how it confines me. I just have a queue and when I am done one project I go to the next, one at a time. It's how I work best.
I ALWAYS ALWAYS ALWAYS feel like I am falling behind in my own life. But we do the best we can. Some days I sew and do nothing else. Then there are days when I HAVE to clean and go to the store if we are gonna eat. That is life and I wouldn't have it any other way. Well, maybe I would have a maid service if I could afford one 😜 I am retired now, but somewhere in my 40's I learned to not make promises for my time because of the pressure I often felt from it. I have a auto immune disease and never know from one day to the next how I will feel so I have no choice but to take it one day at a time.
I work insane hours and hope to retire in a year. That said, I have a stash because I get ideas and then the time to sew vanishes because of life/work, then I feel behind. But I also have other interests: weaving, knitting, spinning. I find that I have "seasons" for things, for example, I knit and weave more in winter, and sew more in summer.
A friend gave me a nifty "Fibre Arts" Journal for Christmas design by Carol Feller. I have taken to writing in a goal for the day, or for the week and try to keep it manageable. I realize, upon reflection that I do a lot more that I thought. I write in prep things, too, like "Purchased a zipper for Mom's vest", and see how much time goes into things that are preparatory or "finishing" that I never noticed before.
I, too, am realizing now that if I don't make the Christmas outfit in August, it will never come to be. My brother is getting married in October. I have a great piece of Silk Dupioni that wants to be a jacket. Better schedule that for June!!
You might want to play with a gantt chart, which is a project management tool used to plan projects and plot things like resource usage (a fancy term for 'people'), milestones and interdependencies. In your year you'd have milestones like birthdays, Christmas, etc, and you can add in availability - when you're looking after kids over summer, you can change the amount of time you have available for sewing.
They're honestly easy to set up and run, and you can even add things in like buying fabric online and the time for it to arrive, which clearly affects when you can start sewing.
The best part is actually seeing your year spread out in a diagram.
Microsoft Project is probably the easiest to find, but I'm sure there are really simple ones available online either free or very cheap.
I’ve done some similar planning because I feel I do not have enough time to sew my own projects, even though I work very part time (nearly retired). I also have multiple projects on the go, for myself, the house and other people. I am trying to learn how to prioritize, figure out what really matters to me, and when it is better to say no to whatever bright idea enters my mind. I don’t have the hang of it yet. For those of us for whom sewing is an expression of love and caring it might be especially hard to get the balance right.
Interesting post. I find I really have to put sewing on my calendar and am better if I work with a list of projects. Like Bunny, my sewing space is spacious and bright, but downstairs and I need to make a conscious decision to go down and work (or play). Between grandchildren, housework, knitting lessons, and wasting time, I do work best with a schedule. After I finish a rush of some summer things for vacation, I hope to do some challenging and slower sewing.
I always have more sewing ideas than I know what to do with, and have eventually learned that I can't make them all, and if I did, I'd have approximately fifty dresses for a start. Pnning the ideas down in a notebook helps, and I have been using an informal planning system like yours for a long time. Christmas sewing is a tricky one, though. I've been making an advent calendar for six years now, and will for at least another six because it's the last thing I feel like doing when it's warm and sunny, but if I leave it until my thoughts turn to Christmas, it gets totally swamped by the seasonal rush. It's very good to take time to think through these things. I could do with an RV trip!
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