Procrastinating

I always thought I am a steady worker, and I always thought that it did not really make much of a difference whether I was working under a deadline or not. In terms of efficiency and dedication, I mean – it certainly does make a difference in terms of feeling pressured and comfortable. Which is to say: I prefer working without the pressure. (Well, who doesn't.)

But I have to adjust my self-image about the efficiency. Without the real pressure of facing a deadline that calls for ‘only new quilts’ (and close to 30 m...) I am still fumbling about, doodling along. Free flow of creativity is still at a low tide point and right now I don’t see any signs that the tide is actually turning. So I am planning next weekend, when friends from my year as an exchange student will be coming to visit and celebrate our thirty-year-reunion (ugh - we're growing old), am selling my husband’s sorted out books on ebay and doing this and that. Hibernating?

I have been working on commissions which I will talk about later, when they are all finished, but apart from that...

I started teaching another beginners class at the local community college in Landshut earlier this month, and on the third evening of the class the agenda called for diagonally split squares. I usually tell the students about three different techniques for making these squares – starting from squares as such, from long strips, and what I have got to know as “fast and easy triangles”. But as I found out over several instances of demonstrating this technique, I only accumulate a certain number of these triangles without ever doing anything with them. First, because they are never enough, and secondly because I keep demonstrating with different sizes, so they don’t even match. This time, I decided that I would not fall into this trap again.

I took along my own sewing machine to class so I would be working with my own seam allowance, and not get stuck with samples from the machines in the classroom, which my come with another seam allowance.

Heavily packed - glad for the wheels under the
case for the sewing machine, though they are
only partially helpful in snow and on
cobble-stones...

And when I got home, I quickly started making a few more of the same size triangles that had been the result of the demonstration in class.

And more.

Started another UFO?

Yesterday I realized that this was a good way to tie me over, fill the need to handle fabric and hear the sound of the sewing machine, and mindlessly kept producting more and more right-angled triangle squares.

By now I have made enough squares to complete a blanket-sized quilt. All I need to do is sew them together.

Who knows what this procrastination is good for...