Documenting the process -- part 1, pictures

Last week I wrote about Claire Henderson, who just finished a quilt she started in my workshop at Quilting By The Lake in 2017 and sent me a picture.  I looked back in my files and found some pictures I had taken of her quilt on the design wall, and it was interesting to see how the composition changed during the workshop and then at home.

Vickie left a comment: "I do love seeing the process.  I keep resolving to take and organize photos of my process, and add comments and reflections.  But, then, I think I'm too busy to stop and do that.  I've got to find a designated time for this.  Do you have any suggestions?"

Well, yes, I suggest you figure out a way to do it!  I firmly believe that understanding your own process, both the methods and techniques you use to make art and the way you come up with your ideas, is one of the major skillsets of the serious artist.  Maybe there are artiste savants out there who simply channel the universe into art without thinking about it along the way, but most of the artists I admire and respect don't do it that way.  They are able to articulate and recall what they have done in the past, so it's easier to plan ahead, solve problems and incorporate new ideas into their practice.

Vickie is right that there are two kinds of documentation: photos of the work as it progresses, and comments about how, why and how well you did what you did.  Of the many ways you can accomplish this, there's just one thing that absolutely has to be done RIGHT NOW as you work, and that's to take pictures.  So my first suggestion is to get into the habit of taking a lot of photos of what's happening on the design wall.

Making new habits is most effective one step at a time, and step one is really easy -- keep a camera at hand as you work.  Fortunately many people are already in the habit of carrying a phone on their person even when moving around their own house; if you aren't, then make a point of taking the phone or camera with you into the studio.  At the very least, take a picture of your design wall as you leave for the day.  And if you're working on anything complicated, take more -- you can't anticipate when your composition might fall prey to a gust of wind, a helpful toddler or playful cat, or when you lose your place between the design wall and the sewing machine.

(In the age of digital photos, there's no such thing as taking too many pictures.  When I snap the design wall as I close up for the night, I take two or three shots.  Why skimp?  You can always cull out the duplicates, or the ones out of focus or too dark.)

You can't go back and take a picture of what you had on the design wall last week, but you can always organize the photos later.  I was embarrassed, when Claire emailed me last week, to find that I had no folder for the QBL workshop.  So I went back and searched through everything I had taken in July 2017, pulled out the ones from the workshop and filed them where they should have been all along.  Two and a half years late, but now all is in order.  You should aim for a higher standard; maybe once a month?  once a year???

Tomorrow I'll talk about the second part of the process, keeping track of your thoughts.  Too bad there's no way to just shoot photos of what's going on in your head, and organize them later!

"I'm Kathy, and I am an artist"

Many times I've participated in discussions of how difficult it is to announce to the world -- and maybe even harder to announce to yourself -- that you are an artist.  I vividly remember the first time I said that to another person.  Strangely, it was probably five years after I had announced to myself that I wanted to make art.  I had become comfortable with that idea, and that wording, but the next step was still hard to take.

I announced that I was going to be an artist to a woman sitting next to me on an airplane, one week before I retired -- my last business trip.  She said something like "that's nice."  The world did not end because the word "artist" had crossed my lips.  This surprised and reassured me.  I soon tried it out again on somebody I knew.  Pretty soon I could say it without even stopping to think whether it was OK.

This memory was prompted by a blog post written by Alisa Golden, an excellent book artist who has recently decided to also make quilts.  She talks in this post about two qualities that enable people to describe themselves as artists (or writers, or calligraphers, or any other kind of non-credentialed but esteemed calling).  The qualities are proficiency and identity.

If you're not sufficiently proficient, compared to others whom you clearly regard as artists, then it should be difficult to call yourself an artist, and if you are, then you should be able to claim the name.  But proficient in whose eyes, Alisa asks.  In your own eyes? In those of others?  And which others count?  Your mom may have thought you were an artist since age four, but her opinion probably doesn't count as much as the opinion of an art professor.

Then comes identity -- whether you feel that you are a member of the group.  Clearly you have to feel like an artist before you can call yourself one.

I like Alisa's breakdown of the situation, and if you have struggled with this situation, or are struggling with it now, you might like to read her entire post.  But I am particularly intrigued with her last remark, "These days, I'm working on accepting a new term for myself: quilter."

Imagine me with a rueful smile as I think of Alisa, who easily calls herself an artist, trying hard to call herself a quilter.  By contrast, I easily called myself a quilter for decades, and then had to try hard to call myself an artist.  Not just that, but since then I have spent many years trying NOT to be called a quilter.

Perhaps it's because I live in a region where traditional quilts were part of the culture, and are still highly prized and widely made.  So many times, when I would say the Q word to describe my work, the response would be "Oh, my grandmother made quilts!!" and then I would have to explain that my quilts were not like those, that they belonged on the wall and not on the bed, that they were made by machine and not by hand, that they didn't use traditional patterns.

I'll make a Q quilt, but avoid the Q word

And within the wider world of art, I have often felt that quilters, unless they come from Gees Bend, are not regarded as "real artists." So for a long time I have most comfortably called myself a fiber artist, and tried to avoid the Q word altogether.  But even that seemed to have a faint aura of second-class citizenship within the wider world of art, so for the last few years I have pretty much dropped the word "fiber" too.

Alisa's right -- it all comes down to identity.  We all have our strange ways of feeling and expressing that, and one person's take can be quite the opposite of the next person's.  How do you describe yourself?  Was it hard to reach that point?  Has your chosen nomenclature changed over the years?

Very afraid

During the SAQA conference a couple of weeks ago I heard at least four presentations in which the topic of fear played a prominent role.  Yes, in the final reckoning fear was always vanquished, at least temporarily, but I had an uncomfortable feeling about the whole subject being brought to our attention so frequently.

Several trains of thought left from that station.

First, I wonder why fear is such a popular subject for artist presentations.  Maybe starting with the famous "Art and Fear" book, there seems to be a pervasive assumption that yes, of course artists suffer from fear, and that overcoming fear (aka self-doubt) is the major task one has to accomplish in order to unlock one's full artistic potential.  If only we could get past our fear of success, or maybe our fear of failure, or perhaps it's our fear of being liked, or being disliked, or something....  then we could MAKE ART!!!  In 20 years of working among actuaries, and in 40 years of working in communications I never once heard a professional development talk in either field exhorting people to overcome fear, so I wonder just what is there about artists that makes us so fragile.

Second, I wonder whether this fear of fear is gender-related.  Let's have a thought experiment.  Let's imagine a professional group called the Heavy Metal Sculpture Artists, of which Richard Serra is the president, and let's further imagine that it's 90% male, because you know those welding tools are really heavy.  At the HMSA annual conference, how many presentations do you suppose will talk about conquering fear?  I imagine not very many.  (After all, a guy packing real heat with a welding tool is almost as well-defended as one packing mere metaphorical heat.)

Third, I wonder whether all this talk about the need to overcome fear really helps people overcome fear -- or whether it actually encourages and enables fear.  People who do have doubt and fear are comforted: apparently everybody has doubt and fear, I must be just fine, I'm like everybody else, it's OK to be afraid.  You could walk in to a conference fearing nothing, your self-esteem at an all-time high, and by the time you sit through four or five of these talks you could start thinking geez, I'm not afraid, what's wrong with me????

All together now, let's sing:

Whenever I feel afraid
I hold my head erect
And whistle a happy tune
So no one will suspect
I'm afraid.

While shivering in my shoes
I strike a careless pose
And whistle a happy tune
And no one ever knows
I'm afraid.

The result of this deception
Is very strange to tell
For when I fool the people I fear
I fool myself as well!

I whistle a happy tune
And every single time
The happiness in the tune
Convinces me that I'm
Not afraid.

Make believe you're brave
And the trick will take you far.
You may be as brave
As you make believe you are.

So if I were organizing the next SAQA conference I would tell all the presenters that there will be no talk of fear.  There will be talk of hard work, and continuous learning, and rigorous reading and thinking, and brave self-evaluation.  Focus on those things, and maybe fewer people will be afraid.

From Corporate America to art

Yesterday somebody posted a question to the SAQA email list that sparked much discussion.

"I'm in the midst of a career transition, and am considering all kinds of new paths to take.  I've been a graphic designer most of my career, working primarily for publishers and design consultancies.

"However, my first and truest love is visual arts. I studied painting and printmaking in college, and I have a decades-old dream about finding a place out in the country that has an outbuilding I can convert to a studio, with room to do fiber arts and mixed media works on paper. To finally be able to say that I'm an artist whenever anyone asks me what I do.

"Has anyone here transitioned from Corporate America to fulltime artist?"

Having spent my previous life in Corporate America and my current one as fulltime artist, I thought I might have some insights for her.  In addition, one of my avocations is career counseling.  So here's my answer to the writer, in hopes that she might find it helpful and some other readers might find it interesting:

I infer that your "career transition" means that you need another career, and that you are considering fulltime art as a way to make a living.  That means your task is very different from the person who is retiring from corporate life and can do art as a labor of love.  So if you are going to do this as a business, you need a business plan.

You need to figure out what you can do that will bring in revenue, and how much of it you will have to do to bring in sufficient revenue to meet your needs.  You don't have to just make and sell art to get revenue; you can also teach, write or do art administration.  You'll have to do research on which of these activities seem possible in your situation, and how much money you could reasonably expect to make per hour, per work or per whatever other measure you would like to use.  Also take into consideration that in any freelance business, you generally can devote only about half your time to revenue-producing activity; you also have to market yourself, find and cultivate potential customers, keep track of your finances, maintain your website or other public presences, do paperwork and other tedious chores. 

What concerns me about your question is that you seem to have a wish more than a business plan.  You talk about a dream about a certain way to live and a certain way to describe yourself, but not about what you might do to earn money.  

Realistically, unless you have been selling art consistently and profitably in the last couple of years, you should probably not expect to do much as you embark on your new path.  Even established artists who were doing quite well financially until the economic downturn are finding it extremely difficult to sell in the new climate.  Many artists I know, in all mediums, believe that the whole paradigm of non-billionaire people buying art has changed, perhaps permanently.  

Unless you have very good reason to predict that you can buck this tide, you should probably look to other ways to earn money.  But again, unless you have a solid reputation as an artist it will be difficult to count on making money as a teacher or writer.  Especially in fiber art, the market is crammed with workshops, books and magazines, and even if you are successful in establishing a foothold as a teacher, it will take time to build up enough business to support yourself.

If this sounds pessimistic, I'm sorry.  The world is tough these days and it's hard enough to earn a living at established and traditional vocations, let alone from those based entirely on discretionary spending.

But let's look at the bright side.  Your dream is to find a place in the country with a studio, to make art and to call yourself an artist.  None of these aspects of your ideal life depend on this stuff constituting an actual business.  Perhaps you would be happier if you found a day job in another field, one that you could leave at 5:30 every night, and come home to evenings and weekends of making art.  You could make some money on this "second shift," and if you were very fortunate, you might be able over time to grow this into a fulltime business.

Meanwhile, why not call yourself an artist if that's what you dream of doing?  You don't have to produce your tax returns to do that, you just have to make art.

Pennies from heaven, aka creativity

This week our local fiber and textile arts group heard a presentation on creativity by Dr. Annette Allen, a poet and professor of humanities at the University of Louisville who has studied creativity in many different artistic disciplines.

Many of her comments struck chords with me and other listeners, since we have all wrestled with the issues of how and why we make things and why some times it's easier than others.  I was taken by her remarks that creativity has been a subject for argument for millenia.

Plato thought that creativity or inspiration came from outside the individual -- from a muse or a divine power.  He sometimes described this as "divine madness" and believed that works of art are unpredictable.

By contrast, Aristotle thought creativity or art was mainly a case of craft at work.  Creation is a straightforward process of making a plan and then executing it upon some material.  It's a process that can be explained in terms of psychology and nature.

Rembrandt, Aristotle Contemplating a Bust of Homer, 1653

Dr. Allen asked us which camp we fell into, and the group consensus seemed to be somewhere in between. We believed that there is often a spark of inspiration that comes from somewhere outside ourselves, but that you do have to sit there and do the work.

I think I'm way more toward the Aristotelian end of the spectrum.  I may have had one or two Platonic moments when inspiration struck, seemingly from the blue.  But upon closer examination, in retrospect I realize that the "inspiration" was just a happy combination of subjects I'd already been thinking about, techniques I'd already been exploring, skills I'd already developed.  Then one day, it all came together.

It seemed like magic, or divine madness, or whatever you want to call it, but never would have happened without the groundwork.

I've often thought that luck, like divine madness, is overrated.  If the pennies start falling from heaven, are you going to be standing there with a bucket, or are you going to be inside lying on the couch watching TV?

Doing the right thing

Several years ago I had only begun taking classes from Nancy Crow and thus I was taken aback when she said to me that a certain seam was "all wrong" and needed to be redone.  The fix consisted of less than 1/8 inch.  My first response was "you're crazy" but as the day wore on I realized she was right, ripped out the seam and resewed it.

That day was a watershed in my transition from a talented amateur to a serious artist.  I had always subscribed to the mantra "good enough is not good enough" in my profession, but until that day I had not done so as an artist.  From then on I resolved that I would make things as good as I could in my art, even if that took time and effort.

Which is a long way to get to how I spent yesterday afternoon.

Several weeks ago I was well along on quilting a piece when I went to brush away a bit of what seemed to be black lint.  Oh, the klong when I realized that the lint was actually some kind of gooey foreign substance that left a spot on the pale yellow of my quilt!  Scrubbing it with a wet washcloth accomplished nothing.  My next plan was to put the quilt away and work on something else -- maybe the spot would disappear.  (I firmly believe that in the entire history of textile art this has actually happened at least once.)

But when I came back after my world travels, the spot was still on the quilt, pale brown and about the size of a bit of short-grain rice.  It was in the unquilted portion, so it was relatively easy to fold back the batting and backing and scrub it with soap and a toothbrush, but the spot didn't yield.

In my pre-serious days I would have cussed a few times, then carefully planned my stitching to pass over the spot and hoped that it would be camouflaged from view.  I toyed with that idea for several days but this afternoon I realized that I just had to do the right thing, which of course was to cut the spot out and sew in new, clean fabric.

Rather than rip out any of the quilting, I decided to slice right through the spot and piece in another narrow strip of red-and-white striped fabric.  I opened a seam so the repair would be as small as possible.  I chose to slice the top parallel to a nearby strip so it looked like part of the original design (the ruler runs right through the spot).

To make sure I had plenty of fabric for the mend, I cut a new piece of yellow fabric at the same angle as the original piece but an inch bigger in either direction.  Then I cut a new piece of stripes and stitched the new piece back into place.  It was cumbersome to fold the top away from the batting and backing, and to work so close to the huge bulk of the quilted portion, but with a lot of pins and patience everything worked.

The "new" quilt has one more horizontal stripe in the corner but no spot.  The repair took less than an hour and I know that had I not done the right thing, I would have seen that spot every time I looked at the quilt for the rest of my life and regretted not fixing it.  Can't say whether I would have made the same decision had the spot appeared in the middle of a quilted section, but I'm so glad I was able to fix it with so little trouble.  Nancy would be proud of me.

PS -- note to self -- don't make any more quilts with wide expanses of plain, pale yellow.  It's like wearing a white dress to cook spaghetti.

Advice to a confused artist

Today on the Quiltart list somebody wrote a long, discouraged message about her future. “I am really at a loss as to go about BEING an artist and having hopes of being successful at it,” she wrote, then went on to share some of her confusion.

“I was a member of a local art guild and showed at their big fall show and sold quite well BUT since this area is rural, my prices weren't very high. In fact, I was told to at least double my asking price when I sent a piece to a show once. So, I thought maybe I should try to get my art somewhere where I could ask for higher prices and began entering some of the national shows… Most of the time, I've been successful at getting into them and I sold one once from the Chicago IQA show...

“Seeing what the exhibits will be in Houston this Fall, I noticed SAQA is well represented. Am I the only one, or does it seem like it's mandatory to be a member of SAQA now to get any advanced information for shows?

“I never joined my ‘local’ guild because it's 1 1/2 hour drive away and I wasn't sure I wanted to join a guild that is mostly traditional and be the odd person out. Maybe I do need to start trying to connect more locally and try to fit in a bit more.

“Of course, all this costs money. Memberships in the guilds, IQA, SAQA, then entry fees for each show... it adds up and, at this point, it's adding up to a nice hobby but not much of a profession. I know I have to get my art in front of people to sell it, but I sure don't know where the best place is for that to happen…

“How much time do I have to put towards this? I work. I have kids that are active in different things. I feel good if I have time to make art, let alone try to market it. I know the day will come that I can devote more time to my art, but I don't think I should wait to create when I'm an empty-nester.”

I’ve heard this kind of anguish before, and not just from art quilters – the cry of somebody who doesn’t know where to start in getting out of a situation they are unhappy with. For some reason this message struck a chord and I thought I would respond at length, not just to the person who posted but to everybody, because only the details are different from the situation that everybody else is in to some degree or another.

So here’s what I have to say to the confused artist. Before you can become successful you have to define success. It seems that you define it as selling your work and turning your art into a paying job, so to speak.

If that's the case, you need to decide where is the best place to sell your work. What places could you sell locally or regionally? At a guild show? (That's once a year -- is that enough?) At a gallery or gift shop? In a restaurant? Through a real estate dealer? Via commissions? For this approach, you need to focus on building a local reputation so yes, you might want to join your local guild -- not so much for artistic inspiration but for networking. And you might think about doing things like giving talks to local groups or approaching the school to be an artist in residence, not to mention schmoozing any rich people you can find. Also for this approach you need to determine what kind of art will sell, and perhaps that will mean you make art on a production basis, lots of little blue quilts with birds (even if you hate blue), art that you think people will buy rather than art that you want to make.

Maybe selling locally is only a start, because you can't get enough money, and your ultimate objective is to sell on a wider geographic scale. In that case SAQA would probably be a great resource for you, since that organization is focused on selling members' work and encouraging collectors to buy quilts. In this case you will probably want to enter as many big shows as possible, not that you will sell a lot of pieces from shows but your resume and profile will benefit. And you should have a website and explore online sales opportunities.

No matter where you want to sell, you need to have a financial target in mind. If you want to make $50,000 a year from selling your quilts, you’ll need a different plan than if you would be happy to make $5,000. Of course you won’t make as much when you start out, so maybe you set a sliding target, $1,000 the first year, more in later years.

And no matter where you want to sell, you have to ask yourself, am I good enough to sell my work for the amount of money I would like to get for it? In other words, do you focus on finding a market for the type of work you are now good at producing, or do you concentrate on growing and improving so that in several years you will be good enough to make a better type of work? There are artists who never get past the little blue quilts with birds, because they manage to find enough buyers with undeveloped taste, and it's easier to keep churning out the birds and not have to think too hard. Of course, that makes it more like working at the garment factory and less like art, but maybe that’s OK with you.

The final question was "How much time do I have to put towards this? I feel good if I have time to make art, let alone try to market it."

That's a huge question. If you want to be successful at a free-lance business, whether it’s art, writing, massage therapy or real estate, you have to put in a lot of time marketing, maybe even half your time. For that reason, a lot of artists have decided to keep their day jobs to pay the rent and do art in their “spare time.” At least that way when you have a weekend to spend on art, you get to actually make art. In other words, maybe you should redefine success for the next ten years or so till your kids get older -- decide that you are aiming toward making quilts, entering shows, and getting better at your art/craft. If you sell stuff along the way that's fine but it's not your primary objective for this stage of your career.

As in every other aspect of life, be careful what you wish for. Think hard on how you define success and what you set as objectives. Only when you have your goal very clear can you decide how to accomplish it.

Becoming an artist

Chrismac56 left a comment on my recent post about “what is an art quilt?”

She said, “my quilt buddies were shocked when I signed up for a two-year Art Foundation course and have virtually stopped quilting. I wanted to create more artistically but did not know where to start. I am getting a thorough understanding of creating art - moving right out of my comfort zone learning to draw and paint and loving nearly every moment of it. Hopefully at the end of the two years I will return to quilting with a new vision that will move me in new directions.”

To her, I say congratulations, good luck, go for it! How wonderful to be able to explore something you are intrigued by at length and in depth. But her comment made me think how different her road to art learning is from my own.

I came from a family that was absolutely crazy about art; my father worked in the visual realm all his life (typography, graphic arts) and did calligraphy and a little watercolor. We went to museums, we bought art by the truckload, we talked about art and type at the dinner table. Dad was the arbiter of art, and he defined art as accurate representation, aka drawing. So when it turned out that I could not draw, he officially classified me as “not an artist.” This occurred about the time I hit kindergarten.

That was fine with me; I had lots of other things to do. As far as art was concerned, it was an important part of my life, but since I was “not an artist” I had to be a patron of the arts. I spent a lot of time looking at and acquiring other people’s art, but my education and career went in other directions.

Meanwhile I learned to sew, on a strictly utilitarian footing; made all my own clothes, did drapes and pillows and reupholstery for decades; and early on, fell in love with quilts and figured out how to make them. In time, when I had made baby quilts for everybody I knew, and we didn’t yet have grandchildren who needed baby quilts, my quilts came off the bed and went on the wall and even into some small shows. But I still thought of them as home dec; in my head the A word referred to paintings and prints, not to quilts.

One day at the advanced age of about 50, I was sitting at my sewing machine working on a quilt, when the voice inside my head clearly announced, “This could be art!” With barely a pause, the voice then said, “I could be an artist!” and with barely another pause, the voice said, “I WILL be an artist!”

Of course I didn’t have a clue at the time about what being an artist meant. And unlike my blog reader quoted above, I did not decide to take art classes. I had a fulltime job that took 60 hours a week and lots of travel. I figured if I wanted to be an artist I’d better get on with it, and to save time I’d better just use the tools and skills I had already mastered, i.e. quilting.

Since then I’ve learned a lot about art and being an artist, through three different means.

First, I have taken a lot of workshops from quilt and fiber artists. Some of them focused narrowly on technical skills, but the best ones were broader, teaching about art, design, composition and color. Nancy Crow was my most important teacher and mentor and she has described her master composition classes as the moral equivalent of graduate art courses. Without her keen eye and firm guidance, it would have taken me much longer to get where I am today, if I could have gotten there at all.

Second, I have embarked on a self-guided attempt to make up for the art history classes I never took. I have always been a denizen of museums, and by age 12 could pick out a Pollock from a Miro without looking at the labels, but I started reading books about artists and art movements and have learned a lot. I have read “Art in America” for several years to learn about the contemporary art scene.

Third, I have learned from my own work how to be serious about making art. I believe in critically evaluating my own work and using that knowledge to determine what to make next. I believe in working in series, to fully explore an idea before moving on to another one; rather than flitting about and making a whole lot of unrelated pieces. And I believe in setting objectives for myself, so I don’t so easily get lured into activities that don’t support my serious work.

Maybe I’ll go to art school some day. I’m sure I would love it, and I’m sure I would learn a lot. But for now, I’m on my own – well, just me and my dozens of wonderful, supportive artist friends, some of them in person, some of them via the internet, who are helping me become a better artist.

Answering Elena's question -- suggestion #1

Elena wrote back to tell us a little more about her situation. From her comment and her blog, it seems that it takes her a long time to make quilts because she’s doing small projects and samples (a good idea) and because her major work sits on the design wall for a long time while she tries to decide what to do next. And she admits to procrastination.

I don’t want to urge people to rush ahead and finish quilts before they know what they want to do. And I have had work on my design wall for months myself. But while I’m waiting for inspiration, I tend to work on other things.

I know there are artists who like to work on only one thing till it’s finished, then move on to the next thing. Perhaps it helps them focus, and gives them an incentive to get through the tedious work (no dessert till you finish your vegetables). But that’s not the way my head works.

I like to do something every day. It helps me maintain the discipline of regular work because I know that even if I’m blocked on Project A for a bit, I can work on Project B or C. Sometimes you’re blocked for creative reasons – you don’t know what to do next. Sometimes you’re blocked for technical reasons – your sewing machine is in the shop, or you can’t get more of the red fabric till Monday morning. Sometimes you’re blocked for personal reasons – you’re exhausted and overworked from your day job, or you’re under emotional stress, or you’re feeling sick and can’t concentrate enough for major decisions. In any case, I think you need a fallback plan so you can keep working and not lose your momentum. Otherwise, you may fall into the trap that Elena may be in – when she’s blocked, she doesn’t work. So of course it takes her months to finish a quilt.

If this is in fact one of the issues that Elena has, then perhaps she could move herself along by developing two or three tasks to do while she’s waiting for her fabric to talk to her. For instance, maybe she could have a not-important top available to practice free motion quilting. Or she could allow herself to start another piece and work on two more or less simultaneously.

I once attended a workshop with my sensei Nancy Crow in which one of the other participants had accomplished nothing after several hours of "work". She was fussing over a piece on the design wall, making minuscule changes every half hour or so and not moving along (which is a big problem at an intensive workshop where you’re expecting to make major progress during the week).

Nancy told her to start five pieces and put them all up on the design wall. She was to work on the first piece till she hit a block, and then was immediately to put that piece back on the wall, take down the second piece and work on it. It was OK to realize that she couldn’t make the decision right now, but it was not OK to stop working. By the end of the week, she had managed to work herself out of her funk and made a good quantity of acceptable work.

In the past I occasionally got myself through periods of emotional stress by having totally mindless things that I could do at the sewing machine. Sewing was my therapy, my time to go into my room and work on something comforting, but I wasn’t up to serious thinking. So I sewed bits and pieces into 2 1/2 inch squares and put the squares into a box. Eventually I had several thousand of them, and I made a quilt. At the time, just making a few squares of an evening was all I could manage, but it did give me something to do and I could feel I had accomplished something.

Suggestion #1 to Elena: when you’re stalled on a project, work on something else.

Suggestion #2 comes tomorrow.

Answering Elena's question (sort of)

Yesterday Elena posted a comment that I thought deserved a good answer. She said, “I am still learning the quilting basics - the medium, techniques and tools. Definitely the first stage. Three years at this now and I am finishing my second quilt. Any tips about getting more prolific while still hanging on to my other job?”

Although I am now retired, my twenty years of working for a consulting firm makes me incapable of answering a question like that without asking other questions first. Elena, why do you think it’s taking you 18 months per quilt?

Is it because your life is so busy that you can spare only one hour a week for sewing?

Is it because you don’t have a decent workspace, and you’re cramped and distracted when you try to sew, or you have to set up and take down your machine every time you work?

Is it because your sewing technique is shaky and it takes you a long time to actually make what you have decided to make?

Is it because you don’t have good tools, with a cranky sewing machine that makes bad stitches, an ironing board too small to get your quilt really flat, or no design wall to put your work on view?

Is it because you have performance anxiety or some other kind of mental block that leads you to do a million other things rather than work on your quilt?

Is it because you have a hard time deciding what quilt to make next?

Is it because you are paralyzed in the planning stage, sketching and erasing and auditioning fabrics and questioning your own decisions and starting all over again with new sketches and never actually starting to sew?

Is it because you bit off more than you can chew, trying to make a king-sized quilt and then getting frustrated because (of course) it takes so long to piece it and it’s so hard to quilt?

Is it because you lack support from other quilters or other artists, so that you feel alone and uncertain?

Is it because your loved ones either deliberately or unconsciously sabotage your quilting, interrupting you or disparaging you or running off with your scissors or spilling their snacks on your fabric?

Obviously the solution depends on what the problem really is.  If you can analyze why it’s taking you so long, you can probably figure out for yourself how to improve the situation. But if you do that, and think of some things to change, and you’re still frustrated, then write back and I’ll try to make additional suggestions. My life as an artist is pretty smooth now, with a supportive husband, no day job, a big studio and a wonderful bunch of art friends to provide aid and comfort. But it wasn’t always that way, and I can remember how I struggled to get where I am now. I’ll be happy to share my experiences and ideas with you.