Moderately deep thoughts on sewing, and deeper thoughts on life

Why do I always do this to myself? I’ve just been intensively hand sewing all afternoon, and even though I pretended to myself that I was taking breaks, I wasn’t really — and now I’m completely wiped out, sore, even kind of shivering, and eating Late July sandwich cookies as if there’s no tomorrow! I only get into this kind of state when I’m stressed about how much I’ve got to do; it’s a blind panic mindset, and it’s very harmful. It hurts my body, but it also negatively impacts my work, because I burn out a lot more quickly when I’m working like this. I’ve got to learn not to do this anymore. Balance is more important than short-term gains!

Recent creations

I don’t have a whole lot to show today, since what I did was as much prep work as it was completing items. But I did make this fun-spring-colored brooch (or hair clip?), successfully using fusible interfacing to add stability to the foundation and make the zigzag-stitched edge cleaner and flatter. This brings my brooch/clip total for Craft Happy up to five — gad, how is it so few? — so at least I’ve got some kind of bare minimum there.

On Saturday I made my first zip pouch for the show, which is exciting. It’s the first one that’s come out neat enough for me to sell (and even so, it’s still a little uneven), and I’m delighted with the colors as well. That vibrant tangerine exterior fabric is one of my favorites, and I’ve got very little of it left now.

I’m hesitant to do too many more pouches for the show inventory, because I believe Jinny might be doing some, and anyway there are other pouch vendors who will be there. But they’re just so satisfying when they come out well! Maybe I can use them for my Etsy inventory; I’ve not added anything new for quite a while.

Sewing as art versus business

After talking to Jenn last week about process, it struck me that I take two different approaches to my crafting. One of them is more fine-art-y (well, that’s how I think of it, anyway): I assemble some materials, let inspiration flow, and see what happens. This is how I create my brooches, embroideries, and decoupaged boxes. The other approach is more businessy: I develop a design, and then turn out the same design in different fabrics, colors, or scents (in the case of eye pillows). There’s always some uniqueness to each piece, but this process is definitely more assembly-line-like.

I like having the two different ways of crafting, and I think I strike a decent balance. If I only did the arty things, I’d have to charge tons of money and would only be able to create maybe one or two pieces per week. If I only did the cut-and-assemble items, I’d take much less joy in my shop. But when it comes to preparing for something like a craft fair, perhaps I should aim for more businessy items, just to provide larger quantities of my relatively lower-priced and more popular items. I was thinking about this, and I think I could do it with zip pouches, tote bags, wrist rests, or other such items. I could put in one session for selecting and prepping fabrics, and another for cutting (I can’t do long sessions of both ironing and cutting, as I found out when doing the Art of Yoga pillows), and then put the pieces into separate baggies. That way, whenever I have a little sewing time, I can just pull out a baggie and start pinning and stitching, and if I have to stop in the middle, I’ll just put whatever I’ve got back into the bag. This will require more ironing, but I think it might save me time in the long run. I’ll give it a try at some point.

Living as if each day were the last

Somehow I had a lot of conversations about death this past weekend; I heard several depressing stories and ended up discussing death and misery at least three separate times within just a few days. Death is something I think about quite frequently, and it is, in a very real way, the reason I spend my life doing what I’m currently doing. I quit grad school in large part because I realized that if I were given only a few years left to live, I’d immediately leave academia and begin doing the writing, drawing, and creating I always thought I’d get to someday. So now I’m living that life, creating full-time, and do I think about death any less than I used to? No; in fact, I probably think about it more.

I knew, when I was a miserable and unfulfilled grad student, that I wanted more out of my remaining life than what I was getting. But now that I’m living the life I wanted, I’m forced to admit that it is also, most of the time, unexciting. Now, mind — I don’t mean I don’t love my current life, because I do, and in a general sense I relish it very much. But life is mostly not made up of those moments of deep, savory relish; it is mostly made up of the mundane and stupid. Even in the midst of doing what I love, just statistically speaking, at any given moment I’m likely doing something un-fabulous, like answering an email or washing my hands or — as I did today — wearing out my eyes and my energy pushing a needle in and out of a piece of fabric. On Saturday I was very pleased because I learned how to slip stitch. If I died right now and went to the Pearly Gates, and they said, “You get 20 minutes of your life back. Do you want to spend it slip stitching?” I’d say, “Hell no!” (Maybe I wouldn’t say “hell” if I were really at the Pearly Gates.) But slip stitching is part of a larger way of living that I’m enjoying, and as such, it’s something I willingly give some time to doing. But in and of itself? Boring.

Even though I spend my time doing exactly what I want to be doing — in a general sense — the vast majority of my time is spent doing just such boring things as slip stitching or coloring things on Photoshop or making action lists. In movies about people with fabulously fulfilling lives, these kinds of activities are always shown in conveniently edited montages, with inspiringly anticipatory scores, so that we know the protagonist is up to Something Important even as she’s running errands or making phone calls or sitting at her typewriter. Then, when she wins her award or fulfills her lifelong dream or whatever, we know how she got there, but we didn’t have to actually sit there with her as she did it, day in and day out. But in real life, that’s just what I have to do: live the life, day by day, through the stupid stuff as well as the big shining moments. That’s just the way it goes, and that’s okay. But it does make me rethink that “live each day as if it were your last” saying.