How To Beat The Sewing Funk (Parts 1 & 2)

What do you do when the sewing mojo abandons you? Sometimes I find myself in the sewing room, sitting in front of my machine wondering what to do. The desire to sew is there, but absence of creativity gets in the way.

For me, I find myself doing one of the following three exercises:

FABRIC PLAY AND ORGANIZATION

Firstly, I can play with fabric. This involves pulling stash out of the shelves, scraps from bins and pre-cuts from secret hiding places (No, I have no idea either why I hide them. Absolutely none).  I pet them, admire them, fold them and colour code them. Sometimes I trim the odd pieces and group them into project sized categories (strips, 2.5” & 4” squares, scrap bits for instance). While doing this, an idea or two for the next project usually comes along. And at the end of the process I will have tidy, organized shelves ready to be messed up again. Plus pre-cut fabric at the ready for the next patchwork project :-)

4" squares, 2.5" squares and err.. scrap bits

SCRAP BIN CONQUEST

Secondly, I make scrap blocks. Normally I will do this when my scrap bin is on the verge of overflowing. I take random scraps of all shapes, sizes, prints and colours and piece them together. A good example  of a quilt I completed using this process is this Scrappy Log Cabin Quilt.  The blocks were all made from scraps, pieced into log cabin blocks.

Scrappy Log Cabin Quilt

I find piecing scraps a very therapeutic exercise. I actually enjoy it very much. Anything goes, really. You don’t even have to think what sizes your blocks should be. Just piece. At some point you will have a few small blocks to piece into bigger blocks and so on and so forth. Right now I’m working to making a big scrap quilt. It’s still a long way off, but I’ll get there eventually. Here’s an example of one big block made out of many little odd shaped blocks. I taped a pen next to it so you can have an idea of the size...

Smiley, happy pen :-)

And an even bigger 'block':

Think that's enough for one post. If you pop back tomorrow I will tell you the third exercise that helps me get out of a creativity rut. Stay tuned!