How To Find Time For Sewing

Hands up who has a bucket list of quilty projects and crafts you’d like to try and make someday? All of you? Yep, my hand is up too. After having tried and not particularly clicked with crochet, next up on my non-quilting crafts to learn is knitting. I had hoped to do so this winter with the help of local friends, buuuut the world had other plans and so I’ll try again next year.

Last week, I shared about how any quilt is possible if you take it one step at a time… the follow up from that is how exactly does one find the time do that?! And that’s what sharing a few tips about today – how to find time for sewing. Because life is busy, even in lockdown.

Whether it’s physically busy with lots of work and errands and family-taxi-driving to be done, or that you’re telling yourself mentally that you don’t have the time to try something new, I’m here to tell you that with a bit of planning and a bit of batching, you will find time for sewing within your week.

Psst – what works best for you might not be what works best for someone else! So take my examples what works for me, and reflect on whether or not that rings true for you. You might find yourself nodding, or you might find yourself realising that you’re the complete opposite. And that’s A-OK! As always, my aim is to encourage and motivate you to create what you love.

Make a plan for your week

There’s a famous saying along the lines of “If you don’t plan your life, someone else will.” That someone else will be your family, your job, your friends, the things in life that just happen… Which is why I am a big proponent of planning – digital or paper, whichever works for you! What matters is that you plan your days as best you can so that life doesn’t just happen to you.

What does this look like? Every weekend, I sit down and look at the week ahead. I pull out my planner, and write in what appointments and meetings each family member has during the week, whether that’s extracurriculars, medical, school, or other, that will impact what I have to do myself.

For example, if my husband has a church (Zoom!) meeting one night, then I know that 1) I need to make sure dinner is ready on time, and 2) that I have that night to myself to do what I like. My kids are now back to school in person this week, but for the past six months, I’ve had to keep track of when each child had a video class meeting so that I could remind them and/or swap around devices/locations according to who needed what.

Once I have those in place, I then fill in the gaps with the things I need to get done, and yes, that includes time to sew. At the moment, it also includes dedicating time for an online course I am taking, Free Motion Quilting Academy with HollyAnne from String & Story, which includes making sure I have time set aside to practice my quilting, and also time to join the weekly live sessions.

How your week and your creative time looks will obviously depend on your personal life and when you best like to create. For you, it might be that you love to wind down at night time by sewing and letting the day melt away as you stitch. Maybe you love to get up before everyone else does and start your day with some creating. Whenever it is, book a creative date with yourself. Doing so makes it a priority and tells your brain that creating is important.

Meal plan for the week

Alongside planning your week from a schedule point of view, I also strongly recommend planning your meals too. I can hear some of you muttering, “What does meal planning have to do with quilting?!” Stick with me…

Firstly, I need to acknowledge that this tip is a tad stereotypical, assuming that you, dear reader, are the head chef in your household. However, the statistics of who my readers are, combined with the stats of the wider world, would strongly suggest that the majority of you are indeed the ones responsible for most of the meals in your household. And as such, I strongly recommend meal planning.

I was a latecomer to meal planning. I mean, who knows what I will feel like cooking and/or eating on a given night days in advance? But once I gave it a go, I could see the benefits straightaway. And I’m not just talking about reducing the number of grocery shops I did in a week, or saving money because I had a proper shopping list. No, the main benefit was that I didn’t have such “mental clutter” throughout the week, constantly trying to make decisions day after day about food.

Decision fatigue is real – it’s why people have capsule wardrobes, even to the point of buying 10 of the exact same shirt and pants and only wearing that to work everyday. If we spend a significant chunk of our day deciding what to eat, it uses up our daily tolerance for decision making, and you run the risk of being too mentally-tired to be able to make decisions on a creative project. And we want to avoid that!

From a time-availability standpoint, it also lets you know well in advance how early in the evening you need to start cooking. Which could mean that you know if you have even just 20 minutes to get something quilty done!

Batch task your projects

Now, I bet you just read the previous sentence and thought, “What can I get done in 20 minutes?!” As it turns out, quite a lot.

Parkinson’s Law states that “Work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion”. That means that if we have an hour to do a task, we’ll usually spend the whole hour, even if the task could be done in a shorter amount of time. If you have an hour in your sewing space to choose fabric for your next quilt, chances are you’ll spend that whole hour pottering about. And hey, sometimes that’s exactly what the doctor ordered – slowly playing with colour, mixing and matching to your heart’s content!

But I bet if you gave yourself just 20 minutes to pull fabric from your stash, you could get it done.

Likewise, in 20 minutes you could cut out the next couple of blocks’ worth of fabric. Or sew a bunch of half-square triangles. Or cut and trim those half-square triangles. And when you batch task, you can make the most of those 20 minutes – little by little progress adds up.

When you batch task, you group like tasks with like tasks, so that instead of cut-sew-cut-sew-cut-sew-ing your way through a project, you get all the cutting done before you start all the sewing. You then sew as much as you can until you hit the press or trim stage for your project. When you organise your project like this, you immediately know what you’re up to when you have that 20 minutes to grab some quilty time.

Batch tasking your sewing projects not only helps you efficiently make a quilt with a lot of the same pieces and blocks, but it can also help with the bigger projects with lots of different pieces, like the Women of Advent quilt.

When you’re making sampler quilts, where each block is different, break the project down into smaller chunks – perhaps work on 3 blocks at a time by first cutting them all at once, and then sewing them block by block. Remember – any quilt is possible if you take it one step at a time!

But also, you know what? Even if after all of this, you’re still too mentally and emotionally tired to try something new or work on a current project, it’s ok to rest. It’s ok to sit and read a book, watch TV, or take a nap. This year, I have certainly learned the value of building in rhythms of rest into daily life, and sometimes that’s doing something creative, and sometimes it’s not! And that’s ok. Try again tomorrow, or the next day, or the next week. Creativity will wait for you.