Fifteen Minutes a Day and the Power of Doing Things Badly

I've been stuck since I posted the last post. Afraid to make a mistake. And the answer is 15 minutes a day, and allowing myself to do what I am doing badly. Allowing mistakes

I don't do free motion well, and the next thing on the art quilt is free motion. I've got a new sewing machine and it does things differently than the old one. In free motion the feed dogs are down and you control where the stitches go yourself by moving the quilt sandwich. Turns out I did learn how to do that well enough when I was trying to learn how a few months ago.

But it also turns out that THIS machine has thread tension problems with free motion. It is a "known problem" and the instruction manual had the fix. I was a bit surprised at how much I had to "fix" it. I literally tightened the upper tension to twice what it normally is before the problem of the upper thread showing on the bottom went away.

I also tried it out with more than one kind of sample. The tension fix is different on the two I tried out. I'm going to have to make up a sample that is exactly like what I will be working on and try stuff out before I work on the art quilt (which is still nameless).

The problem with the bed scarf was an unwillingness to cut into the fabric for the borders. I just managed to do that this morning. I don't know if the things I worried about will happen or won't happen, but it doesn't matter. I needed to go forward. And just think. Once I get the final borders on the bed scarf I'm going to need to quilt on that too.

I'm on the last chapter of the third book in the Complete Artist's Way and the subject of the couple of pages I read today was committing to 15 minutes a day at whatever your art project is, and allowing yourself to do it badly. As usual, Julia Cameron was right. She had a point. The problem is to show up (on the page or at the keyboard). She is a writer who was learning the piano and was writing music at the time she wrote that last book. For me it was sitting down at the sewing machine and trying to figure out what I would need to do to get the free motion stuff moving yesterday, and getting out the cutting board and rotary cutter and cutting into that beautiful fabric today.