I've always been a planner. When someone asks me where I see myself in five years, I can give them the next twenty. I'm always thinking about the next year, the next week, the next day. But while there are some definite positives that come from thinking about the future, I fail to spend enough time in the present. Here, now, today; this hour, this minute, this second. And because of that, the future that I spend so much time planning doesn't always end up being what I
actually want. We've been talking about our future, and making some plans, and as part of that I've been thinking about what I
really want in life.
And this has led me to think a lot about stuff. As in things. Belongings. Actual, physical stuff. We have a lot of it. I downsized my wardrobe recently, thinking about what I actually wear and like. I now own a tiny fraction of the clothes I used to have, and instead of feeling like I have nothing to wear (as I frequently did before), I always know just what to wear. It is so much easier to just choose from a few things that I actually like - no more thinking that I should wear something more fashionable or something I didn't wear just last week. Just wearing what I like, eliminating the stress and the guilt and the doubt.
And so I'm going to do the same thing with my fabric. Kind of. I have so. much. fabric. I
love some of it. A lot of it actually. Some of it not so much. But instead of using it, instead of focusing on what I have, I am constantly adding to it, frequently avoiding using my favorites because "what if I run out?".
I started my
floating colors quilt to use my much loved and long-hoarded Anna Maria Horner fabrics. But as soon as I started cutting into them, I panicked. I starting buying
more AMH fabric, because I might run out! And as I've been stockpiling in the last couple months, I've noticed that my sewing room is increasingly stressing me out. I'm not finding joy in the stacks of beautiful fabric. I'm finding guilt. The excess is overwhelming me -- despite spending a fair amount of my free time sewing, I'm not even close to making a dent in my stash.
So for 2017, I will be sewing my stash. And, because I like experiments and data, I've made a spreadsheet broken down in the same way I organize my fabric - mostly by color, with some "special" fabrics separated by other factors. I've inventoried yardage and weighed my scraps. I've been horrified at the amount of yardage I've estimated. I've spent some time thinking about potential problems and have worked out some rules for myself, and I've spent December frantically buying a few more things just in case. And now I am looking forward to January, and to 2017, and to this chance to learn more about myself as I focus on what I already have, instead of only thinking about the future.
