So I’m sitting here surrounded by half-finished projects and swatches for a dozen designs and feeling just a little overwhelmed, even though I prefer to have approximately a millionty wips at any given time.
And then I realized what my block was: the design that was almost finished? I didn’t like it. And I figured I had to finish it first, since it was almost done, and I didn’t want to because I didn’t like it the way I really *needed* to like it to put the rest of the work into it and send it out into the world.
So I killed it. And I feel a little more free.
When I first started designing I was totally on fire. Everything I did seemed to get me somewhere, most every design I tried to put to yarn and then to paper worked, and I thought it really was that easy. I was wrong. Dead wrong. And now that I inhabit a space where 4 of 5 of the ideas I have don’t work out, or have been done, or fail to excite me for one reason or another, well…I love it just as much. But it’s slower and sometimes pretty frustrating.
Once upon a time when I was chasing an MFA in Creative Writing, one of the books I read about writing talked about how difficult it is to deal with the phrases and sentences and even whole passages that you absolutely love but have no place in the piece you are writing. The author referred to the process of weeding these out of a work as, “killing your babies.” And that’s how my design process has been running lately.
More than likely this will change again, and I’m putting my head down and slogging through until I hit that energy again. And trying to kill what I need to kill in the meantime.