Welcome to Part II of my scrap series. It's highly likely that every post will actually be about scraps, but whatever. In the last post, I mentioned that working with scraps forces me outside of my comfort zone -- turns out one reason is because they are one of the best mediums (media?) for that purpose as working with them is super low investment. They're small. They were going to get thrown out anyways. My immense fear of being bad at something is somewhat mitigated. What do I have to lose?
I think it was the Ann Wood 100 Day Stitch Book Challenge that pushed me the hardest, but in the best way possible. My so-called low investment experiment with mixed results.
A short synopsis: stitch every day for 15 minutes a day for 100 days to create 20 pages that are then stitched into a book. I wasn't convinced I'd make the book, or even that I'd finish the challenge, but it did end up being a great exercise in focusing on process instead of on end states.
I had decided at the beginning to try to go in to each page with no final plan and just see how things progressed as I stitched whatever I felt like on a given day. Sticking to this was really, really hard, and I didn't always -- I was afraid it would turn out bad or ugly if I didn't have a plan in mind that must result in something perfect and good.
And it turned out some of them did feel like they ended up ugly or bad, but some didn't, and some I changed my mind about as I worked on them. Ultimately, I learned to really enjoy (and fear, haha) the unexpected results of each day's work -- what I ended up with was always a surprise. Sometimes a new idea or inspiration that wasn't there in the beginning came as I worked on a page, and sometimes it led me to new spaces I wouldn't otherwise have explored.
Turns out I didn't finish the 100 days and I didn't make the book, but what I did end up with was the realization that my fear of being bad, of creating something that was terrible, was not always justified. And in many cases, I ended up with something better than what I could have imagined from the beginning, something that used colors and fabrics and stitches and shapes and compositions that I never would have considered had I designed it all in advance.
Lack of planning left room for expansion beyond the limits of my own thinking. Working with scraps meant that it was okay if it was bad.
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