I spent last week at Ply Away soaking up the colorful fiber energy and learning so much about spinning, weaving, and dyeing!  It reminds me how much I love my fiber crafts.  It also reminds me how much I want to learn and how I struggle to make the time to accomplish it all. After another year of learning new things at Ply Away, my to-do and to-learn list is even longer.  I have been attending Ply Away every year since it started!

How will I take what I learned this year and the years before and do more? More importantly, how do I do more without falling into the productivity good and bad trap?

Why do I mention this? I was in a fun groove of knitting socks in spring last year. I knit about three pairs of socks in about six weeks. Rather than celebrating how much fun I had.  I started focusing on how much I had done. Then I started to judge why I couldn’t do that before and tried to figure out how I would keep doing it. Then I read something somewhere and it reminded me: “I was in fun groove knitting socks.”

So my first goal in doing more is to celebrate what I do accomplish and not what I haven’t accomplished yet.  I can look forward to what I want to accomplish.  It’s all a journey.  Because I am excited to make things with the fiber I got at Ply Away!

We all know life gets in the way. So I think there is a second part to creativity and getting shit done. It’s getting curious. What’s blocking me from finishing a project that’s almost done? Why did I stall out on that spinning project that I was so excited about? Why haven’t I picked up that crocheted granny square project?

That, my friends, is the beginning of the series.  I want to hold on to celebration and small wins. I want to get curious. I’ll be sharing things that I’m learning about myself that I hope helps you do the same.

Finally, here’s a sneak peek of the cotton yarn I’ve been spinning on my book charkha:

I plan to share more about this cotton-spinning journey with you in a future post, so it might inspire you to spin cotton yarn on a charkha or learn from my process for other goals you have.