I’ve found with projects, there’s a very clear trend that emerges with everything I attempt. I even came up with a name for it while I was sewing my wedding dress–The Creative Cycle. When you start a project, you’re full of enthusiasm, motivation, high hopes, and big dreams. Choosing the materials and supplies is all fun and exciting. The project begins, and inevitably reaches a point where the adrenaline high has run off. Even if things go fairly smoothly, there’s generally some element of “the grind” that you go through to get things done. If the project is especially difficult, this phase eventually turns into the crisis point. “What am I doing? Why did I think I could do this? Is all the work I’m putting into this worth it?” 

If you stick with it long enough, you get to the stage I like to call “finishing touches.” This stage lasts at least 4x longer than you think it will, and you’ll continually be telling yourself or others that it will take “just 20 minutes” (it will take you an hour) or “a couple more days” (it will take you 2 months). 

Around here, I’m somewhere between the crisis and finishing touches stages. The number of small little projects that still remain undone seem to be never ending. Each evening that I spend there after the kids go to bed, I convince myself that it’ll be the last one before we can start winding bolts of fabric and putting them on the shelves–and it’s been about two weeks.