1.5 Getting Back on the Horse

I knew the project would completely derail me. But its complete and wonderful and lovely and ... sigh. It took a LOT of work, a LOT of time. None of the work was hard, but there were times when it was tedious and times when it was downright boring, but I had deadlines I had to meet to be with the rest of the class, and so I ignored as much as I was able to - too bad I still had to go to work most of the weeks I was working on it.

I let myself get excited about this project a full month before the class started. I got the quilt shop lady excited when we were picking out fabrics for it. This excitement followed me through and helped me get through the boring parts. I knew the end result would be wonderful and it was. Today I want to talk about the excitement you feel for a project and how it plays into any project.

As a scientist, it is hard to think about how excitement will help with any experiment, but it really affects you. An experiment that you have a minimal amount of desire to finish will get put aside, will be hard to find the data for, and will be hard to find an appropriate hypothesis and questions to help guide your experiment. The results will be lackluster and results will show up. The quality still may be there, but the extra ... umph ... that certain special something .... will not show up in the final product. In the end, you will be unhappy with the product if the process is not good. The conclusion to any experiment will be brief, incoherent, and unsatisfying. However, the upside to this is it may raise further questions and further experiments to try out.

For example, this blog completely frustrates me. Not the excitement about creating it, but the tools used for creating it. Just like the wrong notions (or lack thereof) can make something you sew ten times harder than it really needs to be, this blog software is ten times harder than it needs to be. I should be able to drag & drop pictures in the middle of my text, but the pictures are the same size as the text editing software, and so drag & drop is not available as easily as it should be. Maybe it has to do with picture size, but I find myself not excited to finish, knowing how much struggle this is to do correctly. I tried once with preloading pictures into Word and that didn't correspond into anything different than what I am currently struggling with.

I want to get back on the (blogging) horse, but before I can do that well, I think I need a new saddle. Just as long as I know how much the new saddle will cost and how I will find it. Craftcast suggests to "get your butt in the chair, and keep crafting", and so I need to struggle before this comes out right (the paragraphs actually show up as I am seeing them when I write them - AAAAAA!!!!) but they also talk about knowing when / how to walk away to get a different perspective on things. Hopefully that new idea comes soon.