Pay it forward

I recently spotted on Sarah’s blog narcoleptic in a cupboard that she was participating in Pay it Forward. It’s a really cute idea for crafty peeps in the blogging community to send handmade gifts to 3 other bloggers who then each have to do the same for 3 other bloggers (and so on). I signed up pronto as I think this is a fab way to share our skills and anyway who doesn’t like receiving a gift in the post?! The rules are as follows:

The first 3 people who comment on this blog post will receive a handmade gift from me.

In return, you must FIRST write a blog post explaining Pay It Forward 2011.
Then send out a handmade gift to the first 3 visitors who leave a comment.  It doesn't have to be sewn, it could be knitted or drawn or embroidered, anything as long as it's handmade
Take your time, you have 365 days to do it.

So if you fancy a little handmade gift from me please comment and take part. I have 365 days to do it though so you won't know when to expect it!

Results from the sewing productivity project

So because the disaster of my laptop breaking, I cannot do fancy charts showing how I spend my free time as part of Tilly’s sewing productivity project.  However I did make notes over the past two weeks and discovered a few things which I will now share:

I don’t use my evening free-time wisely.

I spend a lot of time cooking / washing up in the evenings, at least a hour on the days when I cook.  I think I need to cut down on the fancy meals during the week, because this is cutting in on my evening free time.  I also need to organise my evenings better as I do not utilise this time well.  I often sit on the sofa and put my feet up when I get in (just in time for neighbours or home and away) and then don’t get up till after 7-7.30.  Bad me!!

I don’t manage well with big overwhelming projects. 

My grey skirt has remained untouched basically because I need a good chunk of time (say 3-4 hours) to sit down an figure out where I got, what I need to do next and also how to attach the lining to the skirt at the zipper (see this post of details).  In the evening I am usually tired and need something I can pick up and put down quite easily.  Or at least I need to have a notebook where I write these things down and have everything ready to go when I next want to work on a bigger project.  [By the way a skirt may be a quickie project normally for most people but for me at the moment it’s a biggie!]

This leads onto the next point:

I need a dedicated sewing space! 

Currently everything is stashed behind our sofa and I use the dining table to sew on.  Having to faff around unpacking everything and set up my machine, re-pressing everything that has been sat stacked up behind the sofa, and rummaging around trying to find certain bits of equipment is a real pain in the posterior.  Likewise having to clear it all up afterwards, it just takes up too much time.  I need to be able to leave things mid-progress, and I need to be able to create a mess and leave it there.  It’s just how I roll. This is the space I plan to utilise, it’s part of a spare room we have in our flat.  Well it’s actually separate to our flat on the communal hallway but half of it is mine to use, lucky me.

As you can see the other half is used by my lovely man for man-things.  Any advice on how to create a cheap partition would be fab!

Anyway those were my major obstructers of productivity.  However there were some interesting positives I gleaned from this project.  They were the following:

I work a lot better with small manageable goals. 

I made the purses over a few evenings and gave myself a clear goal each time.  In this case they were, cut out all the pieces and iron on the interfacing in evening one, sew them up in evening two and lastly glue the frames on in evening three.  This was great as each task took 30 minutes to an hour to complete and it was easily manageable.  Breaking down projects into smaller chunks really works for me.

Deadlines / timetables are great (if you make them realistic).

I gave myself too many things to do by Easter and had to drop a couple just because I ran out of time.  However having a schedule to stick to gives me something to follow and keeps me focused, as I am [very] easily distracted.

Something else I really need to face up to is that I just don’t have as much free time as I’d like at the moment.  At least till the end of June after my accountancy course is over I just can’t churn out projects on a weekly basis like many of the other bloggers out there.  That’s not great news for my blog as I won’t have much to show over the next few months, but I will give myself a few smaller easier projects to keep things ticking over.  Plus I plan to do a little makeover series of posts on my sewing space, as I make it workable and pretty, so that’ll be nice.

So overall my plan for improved productivity is as follows:

  

Sort out my sewing space!!

Don’t try and do more than I can manage right now

Give myself a "realistic" schedule for the projects I choose to start

Break down all my projects into little chunks, and a have a list on which I can tick off each one when complete

Thanks to Tilly for this great idea.  I am enjoying reading everyone else’s findings and tips

More speed, less work! My time and motion study



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I've signed up for Tilly's Sewing Productivity Project.  Basically we have to analyse how we spend our time and try and find ways to improve our sewing productivity. 

Doing a study on how I spend my time reminds me of this fab children’s TV show I watched as a child called Bertha.  It was about a factory machine called Bertha [hence the pic above], who (obviously) was alive and had her own personality.  She’d make different things every week, and was helped out by various other peeps in the factory and office.  Anyway in one episode the Foreman Mr Duncan decides to do a time and motion study on everyone, and struts around with a big clipboard observing everyone, and spent most of the episode shaking his head, tutting loudly then saying “too slow” or “more speed” and scribbling furiously on his clipboard. 



Source

The moral of the episode was that sometimes it’s quality not quantity that counts when working, and that you have to enjoy the process, not just get things done as quickly as possible.  So although I want to measure how I spend my time, I’m also going to do a qualitative analysis (I know get me right, I used a big word!) on how well that time was spent. 

For example, maybe I spend a night watching a film with my fella, which initially may seem fairly unproductive.  But we both have a lot on work-wise and both have things on during the week, so sometimes relaxing together over a film and a bottle of wine now and again can be time well spent!  Equally if I spend 2 hours sewing one evening, but actually fuss about for 20 minutes because I can’t find my paper scissors or my water soluble fabric marker pen thingy or whatever, then that was time poorly spent.  Do you see?  I know one of my biggest issues is lack of a proper sewing space, and maybe if I see the time I actually spend faffing and setting up before / tidying up after sewing I will buck my ideas up and sort my sewing space plans out!!

Now for the boring bit; laying down some ground rules for the quantitative side of things:

Sleeping, working & time at college are all unavoidable time activities as in I have no choice in these activities.  However I will record those hours as I can control when I go to work (I’m on flexi time so can start as early as 8 or as late as 10, and can finish at any time between 4 and 6 as long as I get my 8 hours in it’s cool) and I can decide on the time I go to bed or get up in the morning.

Hooping (and travelling time to hoop class), cleaning, socialising, watching TV, sewing, embroidery, reading, cooking, project work, homework and so on fit in as free time activities as I do these through choice.  Homework and project work technically must be done, but once my course finishes this time will effectively become free again so I want to see how much more time it gives me.  Likewise I am starting to think I spend too much time cooking fancy meals during the week and need to start speeding things up and making simpler things on work nights so keeping a record of cooking time works for me (anything over half an hour is waaay to long I reckon).

I am breaking down my time into half hourly blocks, obviously total hours in a day are 24, so 48 blocks of time per day.  If I must I can always get picky and do 15 minutes on the odd occasion, but I want to avoid making myself actually include a “time and motion study” category in this thing, as recording every 15 minutes will just take too much time.

I will create a simple table to record time taken up by each activity in each day like below:

Exciting huh!  Then I can do a fancy pie chart to show how I spend my time each day.

Oh and in other news, I just received my custom labels in the post.

Pretty!

What should Laura make with this? No. 1

I have a confession to make.

When I first had sewing lessons and actually managed to make a couple of things, I might have got a tad over excited about the prospect of being able to sew.  Soon after the course finished I went on a bit of a splurge [read massive huuuge ridiculous splurge] and bought a lot of fabric and quite a few patterns, with no real focus or forethought behind said purchases. 

I then hit a few hurdles over recent months, one being having no time to sew due to struggling to find time to study whilst working, the other being an issue to do with pattern fitting which I will cover in another post soon, so have not really made much in the way of clothing (although I have made plenty of other things).  As a result most of the patterns have remained untouched, as has the fabric.

I feel quite guilty about this now, as my bank balance is suffering somewhat, and I don’t feel I’ve really justified my purchasing by being productive and actually making things.

A lot of the fabric I bought because I thought it was nice, and had no plan in my head of what I was going to do with it.  Now I have banned myself from buying any more fabric or patterns until I have used up some of my existing stash and made use of a pattern or two that I already own.

Therefore in an effort to be more productive with my existing stash I am planning to make this theme “What should Laura make with this?” a regular feature on my blog, and am hoping my readers and followers will offer advice and suggestions of what to do with each item I post about.

Note: simple projects are preferred at the moment, just because there’s more chance I will find time to make them which increases the likelihood that you might actually get to see me post about the finished result!

So for post No. 1 in this series I have decided to start with two lengths of fabric.

The first is a 1/2 metre piece of linen/cotton blend fabric by Echino which I bought in sale at M is for Make.

Pink isn’t really my colour but I loved the design so thought I’d snap it up while it was on offer.  I was thinking of turning it into a bag, maybe for my embroidery bits and bobs, as I don’t see me using a pink bag on a regular basis when going out and about.  However I have no bag pattern in mind, and am also open to alternative suggestions about what I could do with this.  If you have any recommendations of good bag patterns (preferably simple in design and free in price), or other things (home dec, accessories and clothing ideas welcome) please let me know.

The second fabric is 3 metres of medium weight cotton I bought in Ikea back in October. 

At the time I thought it would make curtains for the bedroom in our new flat, but for reasons I won’t go into that’s not a viable option (not least because 3 metres is nowhere near enough fabric to cover the windows!!)

The design on this one is quite big, see the pic below for an idea of scale, so its not ideal for clothing – but if you disagree do say so as I am open to all suggestions.

The vague idea I had was to maybe make a bedspread, but I’ve never done patchwork or quilting before and again the design is so big I’d have to keep the fabric pieces quite large.  I am keen to hear any ideas here as I think it’s a funky design, also the pinky parts match the colour of the walls in our bedroom (our flat’s rented so I can’t repaint them even if I wanted to). 

Right that's the end of post 1.  Can't wait to read your suggestions!