Thoughts About Creative Enthusiasm

 I was going to get a HaikuCat email list started, but when I went on the website to get it done everything seemed way more complicated than it should be and I don’t really want that on my plate today. Maybe one day I’ll get around to it.

I wanted to talk about a couple of different things, but it centers around creative burnout and feeling obligated, which seems to be what I keep coming back here to write about. I’ll start at the beginning though, and the beginning is really the middle and it’s a middle that seems to happen to me over and over and over again. I was feeling burnt out and depressed and full of doubt about my creativity, about my micro business, about my social media presence, about all of it. And I say it happens over and over because it really seems like I just keep getting to a point where I have to have some sort of reckoning with myself to be able to go on at all. Will this pattern just continue on forever, for the rest of my life? Because it’s exhausting.

Basically, despite knowing that I don’t do very well with a sense of self-imposed obligation in my work, I had been swinging more toward buckling down and focusing on what I thought I should do in order to get my Etsy shop to really take off. My theory has been that if I want to have any chance of having a sustainable business, I’m going to need to create a bigger library of embroidery patterns. One of the main problems I’ve had in the past with making patterns has been being unable to work under self-imposed pressure. But what I wanted to do was create a pattern a month, to see if I could do it. I just knew that I would be setting myself up for failure if I did it the way I had in the past, where I would design, stitch, write the pattern and then release it right as I finished. I knew that having to crank them out once a month was going to create problems and resistance within myself.

So I came up with a plan. I would spend 3 months getting myself 3 months ahead of the game. If I knew I had a backlog of three patterns ready to go, I thought, it would relieve some of the pressure and I would be able to keep designing, stitching, and writing patterns at a variable pace, as long as I was keeping myself somewhat ahead. Sometimes the pattern-writing could be quicker, sometimes slower, and in the times when I was not working on patterns, I could work on finished pieces to sell, things that could maybe be more experimental or complex in their design.

What I found, instead, was that I was still putting off working on patterns. September rolled around and I had one finished design, with two versions stitched. I had not begun writing the pattern and I found myself continually putting it off. Worse than that, every time I came to my creative work, I had to work past this blah, down, sludge of a feeling, which I seemed to have even about non-pattern related work.

Around this time I listened to an episode of a podcast called, “Creative Pep Talk” by Andy J. Pizza. The title of the episode is, “3 Things to do When Nothing is Moving Quick Enough in Your Creative Journey.” One of the things he talked about was not taking on projects that you are not 100% enthusiastic about. Or, rather, not taking on projects because you think you should.  It was a bit of an eye-opener for me. Or, really, reminding me of something I already knew.

I had to ask myself whether I was making patterns because I wanted to or because I thought I should. 

The truth is that the answer is ambiguous for me right now. For sure, there is a certain sense of foot-dragging that happens every time I go to make one. That’s as true for the one I just finished as it was for the first three I wrote. And I think that there are two elements at play here. One: I haven’t really sold a lot of them. I have to believe that if I was selling them consistently and getting some positive feedback from people who enjoyed using them, that I would probably find a lot more enjoyment in creating them. There’s no way to know without it happening though, so my plan to create a larger library of patterns in my shop was a way to try to get to that point.

But the second element had to do with a feeling I was getting when I was writing the patterns. A kind of irritation and annoyance. Well, let me put it this way. When I purchase embroidery patterns I get annoyed with what I feel is excessive hand-holding. This is not to say that I don’t love the patterns that I have bought—it’s just that the part that I find to be most valuable is the design itself. But every pattern boasts of being multiple pages of detailed instructions and photos and to me it always feels like I have to wade through a whole lot of extraneous stuff to get to part I want and the part that I need: the design to transfer, the colors they used, and the stitches they used. My problem was that I wasn’t writing my patterns in the efficient way that I would want patterns to be written for me.

Or, at least, that is a part of the problem that I can definitely identify. So, for my latest pattern I decided to just do it my way. I included the transfer patterns (right at the beginning, because they are the most important part of any pattern), stitch notes instead of a stitching guide (basically a list of the stitches and colors I used), a list of places where one can find tons of tutorials about how to do individual stitches or just get started and learn the basics, and a few close-up photos for reference. Creating the pattern in this way lifted a huge amount of the stress I was carrying off of my shoulders. 

One of the other things I feel about patterns is that they are more interesting when they are a stepping off point. I’d much prefer someone take my design and apply their own sense of creativity to it than to feel like they had to follow a set of instructions and then possibly feel bad if it doesn’t come out looking perfect. Want to try a different color here? A different stitch there? Add or subtract an entire element? Go for it! Have fun!

I do wonder whether my understanding of what people want from an embroidery pattern is fundamentally flawed. Maybe no one wants what I’ve just described. The thing is there’s no way of knowing without just putting it out there and seeing. So that’s what I’ve done. To be completely honest, I don’t know if writing patterns is my thing. But if it’s going to have any chance of being something I’m 100% enthusiastic about, it’s probably going to be patterns written in this way. And, no matter how much I think I should write and release a pattern a month, that’s just not going to happen. I just need to accept that I don’t really work well that way.

Back to creative enthusiasm. I have a long, long list of ideas for things to stitch on my Keep Notes app on my phone. Once I finished up with the pattern, I went to my list and chose the thing that excited me the most and I got started creating a sketch for it. I’ve advanced to the stitching stage and whether or not it ever becomes a streamlined pattern, I can definitely say that I am 100% on board for it.

If you have read this far, I would like to say thank you. I’d like to give you a little coupon, because that is what I was planning on doing with the email list that I don’t have the energy to figure out right now. This will be good for one month and it can be used on anything in my shop for 10% off. 

BLOGGYTHANKYOU