A is for Achievement

Have you read Quilter's Home yet? If not, run out to your favorite book store and get a copy of it. It's not your regular quilting magazine ... it's a magazine for quilters with all our varied interests. I love Quilter's Home ... and Mark Lipinski is too funny.

Yes, there is a link to the title of this blog!

Back in March, Debbie Bates and Liz Kettle wrote a great article on designing your own Grand Patchwork System (GPS). I was rereading the article the other day, and it occurred to me that building my own System using their techniques might be fun as well as educational! It's all about plumbing the depth of our creativity and expanding our horizons. Yeah, I can do that! Using their alphabetic index of positive ideas, I chose "achievement" as my first word.

Sometimes I have so many ideas in my head, on paper, in magazines, tacked on my wall, and streaming at me from the Internet, that I get frozen into immobility. Then I know it's time to take a breath, get out my index cards and break things down into manageable pieces. Each project that I want to work on in any given month gets a card, and I break the project into steps. Ahhhhh now it doesn't look so unmanageable! And each task that gets completed gives me the feeling of achievement -- success -- forward moving. Not only that, but I pay myself for each step that I complete ... yep, $1 goes into my piggy bank for every step that I complete. And when I finally get the binding on a project, a whopping $10 goes in!

Here's an example of the steps to a project -- you can adapt it any way you want with more or fewer steps. This is for a quilt that I just finished that you can see in the Quilt Project show to the right.

Country Garden Checkerboard (started in 1996 and finished this year)
1. Count finished blocks
2. Sew any blocks already cut
3. Put rows together
4. Cut fabrics to finish blocks
5. Sew blocks
6. Finish rows
7. Attach borders
8. Quilt
9. Attach binding
10. Bind
11. Label

So how do you achieve your goals?