Try This: Just a little bit at a time

I'm creating things with less anxiety this year.

Welcome to Making Time. Each week, I share thoughts and ideas for making more time for yourself by building creative energy and establishing rituals and practices. If you’d like to follow along, you can subscribe for free.

After work last Thursday, I decided to stop off at the nearby antique mall in Portland rather than spend the next hour sitting in traffic.

This was exactly the right decision.

In addition to trying on a hooded black wool coat that made me look like a druid, eyeballing a collection of paintings of kittens, and swooning over lots of furniture I have no room for, I found this beauty stuffed into a basket in a corner, waiting for me.

Rusty insisted on modeling it.

It’s a beautiful log cabin quilt, hand tied, and in a versatile throw size. Something about it just feels magical to me, all those little scraps brought together into unexpected harmony.

For the last few years, each January I think, “I should make myself a quilt.”

I’ve made quilts for other people several times, and I’ve collected vintage ones, but I’ve never made one for myself. And each year, the months pass, and I never quite get around to it.

Mainly, this is because making a quilt is a big project that takes me weeks or months. It feels daunting, so I just never start.

I’ve noticed this tendency in myself in other areas of my life too, and now recognize it as a sign of both perfectionism and impatience. If I can’t go all the way, if I can’t envision a successful end result in the immediate future, if I don’t have the time right at this moment, I just won’t start.

So I’m trying something a little different: letting myself work in the smallest chunks possible.

If I don’t have time at the moment to do a project, instead of feeling frustrated and anxious, I ask myself, “What’s the smallest piece I can do right now?” Then I do it.

To celebrate and practice this mindset, I’m making myself a quilt!

But instead of getting hung up on designing it, planning it, and setting aside big chunks of time to sew, I thought to myself, “What’s the easy way to do this?”

And so, this year I’m making a sampler quilt with the scraps I already have, sewing just one block per month. I’ll put the whole thing together other the holiday break this December, and over the course of a year, just by fitting in a little work here and there, I’ll have a quilt.

Not just that, but a quilt created through the practice of patience.

So much anxiety comes from wanting things to be perfect and done as soon as possible, and I often forget the sense of accomplishment that comes from doing just the smallest step.

This is just one way I’m attempting to make things as easy as they can be in 2025.

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