I set goals for myself and beat my head against a brick wall. Eventually I realize it isn't attainable, so I just move on. I am this way on lots of things. Just who I am. I only donate or give away quilts. I would never enter a quilt show or any competition.

I only quilt for my own pleasure. Mojo comes and goes. I never have a deadline. I’m fine with it. My life has a routine and rhythm which means everything that needs to get done gets done.

Boy... i’m thinking you all have been running around in my head! 😊 i agree with all of this, but sometimes we can lose track of why we really quilt. For me i just plain love it and even if it isnt exactly going as planned, its still mine on my schedule and it makes me happy (even if my results arent exactly as i expected).

Most of us go to work every day (or used to) and we have had enough of stress and deadlines, etc. We quilt because we want to and it feeds our soul.

Have i entered something in a competition? Yes, i have and i got my first and only blue ribbon. But never again for me cuz its just too stressful! I’m in heaven with a bunch of seemingly unrelated scraps making charity quilts from start to finish. I have a number of my own quilt tops waiting to be finished but i’m not making a list. They will get done when it moves me. Period.

I bought a sitdown longarm last year but i dont quilt for others ( with the exception of charity quilts). I am so happy not to have to cram those quilts into that comparatively tiny space on my domestic sewing machine anymore! But i’m not pushing my learning process at this point - rather i learn on a need to know basis and be happy with that! Hoping by the time i retire in a few years that my skills will have progressed more, but if they dont i’ll work on them at that time! I just wanna sit in my Happy Place and just putz along... and i’ve finally gotten old enough to realize that isnt such a bad thing to aspire to!

Thanks everybody... happy to know im not alone!

We think alike!

yup, sometimes you just want to back the pressure off and sew for enjoyment. Wish I was there right now!

I too have made sketches of a quilt that I want to make for a quilt show...someday. It's actually putting part of 3 different quilt patterns together as one. it sits here on my desk looking at me because I know that if I take it to the sewing room it will get lost. But for now, I'm dealing with strings, and I'm surprised that I like doing them.

I set goals for myself at the beginning of the year, but they are more like achievements I want make. Like using up the vast stash of precuts I have amassed, making lap quilts for a charity, or challenge myself to something I have never tried before. If I don't succeed it is no big deal to me. This is my way of keeping me sane and should be nothing but fun. Stress is my enemy, and I don't allow it in my house.

Been there and let it get the better of me. I did not touch a piece of fabric for better than a year. I want to love everything from the smell of the fabrics to the last stitch of the quilt to trimming of every loose thread. I was turning out a quilt every month just to be prepared for the holidays and frequently something in between for a special gift along the way. The joy went out for a while. Now I am having fun again. Not much gift giving and even quilting for myself. I even started doing charity quilts that have no pressure to finish just for the fun of quilting. I even just finished the quilt a couple weeks ago that I did just to teach myself some new techniques. And I get to keep that one too. It is so much fun to quilt without all kinds of pressure that takes the fun out of a great hobby.

Well, seems many of us (including me!) have been giving ourselves unreasonable goals, and injuring (if not killing) the joy we find in quilting. For myself, it looked like a spider's web--a commitment to teaching classes, our guild's 25th anniversary quilt show, several unexpected commissions, an unexpected need for a baby quilt, and finally DH deciding that 'we' should enter some craft sales--all in the space of about 4 months.

I took yesterday off. No, not from my sewing machine, but from my goals. Surprisingly, I accomplished a fair amount--and I enjoyed the process. I do have a goal for today--housework!! And my reward will be time at my sewing machine! I like that attitude/outlook/feeling much better.

I am a goal oriented person but in retirement I have rethought it just a bit. Quilting is my hobby. It is not my profession and I have the right to sew as I please. That said, I do have a list of projects I want to do and I have “kitted” several. Still, I can insert another project if there is one I would like to try. I usually finish the quilts as I go so I don’t have a lot of UFO’s....that would probably put me over the edge. I am simply a Type “A” personality and that doesn’t seem to be changeable.