Zatera Ul

I recently reread The Goal: A Process of Ongoing Improvement, by Eliyahu Goldratt. It’s a business book from the 1980’s, actually a novel about a manufacturing plant, but still has some useful ideas. The plant management in the book spends most of it chasing down and dealing with bottlenecks in their manufacturing process, using hints from a mysterious physicist who somehow knows more about their problems than they do. Eventually, the author gets into his Theory of Constraints–the bottlenecks in the process arise from the constraints on the system, and you can optimize flow through the process by optimizing the flow through the bottlenecks.

Anyway, this got me thinking about what bottlenecks there were in my crafting process. The first and most obvious answer is: sewing. I have about half a dozen sewing projects all cut out, just waiting to be sewn up–I lose interest after the creative decisions have been made and all that’s left is the final assembly.

I’ve just started on a new project, a quilt, and I changed my process around: I put all the fabric and trimmings for the quilt in a big basket, and I am cutting the pieces as I go, one little rectangle at a time, and sewing them onto one twelve-inch square of backing fabric at a time. This leaves me with a constant stream of creative decisions to make: which fabric to choose next, where it will go on the square I’m working on, which size and shape to cut the piece, the most efficient way to sew it to the backing. I have been doing one square a day for the past few days, and have been having more fun sewing than usual. (Despite the constant crotchets of my sewing machine.)

So far the only material that I’ve purchased for the quilt is a pink curtain, because I didn’t have enough pink fabric. For the rest, I’m using old clothes, sheets, inherited thread and trimmings, and my old collection of embroidery thread. The color scheme is green, pink, and white.