THE ANXIETY OF THE UNFINISHED: Sewing UFOs, WIPs, Unfinished Sewing Projects
My current pile of projects in progress.
What do you call them in your sewing room? WIPs? UFOs? Fails? Do you hang them on the back of the door, where they will haunt you, or do you stuff them away to the bottom of a bin, unnamed, and pretend they don’t exist? I am talking about something I personally dread: unfinished projects.
Generally speaking, I don’t like to leave anything unfinished. It looms over me, and anxiety builds. Anything from an email draft to a basket of crumpled clean laundry, to all of life’s bigger and scarier responsibilities can cause me to push things off until “later". The stress builds and grows, but it doesn’t necessarily mean I’m going to do anything about it (I’m especially talking about the laundry).
My most time consuming WIP is perhaps the most annoying one: I could just hem it and remove the trim and call it a day. But I want to remove the sleeves and re-make them in the blue print, and I need to complete about 8” of the hand sewn trim. Then I can hem it and be truly done with it.
I’m very disciplined in my creative pursuits, and when I was in full swing with my jewelry business, I had a rule with myself that once a batch of charms had been started, it had to be finished within a week. That was a really tight turnaround. But if I left things to linger at any stage, I would risk losing momentum or getting distracted. So I trained myself to finish what I started before moving on to the next thing, and through this, learned that I loved checking things off my list. It was satisfying.
I am much looser with sewing - it is distinctly not a business, and sometimes you have to set a project aside while you source buttons or a zipper, or research a way to modify the armscye after everything is already half assembled. Maybe things require more emotional energy (or math) than you are able to accommodate this week, and you plan to return to it when you are feeling refreshed. I know some people are constantly chasing the thrill of starting a project, but that’s not really my issue; my favorite part of the process is when I am about 75% done….and I often make it to that mile marker (or beyond) before walking away.
I bet I could finish these in 15 minutes: corduroy trousers from the Japanese pattern book “Big Clothes, Small Clothes”. They fit, they are well made. They need a button and buttonhole, and they are not my style. So I lost momentum and motivation. (Sorry about the lint.)
For years, I have started one sewing project, worked on it until it is almost complete, and only then allowed myself to pull out pattern tissue for the next garment in the queue. When I got back into sewing in 2018, I would read online sewing forums and see the term “UFOs”. It was months before I understood they were referencing “Unfinished Objects” aka sewing projects stuck in some stage of incomplete. I was a little surprised by how many people did this, and by how many projects they would say they had stacked up! I imagined how annoying it would be to have that pile in my sewing room, how it would nag at me, how I would want to actually wear those things.
The only thing between me and wearing these pajama pants is winding a new bobbin and about 5 minutes of sewing. Shameful! lol
Well, well, well. Look at me now! Ha! I currently have five (oh no...six) projects at varying stages of WIP, and varying levels of passion around ever completing them:
My blue & yellow Liberty blouse with hand pleated trim that keeps dragging on forever.
Corduroy pants from a Japanese sewing book that just need a button and buttonhole.
Pajama pants that need a simple hem (but I’d have to wind a new bobbin), why has that caused me to wait almost a month?
A criss cross red dress that just isn’t working, and anyway, it doesn’t get hot enough here to wear things like that, so I can’t muster the energy to fuss with it.
And my newest project, my 70s Victorian dress in black & white daisy print with colorful ruffles. It just needs a skirt lining (the lining is currently hanging to dry) and a small hook & eye at the back of the neck.
Oops, just remembered the olive green jersey knit dress I started - it’s a super fast and wearable project…..I’d like to cross that one off the list, but even quick projects take time and focus.
This dress has me so annoyed with myself. I should have made a muslin of the bodice - it has a poor fit at the moment. It’s also very difficult to get on and off, which is always a huge turn off for me. The skirt is great, and I bet I have enough scraps to make a totally different bodice if I can’t salvage this one. This WIP will be stuffed away for a few months, I’ve lost interest.
As I let my pile grow, I am aware that I am creating a cycle of anxiety: I feel anxious that things are unfinished, but instead of just focusing and fixing that problem, I add a new project to the pile. Making the problem (pile) bigger makes it less acute. How could I possibly be expected to finish 6 unfinished things! One would be an afternoon or two, but six?! You couldn’t possibly expect me to do anything about that!
I’ve been working on this dress steadily and luckily haven’t run into any major hiccups. The dress needs two hook & eyes sewn at the back neckline, and I am adding a slippery lining to the skirt. I washed the lining and it is currently hanging to dry, hopefully I won’t run into any snags from here on out.
We’ve lived in Scotland for about six months now, so I am overdue to write a life update post, but as I’ve written about in my last update, I’m more emotionally brittle than I was before the move. I think my stack of unfinished projects is a counterintuitive attempt at feeling in control - I am in charge of what gets finished and what gets cast aside; I am in charge of my own sense of accomplishment (which apparently I won’t allow myself to have).
When I finish a sewing project, I hang it where I can see it, sometimes on the bookshelf in the living room, sometimes on the wall of my sewing room. I enjoy seeing them completed! When I begin the next project, I move that finished one to my garment rack (this is my only closet). I love choosing a place for it and seeing how it works with other pieces in my wardrobe.
Regardless of the logic, it feels bad. In the past, if I had one or two discarded WIPs, I didn’t really think about them or care, but this is too many! So after typing out my list, I think I could begin to chip away at this list. I can’t put too much pressure on myself around it, or I’ll avoid it. But sometimes breaking things down to a simple list and checking them off can make it seem less daunting. Do you have any advice for how to deal with unfinished projects? I would love to hear it. XO, Martha