If you’ve been reading my blog for very long, you’ve probably heard me say more than once that I have to make things into a game for myself to stay motivated sometimes.

In fact, in my recent article on Battling Burnout in Love of Quilting Magazine, one of the things I suggest is making things into a game for yourself to help you stay on track.

I’m always trying to come up with new games to keep from getting bored, and last week, I landed on a good one, so I’ve decided to share it with you. And it’s not about food!

I’m a flitter by nature, so it’s very difficult for me to keep my attention on any one thing for very long. In some people, this might be diagnosed as Adult ADHD, and while I don’t have any such formal diagnosis, I DO know myself, and I have to make the flitting work to my advantage.

I get lots of interruptions every day. We live on a farm, so there’s always something happening. A storm blew down one of the goat barns and injured Agnes’s foot . . . we had to clean up the mess from said goat barn to keep anyone else from getting injured . . . my horse decided to try and slice off his eyelashes, and had to go to the emergency vet for stitches . . . we drove four hours to go pick up a load of fencing supplies, which had to be first loaded and then unloaded . . . and that means we’ll be rebuilding some fences in the near future . . . my parents need me a couple times a week to come help them . . . and lots of life stuff happens in between, some little, some big. It makes cooking and cleaning seem like child’s play sometimes!

So when I do get to do real work in the studio, I have to make the most of the time I have available. Which basically means FOCUS. Which I have a hard time with. Hence the games I make up to help me with that.

So my new challenge is called The Sticky Buns Challenge.

I’m forcing myself to sit down at my Sewing machine for 30 minutes every day to sew. My goal is to sew as much as I can during the 30 minutes, and I’m not allowed to get out of my seat. Sticking my buns to my chair and focusing on sewing as much as I can for 30 minutes.

Here are my self-imposed rules:

• • Prep work is key. I pile enough projects around my machine that I won’t run out of things to work on in the 30 minutes I’m there (and I have plenty to work on). I also wind bobbins, gather other materials I might need, etc.
• • No pressing allowed. Just sew, and nothing else. Just feeding pieces and units through the machine to further the projects along. Pressing can come after.
• • No getting up for any reason. No trimming, no “Oh, I forgot . . .” items, no potty breaks, no drink breaks (plan ahead), no excuses.
• • Set the timer when I sit down, and don’t get up or quit sewing until it goes off.

So far, it’s working! I’m getting a lot of sewing done that I would not have concentrated on as hard if I were not doing this challenge for myself. I love chain piecing anyway, so this is really working well for me. So my goal is to do this every day during July, and see what I can move forward. If it makes a huge difference in my productivity, which it appears it might, I may continue on after that — if not every day, then at least several times a week.

Sometimes it’s a struggle to choose a window of time when I will have 30 uninterrupted minutes, so it happens at various times of the day, but that’s OK. Whatever works!

If you’d like to try this, too, you can most certainly make up your own rules for yourself according to what you need. Maybe 15 minutes works better for you (maybe 45 minutes works for you!), maybe not every day is possible for you, maybe you can’t sew for that long without pressing, in which case, you could place your iron at your sewing station to keep your buns sticky!

Make up your own rules to help you stay focused for a period of time so you can be a bit more productive. Your brain will tell itself that for the next 30 minutes, this is your only option, so you’d better make the most of it!

If this works really well for machine sewing, I may incorporate it into my hand sewing as well. Progress won’t be as fast with hand stitching, but a dedicated 30 minutes at a time should make a difference!

And in some future posts, I’ll get to tell you what I’m actually working on!

One of those projects just might be this one:

My Cowboy spotted this vintage Pinwheel quilt on FaceBook Marketplace, and it reminded me of my Kathy’s Ramble quilt I made a couple years ago:

It was a fun quilt to make, and used up a lot of scraps, so now I’m thinking a bright-colored scrappy one is in my future next! I’ll keep you posted.