Looking Back as a Way to Move Forward

I was sitting in my studio yesterday thinking about what to do. I've finished up several big projects and now that it's summertime and I've met most of my deadlines I have a choice as to what comes next. Sometimes these open-ended creative moments can feel a bit paralyzing. Have you ever felt like you don't know where to go next?

Here is how I work through these transitions: I go backward. Going backward is my ticket forward.

Over the last seven years I've made many, many softie patterns. Some of them were fantastic and I've made them dozens of times, I've published them and I've sold them. Others, well, they were experiments. For some, at the time I designed that particular pattern, I just couldn't figure out how to make it come together properly. Designing softies requires a lot of three-dimensional thinking and there are aspects of some patterns that just boggle my mind. Most likely I threw away the failed softie I made from those patterns, but I saved the pattern pieces in a labeled envelope. And right now is the moment to pull them out!

Looking at those pattern pieces I can see the nugget of the idea I had those many months, sometimes even years, ago. I remember what I was trying to do, and which parts had stumped me, and I use those pattern pieces to begin again.

I start by tracing them onto fresh freezer paper and then erasing and redrawing, doing more research to try to figure out the shapes I need. I look at pictures from nature, at commerically made stuffed animals, at cartoons and illustrations. Sometimes I end up using a few of those original pattern pieces, but most of the time they all get edited and the originals get thrown out.

I find if I had the idea once, and was excited enough to spend time trying to make it into something, the excitement about that idea remains, and I've cooled off enough, and hopefully developed my skills enough, to sit down with it again and rework it.

In May of 2009 I made the patchwork dachshund on the left. I made one, as part of a book proposal I was writing, and then I put the pattern away. The other day when I pulled out the dachshund pattern envelope I could see right away all kinds of things about the body that needed to be revised and that got my creative juices flowing right away. And after a few hours of work it became the dachsund on the right.

And that's another benefit of starting with something you've already begun – the page isn't blank. Ususally it takes less time to revise something than it does to begin from scratch. This isn't to say revision is easy. I still had to make several new prototypes before the new dachshund pattern was perfected, but at least I knew where I was headed.

Do you ever revisit and rework old projects? Do you find it invigorating or frustrating?