Wool and Honey’s Gideon Method

Confession time: I hate making lists. I don’t do planners. I blame 7th grade where we had to do weekly planner check in classes. Being told to organize doesn’t work for me. Which brings me to my current dilemma; there’s a crap-ton of stuff on my sewing table (which is not a to-do list) and I need to work through it. What’s an Eye Candy Quilter to do? Procrastinate and scroll through social media of course.

And that’s how I found Wool and Honey’s Gideon Method. Click here to see the first post explaining it, and here to see the second post. Wool and Honey is a yarn shop in Cedar, Michigan that I really look forward to visiting once we’re allowed to leave our little spaces again. You see, both of the Eye Candy Quilters love all types of fiber and fiber crafts. We’re multicraftual. And knitters have just as many WIPs (works in progress), PhDs (projects half done), and UFOs (unfinished objects) as quilters do. So how do you tame all the pretties when getting started is half the fun? The Gideon Method. It seems similar to something called the Pomodoro Method but that doesn’t involve knitting or crafting so Gideon Method it is!

The gist is you make a small list, and you chunk your time and work on your list in rotation. You can’t escape the binding if your time chunk isn’t up! No avoiding that mitered border you promised you’d do if you had the time! You do the thing. And like it says in the second post linked above, that’s not to say that you don’t have flexibility to change stuff. Make that last minute baby quilt. Change the time structure. Increase your list size. But to me it’s a different way of thinking about getting stuff done that will be helpful for a lot of people that also might be list-averse or just overwhelmed by the size of their list.

Now, I’ve been thinking about this off and on (since March maybe?) but I’m going to commit to doing it. Getting started is half the battle, right? So here’s the Gideon Method, helping me get something/anything done.

And hopefully before the blonde lemur/Cirrus decides to help rearrange pieces. Again.