How I Feel About It and What I'm Going to Do

After my recent post full of analysis and conclusions about my efficacy in my fibre arts projects, you might wonder, how do you feel and what will you do.

I feel okay.  It's better to know how work flows and to know what to change.  It's understandable why I have the WIPs I do.  It's a given that the opportunities that move me to action involve gathering, understanding, and giving out information.  But my motivation for learning to spin yarn was to re-skill, to learn to meet a basic need independent* of fossil fuel or as close as I can get.  My hope is that, by subordinating the scholarly WIPs to practical WIPs for handspun clothes, I will make what I learn into something tangible and visible, and the experience will make me better able to pass along knowledge about how handspun clothes are made.

I should say, my post only discussed prioritization and limiting WIPs but kanban has more improvement areas than that in Anderson's book, Kanban.

For now, these all look like places to start.  I have some doubts about being able to stick to them, but I will name them.

• reduce the amount and the depth of fibre arts correspondence I initiate
• reduce the time I spend searching for språng items in museum collections
• maintain blog posting but cap the time spent preparing posts
• set a minimum and maximum number of pages to read per day in whatever textile book I have going
• spin yarn on a more regular and consistent basis, yarn intended to go into a finished item for me
• look at the two WIPs that are at a standstill and get them going again somehow instead of starting new ones
• either delay working on the fixed date WIP, since the deadline is far in the future, or work on it soon to get it off the kanban board, making sure it results in a wearable handspun item for me
• look for opportunities to fix dates for tasks that relate to my goal of handspun clothes
• stop fixing dates for tasks that fail to result in handspun clothes, with the exception of a weaving class project

*a good thing to remember today on the Fourth of July.  The thirteen colonies in British North America that had a revolution went for textile independence among other things.  So did colonial India under British rule.