My last block took me way longer than it should have to finish. At one point, I had two seams left to sew, but I put off working on it for an entire week, because they were long seams (4.5 whole inches long!), and I apparently didn’t feel like I could commit the time on a weeknight to sew those seams.

Once I finally sat down to work on them, each of those seams took me nine minutes. That’s right, nine minutes each, including the time to pin everything together, thread the needle, tie the knot, stitch the seam … the whole shebang. Nine minutes.

And then I decided to do my first advanced difficulty block. Granted, it didn’t look super difficult. Yes, those triangles in the corners are pretty darn tiny (think three-eights-penny instead of half-penny), but the thing that made this block really dauntingly advanced is that it has a lot of tiny pieces. A lot. My concern was that if I was taking a week to stitch two seams, this block, with its 41 seams, was going to take me almost five months to complete.

So, I reached back into the distant past for a solution …

One of my elective classes in high school was sewing. By the time you got to class and took all your supplies out to get started – and then left time at the end of class to put everything away – there was maybe 35 minutes of actual sewing time in any given class period. And yet, I got several garments sewn over the course of the semester. In my mind, the real key to productivity there was being forced to sit down and work on it for 35 minutes every weekday.

So, I decided I was going to take the same approach here. 35 minutes seemed like a bit much (I do work full-time, after all), but I felt like even I could manage to sit down and sew for 15 minutes a day. Who doesn’t have 15 minutes a day?

Me, as it turns out. I didn’t get the 15 minutes done every day, but I’d usually make it up within a day or two, because once I got started, sometimes I’d keep going beyond the allotted 15 minutes for that day. Other days, it was a struggle to get to 15 minutes. I think the first day all I did was find the fabric I wanted to use. But I did 15 minutes a day, (almost) every day.

Yes, it did still take me nearly a month to complete the block, but I felt like there was steady progress there. Left to my own devices, I’m sure I would have dragged it out for way longer than a month … like maybe five months. It does have several long seams, after all.

The jury’s still out on whether this new approach affected the quality of my work. Some of the diamond points don’t quite come to the edge of the square like they’re supposed to, and some of those triangle points aren’t as pointy as I’d like. I can’t decide if this is because I wasn’t working in large chunks of time where I could really focus, or if it was just because of how tiny and numerous the pieces were in this block.

Either way, I’m happy to have my first advanced block under my belt. Now it’s on to the next challenge, 15 minutes at a time.