It's Okay To Give Up — Stitching in the Woods blog

It’s a couple months into your temperature project and you’re getting a better idea of what your final project will look like. You may like what you see. You may not. If the latter is true, I’m here to tell you that it’s okay to give up.

If you’re happy with your temperature project, great! But you can still read this to get some tips for your other projects, too.

Reason

Much like Gibbs says in Pirates of the Caribbean, “reason’s got nothin’ to do with it.” The “it” for our purpose is why you don’t like your project after you start making at least some visible progress on it. Sometimes it just doesn’t seem as pleasing as you thought it would.

But just because your feeling isn’t based on reason doesn’t mean you should ignore it. This is especially important in such a time-consuming project as most temperature projects are. If you don’t like what you’re working on, you’re going to find more and more excuses to avoid working on it.

All you need is love

When you first love another person, you often overlook faults that they have because you’re excited and are overall more positive in your view of them. Over time this can change and you usually start to notice their faults more. You may even start to get irritated every time they use their blue ink pen on something you already wrote on in black ink. Just kidding. Maybe. (Those links are to pens we make.)

Your relationship to your project can progress in much the same way. When you start out you’re excited about it and may not notice faults in planning or execution. But as you do more and more work, the excitement will start to wear off. Then you’ll start seeing your project with new eyes and you may not like what you see. Just like our relationships with other people, this may happen much sooner than we’d hope.

For the record, I feel compelled to say while I don’t mind Beatles music, the “All you need is love” reference this time came from Moulin Rouge. Yes, I know it’s because they used the Beatles song in it but I wanted to point out which fandom I was in.

It’s okay to give up

If you can’t shake the feeling that you’re out of love with your project, then I’d lean into the feeling and plan your exit strategy. I have a huge waiting list of projects, even temperature ones. I’d much rather just quit the unhappy feeling project and move on to another one.

I know it can be hard to give up on something you’ve put even a little bit of effort and/or planning into. It’s hard for me. But it’s harder for me to continue working on something I’ve fallen out of love with. I should note my advice here only applies to projects and not to relationships. Gotta work on those before you finally call it quits as a last resort. (Exceptions do apply in extreme cases.)

What do I do next?

So now that you’ve made the final decision to move on to a new project, it’s time to plan an exit strategy. There are a few different options, really. Your decision will largely be based on exactly what was bothering you about your project.

The first thing to decide is whether to tear out or keep your work. If you want to use the yarn for something else, tearing it out is the obvious choice. If you don’t want to or don’t need to use the yarn, you can set the project aside and figure out what to do with it later. I still have the 3 month effort of a temperature blanket I made from the blanket I planned in 2015.

Then you can decide what parts of the project you will keep and what to get rid of. It should be fairly easy to decide because you focus on dropping the parts you didn’t like. Keep the other parts that you still like and find out how you’re going to move forward with them. If it’s a temperature project, it wouldn’t hurt to go back to the beginning and double-check each planning step decision you made.

So change the colors or the pattern or whatever it was that made you unhappy and just start again. You’ll probably have to catch up, especially if you’re making your project to document the current year. But in the end, it’ll be worth it.