2013 – The Year of Finishing Things!

I am not good at finishing things. I am great at starting things, but very few of them ever get finished.

Ending and finishing are not the same thing. I had to end my PhD unfinished. This has been very hard to deal with and does not help my view of myself as a person who is bad at finishing. This is an unhelpful way to see myself. So in order to change that, I need to declare this year one in which I finish more than I start!

You may wonder how that is possible. Please see the second sentence of the first paragraph 🙂 Obviously I need to finish some things I started some other year!

Fortunately I have not started heaps of things yet this year. I have started a few though. I need to make a list:

1) A Victorian crochet pattern for carriage boots – this is going quite well so far and is my current crochet project, I think it might be possible to finish this one. Here is the link to download the 1851 booklet for anyone interested!

2) Needle felted penguins for my Mum – I need to finish these this week as she wants them asap! (The link is to my pin on Pinterest, it does not go to the right page though. I intend to make a blog post about these soon.)

3) Renovating the purple parasol – I stripped it as the fabric is rotten and took photos to make a blog post, but I haven’t written the blog or finished the project.

4) Another Victorian pattern for a cushion, I got confused and moved on to the other pattern.

5) I started to try and blog more often, but it has been a bit patchy, I could commit to once a week, at the risk of having to resort to an emergency post of a picture of my cat. But she is cute, so that might be a risk worth taking 🙂

6) I have resolved to finish a novel this year, but I always intended that to be one of the ones I have already started. I don’t even care which one and I do have time left, so I am not worried by a slow start to this one – after all, if I have made no progress by November I can use Nano and finish one there.

7) I also started some crochet fingerless mitts, but I need to use a bigger hook so I’d have to undo it all and start again, which is why it has been sitting there for weeks.

I could go on, but a list which is too long can be disheartening.

Once I have managed to finish something I hope I can then begin to see myself as someone who finishes some of the things. The more I finish the more my view of myself will change. Does this mean I will not start anything new this year? I can try, but we shall see. Just so long as I finish more than I start I will be happy! Sometimes a project will have to be ended rather than finished – some of my crochet projects stopped because they hit a problem and I just left them and went on to the next, so I can call one finished with if I decide to abort it, unpick it and rewind the yarn to be reused. But that is not really what this is about – I want to finish things I start!

This resolution has been inspired today by reading this blog post from one of my favourite writing blogs. If you are an aspiring writer like me, she is well worth checking out.

I could put off posting this to add some photos, but maybe it better to just finish it here and have photos in the next one! Start as I mean to go on. Perfectionism is the enemy of getting things done.