![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
Slow And Steady Wins The Race
Jun. 29th, 2020 04:24 pmAs I've been meticulously sewing sequins on to Masked Futures mask number 6, I've reflected on the fact that my mother is a costumer and my grandmother was a costumer, and both of them have made a lot of dance costumes, and I also spent a fair part of my 20s hanging around with drag queens and their custom gowns, and my sister is a textile artist who has done various high-labor installations, &c, &c. It has occurred to me that a lot of the vaunted 10,000 hour rule about mastery is, in my case, just knowing that these kinds of projects take a long time.
There is not a way to make them faster. You will spend an hour sewing down an inch worth of stuff, and then you will have to readjust all your pins because fabric is stretchy and you've changed the weight of how that part pulls. It does not mean you messed up. You do not need to waste time looking for a special tool. You just keep going until you are done. And sometimes you have to back up and unpick something, but that is a small amount of extra time given how much time the normal amount of time is.
This is a realm of knowledge I have about other artforms, and informs my approach to life generally, but it is absolutely the most true about beadwork.
It also seems to me that I'm useful to people purely for having been around a while. A lot of the advice I'm asked for isn't at root to do with my individual artistic brilliance, but is more about affirming (or disaffirming) somebody's instinct about whether a contract is unusually good or bad, stuff like that. I've done stuff enough times to be able to say "nah don't worry about this, it's nothing" or "no, definitely don't talk yourself out of worrying about this, this is a huge weird bad thing."
None of this is surprising; there are a lot of maxims about it. But there are a lot of untrue maxims and fables and it's nice that these ones in particular do seem to jibe with my experience. "A journey of a thousand li starts beneath one's feet," how true that is, Lao Tzu, thank you, I think of it every time I want to use the word "li" in Scrabble (permitted).
There is not a way to make them faster. You will spend an hour sewing down an inch worth of stuff, and then you will have to readjust all your pins because fabric is stretchy and you've changed the weight of how that part pulls. It does not mean you messed up. You do not need to waste time looking for a special tool. You just keep going until you are done. And sometimes you have to back up and unpick something, but that is a small amount of extra time given how much time the normal amount of time is.
This is a realm of knowledge I have about other artforms, and informs my approach to life generally, but it is absolutely the most true about beadwork.
It also seems to me that I'm useful to people purely for having been around a while. A lot of the advice I'm asked for isn't at root to do with my individual artistic brilliance, but is more about affirming (or disaffirming) somebody's instinct about whether a contract is unusually good or bad, stuff like that. I've done stuff enough times to be able to say "nah don't worry about this, it's nothing" or "no, definitely don't talk yourself out of worrying about this, this is a huge weird bad thing."
None of this is surprising; there are a lot of maxims about it. But there are a lot of untrue maxims and fables and it's nice that these ones in particular do seem to jibe with my experience. "A journey of a thousand li starts beneath one's feet," how true that is, Lao Tzu, thank you, I think of it every time I want to use the word "li" in Scrabble (permitted).
