Rip It Out, Even Twice

Since the deadline for completing needlepoint Christmas ornaments is ten and a half months away I have slowed down the speed of my production from hyper-fast to just impressive.  Without the self-imposed pressure to get just one more canvas done I veered off into creativity mode on this week’s ornament.  It is a little bird house with flowers and rather than just do the standard basket weave stitch I decided to do this one like a sampler and do a different decorative stitches on each flower and the bird.

Decorative stitches are a growing thing in needlepoint and most people I know who do them have a stitch guide showing them what stitches go in which places.  Since I was winging this I just used trial and error.  I must confess to more error than trial.

Since this was a painted canvas not specifically intended for decorative stitches some parts were an epic failure.  I completed one whole flower and looked at it and thought it was horrible so I ripped it out.  I tried a different stitch and it was worse than the first one.  I sat and looked at it for a day while I completed a different area of the canvas.  It was still horrible.  I ripped it out again.

I started over completely ignoring what was painted on the canvas and made up my own flower and my own stitch.  Better, not perfect, but better.  I used twenty-one different patterns in the little four by six inch ornament.  I learned I don’t like so many different patterns.  It was a good lesson.

The real learning came in idea that it was all right to rip something out even twice.  I am much happier with the product than I would have been if I had left the offending needle worked section.  Completing a job does not always mean it is done.  Sometimes you just on the way to figuring out when done means finished.

It is kind of like painting your house.  Just because you buy a big can of paint and cover all the surfaces with it does it mean it is right.  If it turns out to have been not exactly the color you imagined it to be or the light makes it look unappealing, repaint it right away.  Living with the mistake will be way more annoying than spending the time and maybe the money to get it right.

I am in no way espousing perfectionism.  That is a different mental illness and one I am far from, but not settling when you know something is wrong is the right thing to do in the long run. It is better to lose one day’s worth of work and have something I like than have something I dislike which equals losing a weeks worth of work, plus the money I put in it.  Do I like ripping out completed work, for goodness sake no, but will I remember that pain when I look at the finished product years later, probably not.