The art of the last minute

Expression, May-June, 2005 by Hilari Ford

Some of you reading this are very organized. Your stamps and materials are categorized and your workspace is always free from clutter. Your magazines are carefully stored away in those little cardboard boxes. Heck, they may even be indexed. You keep all of your ribbon strung on dowels on a rack on the closet door. You can't go to bed before everything is back in its place. Martha Stewart lives in awe of you, as do I. Really, I do.

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But this issue's column is for those of you like me. You buy more than you can reasonably store. The hidden nooks and crannies of your home are filled to over-flowing with random bits of ephemera. You have magazines and newspapers waiting to be snipped for collage bits. On your worktable are the makings of two or three different projects. You work late into the night only conceding to sleep after your head has hit the table twice and you have seed beads stuck to your forehead.

Here's the horror tale of how the other half lives. The non-Martha's. It isn't pretty and it isn't nice, but it works for us, just like your labels and files work for you. But we're bound to teach one another if we understand that both methods of working, orderly and disorderly, are valid and produce wonderful results.

As Editor Mary will attest, I am the Queen of the Last Minute. In fact, I sit here typing this column the very day before my deadline. When I pause in typing to think about the next sentence, I am crocheting a scarf that I promised to mail tomorrow. It is three-quarters of the way done. The column? A little less so.

I often wait until the last minute to get started because I know that given too much time, I will labor over each word so much so that the original intent of the article has been completely supplanted by the final copy and I wind up working until the very last minute anyway. With too much time ahead of me and the day of completion drawing near, I will come up with 20 different designs, landing on something that is too difficult to pull off in the allotted time only to have to scrap it at the last minute and do something simpler. In this case, waiting until the last minute is not procrastination. Procrastination involves putting things off for another time. Working at the last minute involves a bit of introspection coupled with strict scheduling.

Accepting this quirk about myself has been a frustrating journey. In the past, my term papers would be returned with C grades because I would lose focus and wander from my outline. I would often wonder why I had to start and restart a project several times only to have it all come together just before I needed it. I was trying to do it the right way--start far in advance and progress slowly until finished. I would start off by clearing my desk, putting things away and sitting down with the "proper" materials. But why was I less inspired when everything was neat and tidy, than when my work area was covered with paper, fabric and stamps? When I waited until the last minute, I more often than not produced good, solid work.

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Once I understood about the way I work, I was able to jump-start my inspiration by catering my surroundings to my more visual nature. Seeing my art stuff haphazardly arranged put ideas in my head that I would ruminate on until I had the chance to play.

Now, don't get me wrong, I'm organized ... of a fashion. I mean, I have a system. (Is that the nervous laughter of commiseration I hear?) Yeah, we all have "systems" and they make sense only to ourselves. Our systems overwhelm organized people; they wonder how we can find anything and how we can do anything in the midst of such chaos. I hear a lot of my fellow artists say that everything needs to be visible or they'll forget what their options are. I'm a little like that. When you work best in the final minutes, your materials have to be arranged in a way that doesn't hinder your efforts. Having to make a trip to another room to find the glue puts a damper on your creative mojo.

The way my materials are "organized" says a lot about how I prefer to work. My method is a controlled chaos of higgledy-piggledy, cattywampus melange of current obsessions and passing fancies. The embroidery floss of my cross-stitched past now makes its home among my bookbinding materials. My beads are near the dining-room table because that's where the best overhead light is. My stamps, cut card stock, inks, adhesives and scissors are near my drafting table where I do my stamping. It's easy to make a dozen cards in one half hour sitting if everything is close by.

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When I know I have a lot of projects to complete I will schedule them with very little cushion time. This has only gotten me into trouble a couple of times. For the most part, I will be very focused and meet each deadline with time enough for little breaks in between. I prefer to vary the types of projects so that I can bounce back and forth between activities without growing bored. A friend was just telling me that she keeps a variety of small knitting projects all over her house, so that whichever room she is in she has a dedicated project to work on. That way she doesn't get bored with the repetition. Another acquaintance makes greeting cards with her computer artwork and photography. Cards are in various stages of construction at any given moment. This means that she can pick and choose what she does according to her whim, whether she feels like cutting, folding, pasting, printing or packing. It all gets done and she doesn't have to spend hours on one tedious aspect of the process at a time.