Scrapbook II

Since creating a scrapbook of our own in last week’s All Stitched Up!, we’ve spent the last week Day Stacking ourselves through the final ‘Scrapbook Chronicle’ emails we’d accumulated from Hiut Denim Co.

After pointing us in the direction of Julie Beeler’s Mushroom Colour Atlas, Huit Denim Co once again introduced us to another fabulous way to explore colour. Coolors is an ingenious website that allows you to generate the perfect colour palette for any project. Sounds like just the thing our needle and thread would benefit from!

Whilst there’s multiple ways the website can be used – some of which might take a little time to get the hang of – we found ‘Trending Colour Palettes’ was the perfect starting place to be inspired by myriad colour schemes.

‘Be present’ is a phrase that’s become synonymous with living well, with its goal that we perform routine activities with a heightened sense of attention. However, Scientific American published an article that challenges this idea believing that ‘Sometimes Mindlessness is Better Than Mindfulness’. Captivated by the title of the article, we read on.

Whilst they acknowledged that mindfulness has its merits in certain applications, such as when learning a new task, ‘psychological research has also revealed that in some circumstances it’s important to be mindless.’ They quoted activities such as riding a bike, chopping vegetables and brushing our teeth as instances where, once ‘perfected’, we’re able to perform such tasks without attention being necessary. 

They went on to conclude that sometimes when we pay too much attention to the mechanics of the task at hand it can have damaging effects as we ‘choke under pressure’ rather than letting the automaticity of the task take over.

We think there are certain stitches that could also be added to their list of ‘mindless’ activities. It might just be us, but we know there are times that when we focus too carefully on the stitch we’re about to lay, our grip on the needle tightens and try as we might, we just can’t get our hands to lay the thread as required! There are also those times though when we find our minds have wandered from the stitching before us, only to realise we’ve laid stitch after perfect stitch. Mindless stitching might just be a new ‘technique’ we need to add to our stitching repertoire a little more often!

That brings us to the end of our Huit Denim Co Scrapbook… well for now anyway, as no doubt a future Scrapbook Chronicle will spark a thread of inspiration in the not-too-distant future.