OPPS I made a mistake

I just finished hosting my first webinar and things didn’t go as I had planned. While there are plenty of times in my life where I’m totally cool with flying by the seat of my pants, when I’m doing a presentation I like to be prepared.

I practiced, I did test calls, went through the tutorials, all of the things that a good student would do, but today when it came time for the call it seemed that everything went wrong.

The music wouldn’t stop playing and I couldn’t figure out what was going on, my phone kept dropping the call, and the sound just wasn’t that great. Needless to say I was a bit frazzled and was not at my best.

So I’m doing the best that I can to fix it, and that means creating a new video recording and sending it out to everyone. When I got off the call I was frustrated and a bit down on myself.

But then I started to reflect on my creative process and seemed a bit ironic that this happened. As you may already know, most of my best scarf designs come from me making total mistakes and then figuring out how to fix them.

The scarf with the braid is the most popular design and it happened because I was making a Christmas present for my mom, but didn’t start until Christmas Eve. I miscalculated the warp, and had a scarf that wasn’t long enough to be a scarf, but I didn’t have time to start over. When weaving there is a yard of yarn that is considered “waste” and can’t be woven, I needed that “waste” to become a part of the scarf. I sat and stared and finally decided to do some french braiding. It ended up looking really cool, and resulted in a whole new design. 

I’m also working on a whole new product that resulted from a lot of mistakes.  Yup, I’m working on making woven wall hangings, and am pretty excited about it. So I guess what I’m learning is that we can’t control everything, sometimes things don’t go the way that we planned, and we need to forgive ourselves and work through them.

What mistake have you made that turned into something really great?

PS: if you want the video recording of my call today, click here and sign up. Plus it will help to cheer me up!

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