A Cure for Choice Overload

Whenever I take a long break from stamping, it always take a while to find my mojo. My preparation for vacation, time away on vacation, and week of chaos following vacation constituted a reeeeally long break, and my mojo was nowhere in sight last week. Hours spent at my craft desk yielded nothing but pretty trash. 

I had two responses to this frustration: 1) a spending spree and 2) a purge. 

The spending spree was completely crazy and unnecessary, as y'all must know. My craft room overflows with stamps and ink and paper and stuff...some of which I never even use. There's plenty of choice already in my craft room, and no need to add to the choice overload that was clearly crippling me. 

Choice overload is a real thing, and studies show it inhibits creativity. I blogged years ago about how I felt more creative when I artificially limited myself. For instance, I might say to myself, "You can only use this randomly chosen stamp set, a cool color palette, and three pieces of bling." And my creativity inevitably took off. 

Months ago, I pulled all the stamps in my cold storage out and integrated them back into my stash with the mistaken goal of testing them all out. This turns out to have been a spectacularly bad idea. Last week, the sheer quantity of stuff in my craft space--with new stuff added!--left me flailing. I couldn't even generate randomly chosen limits. My mind was completely overwhelmed.

Sunday afternoon, frustration peaked, and I purged. 

All this stampy goodness now resides in my unfinished storage area. You, kind readers, won't be shocked to know there's still plenty of stampy goodness that survived the cut in my craft room. What matters, though, is how I felt after the Great Purge of 2017. 

AWESOME!

I immediately pulled out a random, relatively new punch and four Tim Holtz Distress inks, and went to work. 

The greens and blues are calm and hopeful, and the confetti punch makes wonderful irregular mosaic tiles. Two different arrangements came to mind...a rectangular cluster with the sentiment integrated as the "cornerstone" of the construction, and a straight-ish border.

Aren't those colors beautiful?

These two cards took a while to make. I laid out the tiles first and then used tweezers to pick them out and glue them into place. But this construction was incredibly relaxing. No need for precision...just pleasing organic variety. 

Picking warmer colors would add a ton of energy to this idea, but I needed some soothing cards for my own stash. The next step with this punch will be to fill in large punched or perhaps cut shapes using my Fiskars ShapeCutter system.

Whatever happens, I feel rejuvenated and have made a number of cards in the past two days. Mojo's back and it's never felt so good to have fewer choices.

Have you ever experienced choice overload? What are your tricks for overcoming it if you have? If you purge, what do you do with those things you get rid of? (I plan on selling grab boxes soon.)

Mercy, grace, peace, and love,

Susan

Supplies

stamps: Technique Tuesday (top card sentiment), Clearly Besotted (bottom card sentiment)

paper: Papertrey white

ink: Archival black; Distress Inks salty ocean, mowed grass, broken china, peacock feathers

accessories: Tim Holtz mini inking tool, confetti punch, glue pen, tweezers