How do you stop it?

Creativity is a wonderful trait. Well, mostly wonderful until the ideas start tumbling around. When that happens, I feel like I've developed ADD. I always have two or three projects that I'm working on at one time. That helps alleviate boredom from working on only one project. But I find that while I'm working on one thing, my brain is thinking up more projects. It's hard to not drop what I'm working on and start a new project. How do you stop the ideas from coming? Should we even want to stop the ideas? I don't know the answer to those questions and my guess is no one else does either.

I have found that the closer I get to finishing a project, especially a large one, it gets harder to focus on finishing this one before starting something new. Case in point: My brother and sister-in-law celebrated their 50th wedding anniversary a couple of years ago. I thought I was planning ahead and started a quilt for them about a year before the actual anniversary. I didn't get the quilt finished by the anniversary because my hands started acting up with arthritis symptoms. I did keep plugging away on the quilt and finally finished by their 51st anniversary, but toward the end I really had to force myself to finish it up. It wasn't because I was tired of working on it because each time I set a block together I was awed all over again. The problem was that I would work on blocks or rows or whatever and let my mind run free. Usually my thoughts were of things we did together over their 50+ years together. Once in a while, though, my thoughts would veer off into....Hmmm. Wonder what it would look like if I....(fill in the blank - could be use different color combinations or make this part larger, whatever). Then I'd put down what I was working on -- and needed to be working on -- and start sketching out what might be the next project.

It's fun to be creative and come up with new ideas, but it sure does interfere with completing what is at hand. :-)

Now back to working on those appliqued whirligig squares....

P.S. My brother and sis-in-law liked their quilt, but they can't use it because my brother says it's too warm. You just can't please some people! :-) They do have it on the guest room bed, I think.