A Gleneagle Digital Portfolio

Fourth In-Depth Blog Post [2022]

Good day everybody! Welcome to my fourth in-depth blog post of this school year. Today I will be talking about some challenges and some goals during this intermediate phase of mentorship and checking in on my progress as always. 

  1. What has been your most difficult mentoring challenge so far? Why? 

Goal-setting/communication. I find that my mentor and I are sometimes on different pages about what I want to accomplish in a given time period or what I want to work on. My mentor is a very patient person who emphasizes practicing the basics over and over again, but I do want to get started on a few projects in order to have something to show for my efforts. I feel like I do not express these goals nearly enough and I regret that I am not as consistent about meeting every week as I would like to be. This really hinders my progress and I know I am causing a bit of frustration for myself this way.

  1. What is working well? Why?

I am proud of my ability to take initiative and “study” different skills I know I need to work on between meetings. I have recently started practicing pretty often (almost every day) and I can make a lot of great designs so that by the time the meetings come around, I can get better feedback because my mentor knows exactly what I have been working on and what I should do going forward. 

  1. What could be working better? How can you make sure this happens?

I could definitely be more consistent about meetings with my mentor. We have agreed to meet on Sundays, but we do not have a set time and so sometimes we will miss each other due to time zones. I will message her for a meeting too late and I have to either reschedule or make it up somehow. I will make sure I fix this problem by trying to agree on a set time with my mentor. I will make sure I do not make conflicting plans earlier in the day on Sundays. I usually still make progress even if we do not meet every single week but it would be nice to be more consistent.

 

Progress has definitely picked up! I took some initiative and decided to make a “pattern sampler” to surprise my mentor using the patterns she has sent me. I found that it was a pretty big jump going from practicing stitches in straight rows, as that mostly involved practicing tension, starting and stopping, etc, to patterns, which have additional skills like thread management, deciding what order to stitch in, reading patterns and the like. I could not do it on my own but luckily my mentor’s daughter, who has been learning since she was in the first grade (she’s an adult now) was in town to visit family friends and has been showing me those aspects in person! It really helps to learn from somebody directly and face to face as they can hold your fabric, demonstrate from every angle and there is no squinting at a small phone screen. My mentor was really pleased to see what I have so far with the pattern sampler and while it could use some work (I left some half-finished fails on it and the patterns are weird distances apart) she commended me for my effort and I got lots of compliments on the neatness of my stitches! I would like to try making a bookmark next, and I want to improve my speed and accuracy while working (I tend to spend a lot of time undoing mistakes).

 

• April 2, 2022


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