The Procrastination Pit of Despair

If it weren't for the last minute, I wouldn't get anything done. -Unknown

Over at the Twilight Quilters Coven we're working on an Eclipse themed quilt for charity. We like to do that. I signed up for just two blocks this time. And I had six weeks to get them done. But I'm still struggling with the patterns. Because I didn't really start on them until it was time to get them in the mail. Now, that's some world-class procrastination.

I have a book that talks about procrastination. I read it years ago. It said that people who procrastinate get some sort of benefit or reward out of it. I quit paying attention there. That was enough evidence for me. Today I went to find the specific part of the book where it talks about that, but I couldn't. I've gone by the motto, I work well under pressure. Procrastination is the key, for quite some time. Years now. I've cultivated a finely-tuned procrastination response to all deadlines and obligatory chores. I seem to get more done when I'm on top of a deadline. But this time it backfired on me. These blocks were supposed to be in the mail two days ago. While I was perusing this book that talks about procrastination and says that in certain situations it is even healthy, I decided that there was a little more in there than just that. I'm going to have to go back and read through it again and make use of the parts that suggest that you discontinue procrastination practices. But that'll have to wait because I've got quilt blocks to sew here, people.

One of the reasons I put this off is that there wasn't a ready-made pattern out there for me to use. So, I had to merge and alter three different patterns to fit my needs. But in the alteration process, most of the division lines for paper piecing got deleted and the finer points are lost on me. I can see where to put in the obvious divisions, but I'm not sure how to divide it up further for the smaller details. I've stared at this computer screen so much over the last week that I thought my eyeballs were going to dry up and fall right out of the sockets onto my keyboard.

I'm hoping that The Paper-Piecing Guru can help me out. She lives on the other side of the world, is pregnant and works full-time, so it wasn't very nice of me to dump my last-minute problems in her lap. I fully expected to receive a note back in the e-mail from her saying, poor planning on your part does not necessitate an emergency on my part. I'm hoping she'll find a minute to work her magic, but it's the weekend there already and I feel badly for intruding into her life.

The quilt that we're putting together is going to be raffled off (if I can figure out how and where it is legal to do that) in conjunction with the release of the Eclipse movie on June 30. We've obviously got a little cushion of time built in here. Iris, who is assembling the quilt this time, built in a month for her to do her part because she fully expected some blocks to arrive as much as two weeks later than the deadline. But we want to have it done early so that we can get the word out and start selling raffle tickets. All the money will be donated to Alex's Lemonade Stand Foundation and we'd like to get them at least as much as we got for the New Moon quilt.

It isn't the end of the world that I've not got my blocks finished and mailed. But I do feel badly and like I've let my friends down. We live scattered across the U.S., Canada and we even have an Aussie in our group. I've only met a handful of the girls in our group in person. But they are my friends, and I don't like letting them down.