We Now Return You To the Regularly Scheduled Program

The property of rain is to wet, and fire to burn; that good pasture makes fat sheep; and that a great cause of the night is lack of the sun. –William Shakespeare, As You Like It, Act 3, Scene 2

I've been working on and off for about 4 months on the quilting for a flimsy that P. made. When it's "on" I make a lot of progress. But it's mostly been "off." When last I left off, I had the ditch work and border finished and almost half of the background quilting {diagonal lines through most of the quilt} finished.

I've been working on it again the last couple of weeks and had really hoped to have it finished by now. But I seem to overestimate my abilities to bend time to my will and underestimate the number of distractions in the way of Parent Teacher Conferences with really long lines, play dates, loads of laundry, meals to prepare, sick days {I had my first cold in more than two years}, the need to sleep for ⅓ of the day and just plain life. And I have about a zillion other projects in progress that sometimes just call to me and I have to stop and work on those. Nevertheless, I am roughly ⅞ of the way finished with the diagonal quilting.

I like being on the far side of the half-way point. It means I have less left to do than I have already done. And it's when things all start to take shape and that pesky voice of self-doubt is quieted, either because it was a good plan and it's coming together or because it is too late to do anything about it anyway.

I've been using blue painter's tape to mark the lines for quilting. The tape is really only good for one use; it picks up too much lint on its special clean-release adhesive and so I started a tape ball. I didn't think about it until I was about ⅔ of the way through and had already used a full roll of tape and was a good way into my second roll, but it's still a good size — bigger than a golf ball, but smaller than a baseball. I ran out of daylight today, what with all those things that keep cropping up, like people needing clean underwear and homework checked, so I'll show you a photo another day. In the meantime, you can see my marking system and if you look closely, you can see the pattern starting to fill in in the bottom right corner of the photo.

If I hurry, I can make the tape ball a little bigger before the requisite hour begins to get my full 8 hours of sleep.