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.

Mormon Messages: Daily Bread — Experience

I think what we have to do when the pressures are there and the clouds are dark and threatening is take life a day at a time. It helps at times not to think too far ahead just do what the day requires. "Give us this day our daily bread." We are not anticipating the hardship or suffering that might be entailed. We sometimes just have to break it down to this moment, this day. And while deliverance isn't immediate and you may not see the end, still, you've got enough for today. –D. Todd Christofferson

We Interrupt This Regularly Scheduled Program ...

The chief enemy of creativity is good sense. –Pablo Picaso

You might recall, a couple of days ago, me banging on about procrastinating on the quilting for P.'s String Ring Dresden and then finding my creative quilting mojo again. I promised to show pictures of the progress soon — I'm one small smidge past the half-way mark on the background quilting and then I'll have to come up with something perfectly perfect to quilt in the 12 Dresdens. I've been tossing around a few ideas, feathers among them, but haven't landed on anything for certain. But I digress, as this is not the post with all the progress in it. Sometimes, you gotta stitch where your bliss takes you, and after several days of wrangling a big quilt {one of the biggest I've done} under the machine, I needed a little break. So I broke out the needle and thread and yet another work-in-progress.

Why, you might ask, did I pull out another embroidery project instead of just working on the embroidered labels for the Patriotic Sampler, which I have sitting on my sewing table for the specific purpose of using as a "get out of quilting free" card? Because Halloween is closer than the 4^th of July, silly. And there is the outside chance that I can finish this before then if I work on it as my sit-and-wait project.

I started this cute little hat almost three years ago. I pull it out every year as Halloween approaches. And sometimes work on it after Halloween has passed in the hopes that it will bring me that much closer to a finish the next year when I remember Halloween is coming and pull it out again. A year and a bit later, I had most of the pointy cone part of the hat finished. A bit after that, I'd finished the final piece of the hat. Last year, I finished one of the pieces for the brim and started on a second {no post}. Yesterday I pulled it out again, finished the last two pieces of the brim and assembled it.

This has been really fun to work on. It's hard to photograph black fabric, so some of the photos are washed out. But I think my favorite design of all is the one with the pretty purple cone flowers, and the photo turned out nicely, so it gets its own little spotlight.

I'll work on the decorative stitching between the pieces that ties it all together crazy patchwork style, when I have a few minutes of sit-and-wait time {mostly when I go to pick up the Not-So-Little Bugs from school, who, incidentally, don't believe me at all when I tell them that I walked to and from school every day. Uphill. Both ways. In 10 feet of snow. Yeah. That joke never gets old.}. I have my stitches selected for each seam, all mapped out on a sketch with the colors of floss I want to use. I've learned to write these things down so I don't forget. I'll probably need a refresher next year.

Now, if you'll excuse me, I have some quilting to do.

Mormon Messages: Daily Bread — Pattern

We all recognize the need for physical sustenance. Hunger and thirst remind us very strongly if we forget. But the spiritual need for sustenance is equally strong. It comes not in drinking water and eating food, but in our constant daily efforts of communion with God. We ought not to think that we can go weeks and months without spiritual sustenance and not suffer and not have a deadening influence in our spiritual life. Acknowledging the reality of our need for a daily spiritual ministration, or manna, helps increase in our courage to do the right thing and to serve others, more than we would have if we ignored God. People sometimes think "well those are such small things; prayer, immersing ourselves in the scriptures, pondering, meditating. How can that really produce a significant difference in a person's life?" But it does. As small these are the those things seem to be, as the daily routine sometimes they may seem to be, these are the things that, day by day, transform us. –D. Todd Christofferson

What I've Been Doing While I Should Have Been Doing Something Else

Nothing is so fatiguing as the eternal hanging on of an uncompleted task. –William James

Have you ever asked a child to do something they don't want to do? They fuss and whine and complain and drag their feet and try everything they can think of to get out of it. And after all that time and energy they put into not doing the thing, they could have done whatever it is three times over. I do that sometimes, too. I think that is why it is so frustrating for me when the Not-So-Little Bugs do it .

I've been dragging my feet on the quilting on P.'s beautiful String Ring Dresden for a while. Now don't get me wrong. It's not that I don't want to do this project. I volunteered for it, after all. It's more that I'm scared that I'll mess P.'s quilt up. It is intimidating to quilt for another quilter. I'm a bad, bad friend and she has been very patient with me. The quilt has been at my house for nine months. For the first five months, I ignored it. When I couldn't ignore it any longer, I broke down and started quilting. I got almost to the half-way point and then I lost my mojo. In trying to get it back, I pulled something else out that I thought I'd just work on for a bit. But it turns out that this project was bright and shiny and oh-so-distracting, so I worked on it for just a bit more. After six weeks, I decided it was time to put it away. But I didn't quite. I was the perfect covert dragging-my-feet opportunity and I took advantage.

I kept the little embroidered labels out to work on when I have a few minutes of sitting and waiting. I knew that Grandma Week was coming up and they'd be perfect for when the adults all sat around and talked after the kids had gone to bed. And because I knew Grandma Week was coming up, I decided I didn't want to get in the middle of quilting and have to stop. I embroidered all of the block names and the quilt name in their reds and blues.

After I finished the block titles, I knew that I couldn't work on filling in the details, because that would look too much like avoidance. I decided to keep that "get out of quilting free" card for another time. But except for that really dry spell for the last three weeks of June, I sew almost every day. I needed something else that would get me out of quilting, but not be too obvious. I puttered around with some half-square triangles. And then, just to break up the monotony, I started a completely new quilt. I think that might have been an outright tantrum against finishing the quilting.

Fabric Auditions

Call Backs

Final Casting

Rehearsals

Dress Rehearsal

The performance has been put on hold, though. I stashed the project away to be finished after I finish P's quilt. I finally got up the gumption, put on my big girl Machingers and am quilting again. With any luck, I'll be finished in a week. Photos coming soon. Unless I decided to procrastinate again.

Also, I am officially out of places to stash projects, which {hopefully} means a few more finishes. Soon. Ish.