don't force it

As I mentioned in my previous post, my sewing has had to take a back seat to other issues.  Since writing that post, I drove another 600+ miles round trip to attend my aunt's memorial service (including a flat tire), began going through six boxes of my great-aunt's papers, and scheduled my hysterectomy for mid-September.

When I returned home on Sunday, I found that my Block of the Month had arrived for my Civil War Chronicles quilt.  I spent some time cutting fabric before I was sidetracked in a big way.  On Friday, my Honey had called to ask if his youngest daughter and her friend could go through some of my scraps to play with, that they might wrap them around Barbie dolls or something.  I said yes, they could go through the scraps in my scrap drawer, so he pulled it out and put it on the floor for them and left them to it.  Well, there were also sealed, labeled bags of projects in there that they also went through and I opened my drawer Sunday night to a bunch of empty baggies.  I was upset and it turned into a bigger argument than it should have been, especially because both children left our house with what they took.  The friend brought her scraps back and it was nearly a duffel bag full.  I'm still not sure what my Honey's daughter has and hope I'll be able to retrieve the project pieces.  One of the projects was old signature block pieces I'd collected at my son's baby shower and never made the quilt from it, but so many of the women in my family who signed blocks are now dead, and it was just too emotional for me to think of them gone forever.  I tell you, grieving is a b*tch ... it hits you whenever you least expect it.

I managed to squeeze some time in my sewing room Tuesday night and my Honey joined me to watch the All Star game on TV.  But I was not really ready for it and felt like a novice all over again.  First, I got distracted with the cutting for the Civil War blocks for July and cut them too small ... and didn't have enough fabric to fix my mistake.  Then my seams turned out to be way off and the block ended up with some puffy seams where I was trying to stretch and poke things into place. 

I'm reading the moral to this story as "don't force it" ... if you go to sew just to get caught up but aren't ready to focus, your work will end up showing it.

Tomorrow I'm back on the road for the fourth weekend in a row ... my boy turns 11 next week and I'm taking him back to his father's for his birthday party with all of his friends, while I enjoy a small reunion of sorts with my college sorority sisters in downtown Baltimore.  When I return, my Honey's girls will be there for another full week, the first one with all three kids while both of us adults are working.  It will be hectic and I hope the sewing doesn't add to it.