Where I Try To Make A Boring Day Seem Exciting

Today I was in a mood.

I was exhausted.  The Queen was up from 2:45 to 4:30.

Awesome.

Then she got up for the day at 6:30.

Double Awesome!

I felt like I ought to be productive today, but frankly I was tired, and I just didn't want to.

I have a Knit Picks project to knit.  It is a lovely knit.  The pattern is extremely well written.  There is nothing to hate about this project.  In fact, it is almost finished.  By my estimate I have around 20 rows to go and I'll be done.  I'm in the home stretch.

And I just didn't want to look at it.

I felt bad about it.  I felt like I ought to push through and finish it.  But I just didn't have it in me to make myself do it.  I was all out of push.  Out of guilt I decided to tackle a different project that I have been putting off.

Because somehow doing a different project that I also hated made it all better?

I mended the blanket from my bed.

Exciting I know.

This blanket was not the victim of bugs, but rather had succumbed to old age.  Tiny pieces of tan fluff were flaking off.  Each morning we would wake up to more and more debris on our sheets.  I spent ten minutes each day combing tan ick from my hair.  We were certain that if this went on long enough one day our blanket would simply disappear in a cloud of dust.  I cut off the crumbling ends, and then hemmed each side trying to enclose the decay.  I'm hoping there is enough left to cover our bed.

Then I realized there were tons of tiny holes in the body of the blanket as well.  Ever hopeful I attempted to mend those as well.

Each dark spot is a place where I healed our beloved blanket.  I am left to ponder how much is too much?  At what point does this cross the line into insanity?  When does throwing this blanket away become a mercy killing?

I won't even tell you about the flannel sheets I tried to mend next.  Sufficeth to say, we will be buying new bedding when it goes on sale this year.

And since the sewing machine was out I figured I might as well sew together the backs of the quilts.

I may not have blogged this yet, but about a month ago we finally bought fabric for the backs of THE QUILTS.  I looked and looked and looked and could not find something I loved.  Paralyzed with indecision but desperate to finish the quilts before Queen Bean out grows her crib, I did the only reasonable thing I could think of, I let Sweet Pea pick the fabric out.  We got a blue/green chevron for Sweet Pea's quilt and pink chevron for the Queen.  I love how the pink matches the quilt, but I'm not loving the blue/green shade.  It is too off from the blue stars on the quilt top, but Sweet Pea picked it out, and it is, after all, her quilt, so there is that.  When I went to sew the backs together I realized that buying chevrons was a horrible mistake.  My CDO meant I could not let the chevron pattern be interrupted by the seams.  I had to make the pattern line up.  Surprisingly it only took two tries to get it to a place that I could live with.  I was sewing easy straight lines.  I can not imagine how one would sew a chevron dress or skirt without having to be committed to an asylum from the insanity of making the chevrons match on the pattern pieces.

But I digress.

While I was on a productive roll I taped the back to Sweet Pea's quilt to the floor (as shown above)...

added batting...

and one gorgeous quilt top...

And I made myself a quilt sandwich.

I practiced my free motion quilting.

I am a bit rusty to say the least.  It wouldn't be unreasonable to say I suck at it.  I got to a place where I felt I was ready to try it on the big quilt.  I sewed about three feet of quilting, and then I ripped out about three feet of quilting.

I need to practice some more.

I'm starting to get excited about these quilts again.  There is a point in the middle of making a quilt where I start to hate quilting.  And I wonder why I think I want to make quilts.  But now, when it is looking, and feeling like a quilt, I'm at the part where I remember why I love quilts.  And by the time I'm done (in a reasonable three to five years) I will be all excited to make another quilt.

In the mean time I'm gonna sit on the comfy couch and knit myself a sleeve.  I'd take a picture, but it is dark, and the yarn is nearly black, so it wouldn't be much of a picture.  Maybe, if you're lucky, I'll show you in a month or so.  Since that seems to be the new turn around time for blog posts.

Really need to have that intervention with The Queen about her sleep habits...