Conversation

Yesterday while going on and on about the Halloween Baltimore Quilt I saw at Missy's blog,
Festival » Deep Inside Missy, another guest asked if I quilted. I started stuttering and umming and ahhing, and finally I said, "Well I talk about quilting a lot. Does that count?"

So when I came home I looked at all my projects, my sewing machine out on the dining room table, craft room, are you serious? The "dining room" is an extension of the living room and the first thing you see when you walk in my front door, other than the ginormous black lab laying in front of you is the sewing machine, printer, and laptop on the dining table(and a pile of mail and coupons too). If you walk into the room, which I try hard to block anyone from doing that, you will see a pretty nice china cabinet stocked full of crafting stuff. Yeah, I'm classy that way.

We need to paint, we went through a delusional phase where we actually believed living three miles from the beach meant we really lived on the beach and the colors in the living room/ dining room show that ignorance. Yes, I said colors, the living room is a tourquoise/sea blue kind of color and the dining area is a fruit punch, deep, bright pink. It's horrible and I'm not sure what exactly came over us when we thought this would be a good idea. It's bright, it's hard to be sad in this part of the house--oh we manage to let the sad seep in trust me--one look at the spousal unit's 401-K sucks the bright right out of the room. But it's really, in the bright light of day, a hideous, huge, decorating don't. Trust me. So now I'm going with a nice yellow, Sparkler from Glidden I think it's called. We need a lot of paint, it's a big area but I know I'll feel better about the clutter when the walls all match. I've been steadily filling trash bags with crap we don't need. I need to buy stock in Rubbermaid because there are buckets and bins everywhere, but the things I want to keep need to be moved out of the house and into the garage and we have learned over the years that cardboard boxes don't hold up to our children. Yes, they are all somewhat grown now but they will be looking for something in the garage or decide that they need that box my books are packed in and just dump the books out and take the box. I wander in the garage, slipping and sliding over a pile of hardback books that I'm pretty sure I packed away years ago, yes my kids are idiots or maybe just inconsiderate, but they make me crazy. It only adds to the situation when a cat gets locked in the garage and decides the pile of books might make a good litter box. You think I'm lying, exaggerating, trying to make a point to my kids, oh no, unfortunately this has happened on more than one occaision.

I am back to rethinking my crafting life. I read other people's blogs and I am amazed at what they manage to accomplish. Not only do they finish a BAP in a perfectly acceptable amount of time, they also quilt, sew, can food, bake, garden and many go to jobs for 40 hours a week. I am in need of some serious time management skilz.

I guess sitting around fretting about cleaning the house doesn't count as actual cleaning time but it does help when one is trying to figure out exactly where to start the cleaning, decluttering process. Yeah, I get flylady, I delete the emails everyday. I know 15 mins here, 15 mins there, it all builds up to one clean house. I'm just trying to figure out right now how to have a clean house by Thanksgiving and keep it that way through Christmas and I've determined the starting point is Rubbermaid buckets and three gallons of yellow paint. I want to do one of those Clean Sweep things where you haul all your worldly goods out on to the front lawn and then sort them in front of the whole neighborhood. We may still do that when we finally paint. Football ended last weekend so the spousal unit should have nothing but time on his hands, he can watch tv and paint at the same time right?

I have started Jane Atkinson-Scarlet Letter, maybe some pics tomorrow, the camera has gone missing, probably under a pile of junk. I am in love with Stacy Nash Primitives and want to just quilt my whole world right now. I found some funky vintage looking fabric at a yard sale a month or two ago and I think I have enough to make a table runner, but I might have to add some fabric to it and don't have anything around here that works so I may just play it by ear see what happens.

Does every project have to be planned to the letter? Isn't it ok to just start cutting and sewing and hope it all works out in the end? There was a time when I considered a failed project a waste of crafting time. It was time that could be spent actually doing something I know how to do but there's a lot to be said for a learning curve. I've learned that's important not only in crafting but also in life in general.