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Monday, September 26, 2011

Procrastination Leads To Productivity?

I’m becoming more childish as I get older. I wanna do the things I wanna do, and I don’t wanna do other stuff.




So many shirts, so little interest in sewing them




Last Sunday my partner asked me to alter some of his work shirts, and I agreed to do it even though a wave of resentment took hold of me immediately.




Keep in mind, this is the man who goes to work all day every day at a stressful job, comes home after ten hours, and cooks dinner for me. He does the yard maintenance, the pool maintenance, the home repairs, the car repairs, and the weekly grocery shopping. On top of all that, he makes pies. Every week he asks me what kind of pie (or cookie, or cake) I would like, and he makes that exact thing for me.


But, and not to take away from my personal hero The Selfish Seamstress, I am REALLY selfish. ESPECIALLY with sewing. It’s way too much work to make something for someone else, especially when a) you don’t know that it will fit exactly right, b) you will never know for sure whether they like it, c) you personally will not get to wear it, or d) all of the above. So I don’t like making things for my partner and I don’t like fixing things for him. I didn’t want to do his shirts.




To make the alterations, I would have to switch needles, put in new thread, wind a bobbin, stitch the shirts, finish the seams, and press them. I was in the middle of a sewing project FOR ME, and the shirts would really slow me down. So I put it off.



For a couple of days I enjoyed making my shirtdress in a Jones NY striped shirting, really nice fabric to be detailed in a later post. Then on Wednesday I got to my least favorite part – I hate hems and buttonholes, they take sooooo long when you’re so close to finishing something – so I procrastinated by doing laundry Thursday morning. Then I thought instead of putting the old bedding back in the guest bedroom, it needed a makeover. So I sewed all new pillow cases, accent pillows and curtains, dyed the duvet cover, and installed everything.


At that point I realized I had spent the majority of the day changing threads and needles on my machine and still not done the shirts. So, yes, guilt made me do it. I put in a nice sharp needle, threaded in the white, and ran through all six shirts in about an hour. Geez! I could have had them all done on Sunday!


So now it’s the dress that’s on the procrastination list. I managed to push it off the entire weekend with such follies as trips to the Goodwill to drop off items (thanks to Peter's Daily Ditch!), and to the nursery to buy more seeds for the winter vegetable garden.




Shirt dress - sneak peek!



The challenge for this week will be getting that dress done before I start another, more appealing project.

Katrina

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