Worth Doing Well

In truth, whatever is worth doing at all, is worth doing well; and nothing can be done well without attention. --Philip Dormer Stanhope

I haven't been doing very well with getting a blog post out on a Sunday like I have been for the past couple of years. Sometimes it's because there is a holiday on the Monday and I find most people are too busy to sit around to read a post on a Sunday evening. Sometimes it's because I get lazy and then I the Sunday evening gets away from me before I can settle myself down to write anything. And sometimes, it's because we have to take our dog out on a little adventure:

We took the Cessna out for a flight to Tofino yesterday. This meant that Seymour was called upon to be copilot, which you can see is a responsibility he takes very seriously:

It was a clear, blue, calm day in the skies:

And an even nicer day to be on the beach:

But Seymour is not really a water dog. The forest trail was much more to his liking:

He's remarkably good inside the plane, which probably shouldn't surprise me given how fearless he is in every other aspect of his life:

The excitement and the heat of the day was all a bit too much for all of us. We all got home and took showers and settled in for a nap. That's why I didn't post anything on Sunday:

I did spend the week working away on something. After washing all my fabric last week, I was determined to try to sew something this week. I thought I'd pick a simple project to get my feet wet again. I thought I'd try to replicate one of my favourite tops, which is a simple dolman-sleeved t-shirt with a curved hem.

This is the week that I learned that "simple" is not the same as "easy."

I pulled out some blue bamboo jersey which I have been savouring in my fabric stash for a while and proceeded to try to cut symmetrical t-shirt pieces out of. It took me a couple of hours to do it, because bamboo jersey is slippery as heck and it is therefore very difficult to get it to fold exactly in half, much less get clean, even pieces out of it. Lesson one learned.

I also learned that the simpler the project, the more important it is to get the stitches exactly right. The jersey was plain with no print and so every little stitch and wrinkle was magnified as if a spotlight was shining directly on them. I resisted the urge to fudge it and have it over with. I also resisted the violent urge to toss the whole thing into the garbage and pout. Instead, I took a deep breath, turned off the sewing machine and sat and thought about how I always tell people that you have to make lots of mistakes in knitting before you can learn how to knit well.

So it took me three days of ripping out and re-sewing stitches over and over and over again before I ended up with a t-shirt that I feel good about wearing:

After that, I took a break from my sewing machine and hand-stitched a ribbon to the back of my quilt experiment from a couple of weeks ago. I reveled in the comfort of doing something by hand:

I pushed a bamboo stake through it and strung it up for hanging. I think it will hang under the window in the spare bedroom. I often go in there to take a quiet break to myself. I think I will enjoy looking at it:

After all the sewing and painting I have been doing, you may be thinking that I have given up on the knitting. I just haven't shared much of it recently because it hasn't been all that exciting recently. I'm still steadily knitting several hundred, if not thousands, of stockinette stitch to finish my lace tee project. I'm very nearly to the point where I can increase for the sleeves, which means I'm getting close to being finished, but I reckon it's still going to be several more hours before I get it done:

I guess it means I should buckle down and actually do some knitting. I feel better for getting some of my other crafting urges out of my system, but I also feel a pull to try and sew something else soon. We'll see which urge wins.

Have a great week!