Leave of Absence

I make plans, God laughs.

I've had issues the last few days that meant my stitching schedule went completely off the rails. I was telling Dearly Beloved about it, and mentioned that I can usually keep a rotation schedule for at least a week or two--but four days is a bad record, even for me. He asked if I had planned to try to keep to a schedule while I'm gone week after next--I said I didn't think I could, Harmony would require a steamer trunk for all her supplies, plus everything else, AND I'm taking a couple of classes--and he said I should just declare I'm taking a leave of absence and get back to a schedule when I'm home again.

So, issues . . . 

I needed to make a muslin pad so I could work Harmony's needlelace, which meant digging out the sewing machine. I quickly discovered I was going to need to wind a bobbin.

I've had problems winding the bobbin on this machine ever since I got it, but I'd found a hack that worked so that the bobbin didn't wind all catty-wompus. This time, it didn't work. So I spent the morning with the owner's manual and a chunk of the afternoon online looking for fixes. It all boiled down to needing a professional to adjust the tension. So I spent the next morning trying to find a professional who could do it for me. Apparently, there are few professional sewing machine tuners and they are all booked up for weeks and weeks or are having problems getting parts or both. And since I don't want to wait that long, I need to assemble the thing by hand. Sewing through what has turned into six layers of muslin by hand isn't a lot of fun, so I've spread the joy over several days.

And on the original schedule, the evening was supposed to be devoted to Carmen's Etui. Which I did. Only to discover that I had worked the first motif correctly, but every other motif on that end of the handle was missing one stitch.

So, I thought, I'll rip it out during the next session and restitch it. But, in the middle of the night, I thought, what if I do the second half of the handle to mirror the first side--just work the motif correctly on the first repeat, and then work it wrong on the succeeding motifs. Brilliant, I said to myself--I doubt it would ever be noticeable, as long as I remember to do it.

And since I was concerned that I would forget to work it that way in a week's time, I thought it best to do it right away--so I did, the next morning. And, at that point, I also realized that I was close to finishing the second most labor intensive piece on Carmen--the main body panel is completed. And if I continued to work away at it, I could finish it fairly soon.

So I am taking a leave of absence from my schedule to complete a special project.

How's that for a rationalization?