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Thursday,
January 6, 2005

Muddling along

I would be a very happy camper if I could stop yawning.

See, I have this problem -- once I get started on a project,  get rather obsessive about it and don't want to stop until it's done. When the project involves something large (a novel, a queen-sized quilt, etc.) this can become problematic because I start working on it the picosecond I get home, and don't stop until I realize the cats are glaring at me because I'm keeping them awake and the Discovery Channel has switched over to "paid programming" (which I always used to call infomercials, or "bullshit" to be perfectly accurate, but whatever).

What I'm trying to say is that I was up until 3:00 AM last night finished off the wall quilt. Normally it wouldn't have taken that long, except that when I got home I realized the binding (the stuff that goes on the edges) that I got during my lunch break was 1) too small, 2) the wrong color family, and 3) boring. This was an ever bigger problem because I'd already combed multiple fabric stores looking for an appropriate binding, even taking a crack at making my own (which involves geometry, precision sewing and long hours over an iron. I also suspect this was the reason why the massage therapist started working on my shoulders and said, "What the heck have you been UP to?" on Tuesday), and screwed it up from sheer exhaustion.

Of course, you're entitled to ask -- why am I being so anal about a stupid strip of fabric.  See, this is a present for a friend who was extremely generous to me when I was broke and scrambling for money back in 2001, so it's gotta be perfect, you know?

So, it was around 9:00 PM when I found myself in the local Hellmouth (aka Wal-Mart), combing through their bindings. Lyndon, he of the brilliant eye for color, suggested a purple binding since it would coordinate with central patches as well as the outer border, and I managed to find a rather kicky tye-died purple bias binding in the right size (I also found an underwire bra in my size, with one-piece construction and in a very nice shade of robin's egg blue, for $9.00 -- go me!).

I pay for the bra and binding, go home, and start attaching the binding. This is rather fiddly because I like to do mitered corners, but finally it was all attached to the front of the quilt and all I had to do was fold it over the raw edges and tack it down.

This, by the way, was sometime around 11:30 PM, I believe. I remember that because I was going to go down to the weight room and do a half hour on the reclining bike, but then I sat down to handstitch the bottom side of the binding to the quilt, and LEAGUE OF EXTRAORDINARY GENTLEMEN was on HBO, and Lyndon slipped off to bed around 1:00 AM, and I watched the first half of the AMERICAN CHOPPER episode about the Snap-On Tools bike, and when they switched over to paid programming I found an episode of CROSSING JORDAN, and speaking of Jordan he wasn't feeling all the well so I had to keep taking breaks to cuddle him (he's much better today -- he's prone to kitty colds, and the house was mighty chilly when we got home yesterday), and suddenly it was 3:00 AM and I held a finished quilt in my hands.

Did I mention I get a little obsessive about big projects? Um.

But the nice thing about this is, the quilt can be packaged up and sent off to my friend tomorrow, and tonight I can actually clean the place without hearing the siren song of the Arts 'n' Crafts muse. Right now, though, I would give a gonad for a nap.