Reclamation Satisfaction II

Reclamation Satisfaction II

The chairs both turned out nice.  The very last piece to be sewed was the bottom band.  The journey though, was a tough conglomeration of solving problems, dealing with angles, and correcting mistakes.

I shouldn't sew when I'm tired.  That is when mistakes happen, like this one.  Can you see it?

Sometimes, when involved with a project like this, I have to learn to work with a mistake instead of starting over, or tossing the piece.  In this case, tossing was not an option: I didn't have enough fabric to recut both seat bottoms.  I measured every piece of this project by hand, marked it with tailor's chalk and a yard stick, and cut each one in duplicate, to do each chair.  When it came to the seat pads, I thought I was being very careful, but I actually miscalculated, and cut each about 8 inches too wide.

To correct this error, I decided to add two pleats, right at the where the seat seam joins.  As it turned out, the pleat detail added interest to the monotony of the pattern, so I'm not disappointed with the detail.

I also had a lot of scraps left over so I decided to piece together some throw pillows.

Now, here is where it started to get interesting, and go a little bit wrong.

Here is where I have to acknowledge my obsessive behavior.  It happens when I'm editing manuscripts too.  It's like getting on a train, thinking you're going about twelve stops, realizing the train goes all the way across the country, then deciding to ride it to the end, just to get to the completion.  I don't know what type of compulsion that is, but I know I have it.  Sometimes I can plan for it.  I can not start a project which I think is a moderate-sized endeavor (usually, the projects I think are an hour end up being four, and the things I think take half a day end up taking two days, so, I've learned, through many late nights of having to meet my outer-world due dates, to double my estimates and check my available time) until I have an entire weekend.  There is a tug-of-war here though, because I also know that multiple attempts are needed at some projects, attempts which must be spaced over a week or a month, before a task, which might only take 8 hours, can be completed.  Students take note here: this is why you are given long dates to finish major assignments.  You can't just sit down the night before and knock it out.  

So, the next step was to finish the throw pillows, and some other seat covers, and that took an extra day, and it also lead me into an area I've been gathering in my notebook for a while: rose meditations.