A Slightly Different Pace

Things have been progressing around here rather...slowly. It's called Stella Time and it's what we've been on since this little baby landed in our laps. I'm generally a pretty fast-paced person, and I thought that I'd be driven mad by the lack of time I'd have to complete anything, but I'm actually finding some beauty in the madness.

For instance, here is a photo of the only project I've been able to start and complete since The Bean has arrived:

A few things to note:

- this is a blurry photo

- this is a skirt that I did not make, I just added to it

- adding to this skirt consisted of quickly stitching some thrifted trim with some contrasting thread.

OK, it was a little more involved that that. I had the trim, but it was too white and so I tea-stained it (though I have bags and bags of fleece and some chemical dyes that I'm itching to mix up, it won't be happening until this baby decides she doesn't want boobies anymore). Choosing the trim out of the yards and yards of odds and ends I have occurred in one nap cycle. Tea-staining approximately 2 yards of trim took two cycles, a nap and a feeding, and I forgot about it cooking on the stove and all of the liquid evaporated and it started to burn (yes, I almost burned cotton trim on my stove top, though the color turned out quite lovely). Sewing the trim on took three nap cycles, the first line of stitching had to be aborted mid-stitch at one point. Photographing the project had to wait for another nap, at this point three days after the project was begun.

The beauty of all of this is how much I've been able to let go of because of the limited time I have. I can be so incredibly fussy about the details of what I make, that sometimes it's hard for me to even get a project off the ground. I could have spent days just trying to figure out trim, maybe thinking about sewing a little flower or a button on there, but the truth of the matter that I had a hem that was unravelling and I needed to spruce up this skirt that I love and I needed to do it now. The project got whittled down to the essentials, and a lot of the background noise that I normally feel buzzing around me when I'm in the craft room was gone.

As for larger projects, such as the 6 cups of chopped peaches I have in my fridge which must be turned into jam asap or the baby quilt I made for Stella that still isn't quilted, I'm not quite sure how I'll go about accomplishing those!