Where to Start

That's Otis high atop my yarn hutch.  

I have nothing to say about him really.  I just wanted a picture for this post and others I was looking at were too specific.  I'd have to write something about the picture instead of what I'd planned to write about, you know?

It's one of my days off today.  I'm home, the kids are at school, my husband is at work.  My plan, my desire, my thing I was so looking forward to, was to just do something creative all day until school lets out and my wife/mother life takes over.

So many projects to choose from.  And I don't know where to start.  I really don't.  And now it's NOON already!  

I started out by pulling mostly everything out of the closet in the basement where we store holiday stuff.  Mostly Christmas decorations, but also the few Thanksgiving related items and Halloween things that don't get trotted out to the same degree now that the kids are older.  

I was looking for snowflakes.

A ton of years ago I folded paper and snipped bits of the paper away and unfolded the paper into a paper snowflake.  I did this a lot of times, and pressed the snowflakes flat in a heavy book.  I was proud of my snowflakes because they were delicate and beautiful, AND - because I am kind of annoyingly obsessive about some things, they are 6-pointed snowflakes - just like real ones.  No easy fold-in-half-and-in-half-again eight-pointed "snowflakes" for me.  I would fold the paper in half and then in thirds into a pie-shaped piece and then fold THAT in half, all the better to make my snowflakes as intricate as possible.  I had very sharp small scissors and I think I used to use tracing paper because it was thinner and easier to cut through multiple layers.

Anyway, I remember hanging them in the windows at my parents' house, and they continued doing that over the years until they moved to a smaller house and the snowflakes got packed away.  After Dad died and my sister and I cleaned things out of the house, I found them and brought them home.

At least, I think I did.  I must have.  I wouldn't toss them out after they'd been preserved for so long.  Would I?  

I don't know.  I sometimes throw things away in the heat or despair of the moment and then come to regret the impulse.

So back to the snowflakes.  I wanted them because after digging through all those unfinished bits and pieces of fabric projects (see previous post) I thought I'd go back to a project I'd started another ton of years ago, back when I was doing a lot of hand sewing.  I thought I'd make a series of Christmas stockings in white satin, with trapunto snowflakes stitched into the leg part of the stocking.  They'd be pretty and blah-blah-blah and anyway I never finished them.  But I kept them so that Some Day I could.  Over the weekend, Some Day peeked in the doorway and said "pssssst!" to me.  That is actually why I'd started digging through the bin that had all that unfinished stuff.  I thought maybe they were in there.  They weren't.  I'd thought I could finish them.  Or at least do something with those stitched snowflake sections.

So when I couldn't find them, I thought Hey!  I'll just find those snowflakes I made, and dig out some shiny fabric and trace the snowflakes onto muslin and baste that to the back of the shiny fabric and then stitch the outline of the snowflake and then puff up the branches of the snowflake with yarn to give it some dimension and then turn that fabric piece into, I don't know, a pillow or ornament or something.

But I can't find the snowflakes.  I looked through our boxes of Christmas stuff, where the snowflakes LOGICALLY should have been, but I couldn't find them.  So I put all the boxes back.  

But I kept out the shiny fabric.

Two dresses.  Two wedding dresses.  One is mine.  The other was my mother's and then my sister's. 

We aren't going to wear them again.  And our daughters will most likely want to 

(Okay, I'm just interrupting myself to say I've got Air Force One (the movie) on tv right now and I love this movie and Harrison Ford is SO fabulous at looking uncertain and desperately trying to plan his next move and I love this movie and I'm so glad it's on Amazon Prime.)

Anyway.  I've looked on Pinterest for ideas of what to do with all this wedding dress fabric (because there's a lot of fabric to these dresses) and I'm thinking some of each dress will be incorporated into quilts for all four kids, at the very least.  (My sister's two and my two.)  And also some will be incorporated into a quilt or something for my sister and for me.  And I figured I could maybe use some of the fabric to make a few snowflake-embellished pieces.

I have the dresses.  But I'm reluctant to start cutting them up just yet, since I don't have a clear plan for any of those projects just yet.  And can't do the snowflakes.

I kept looking for the snowflakes.  Boxes of pictures and old mother's day cards and coins my dad's father used to find on his walks and send from Arizona to his granddaughters.  Old partly filled notebooks.  More pictures.  More pictures.  I really need to organize them.  But how?  By person?  By year?  By this side of the family and that?  But then what about the intersections?  Which box do they go in?  Should I make duplicates of everything so when my kids are going through this same thing years (and hopefully more years) from now, they'll each have a complete set?

And I didn't want to sort pictures today anyway.  I wanted to do something with fabric or yarn.  Fabric.  

I think I will probably sew a bunch of pieces for that double wedding ring quilt I'd started back in the day.  

But then what?  

I have so many projects I want to work on.  About half a dozen quilts in need of repair.  Several crocheted blankets in various stages of completion (or incompletion thus far), plus one I'm knitting.  And all those unfinished bits of other projects I found in the bin the other day when I was looking for - yep, those snowflakes.

There are also some reorganizational things I want to do to this blog but they will be time-consuming, too.

So, where to start? 

I don't know which thing to tackle first.  I feel pulled in a multitude of directions.

I'm thinking maybe it would be sensible to repair the Christmas quilt first, since it's the middle of November and that would sort of make sense, right?  

But I also want to keep going with the double wedding ring quilt.  So many small pieces.  

And I really like having some yarny thing to work on because it's quieter than the sewing machine and sometimes I just need something simple and repetitive to work on.

And  -  well, you see my problem.

So I'm asking you.  How do YUOU decide what to do next?

Comments

[Kat]

Our heads work in such similar ways. I can't write it all out the way you do, but I can relate. My husband calls it glitching. I get into these long circular arguments with myself and absolutely nothing gets done. One thing that usually works for me is just to grab ANYTHING. I'll work on it as I continue glitching about what I actually want to do. Sometimes I discover that what I'm doing is great and I keep going, and other times I realize I don't like it one bit. Those times I can then usually figure out pretty quickly what I'd rather be doing, and sometimes I even come to the conclusion that I'm NEVER going to want to work on this project, ever, and then I can let it go completely.

[Trish]

I've been there! I have an almost empty day tomorrow that I'm trying to plan for today, so I don't end up in just such a predicament.