Dig Out an Old Project, see if you can finish it…
Sigh. I hate early spring. The weather goes from gorgeous and warm to bleak and icy in no time flat, and one dare not plant out anything that can’t take at least a couple of inches of ice on top. One day this week we had a 50+º swing between 73º at 2 pm and 22º before midnight. That’s what my Mama always called “pneumonia weather.”
The wood pile is down to dregs too, this having been one of the coldest winters in the entirety of our 22 years on this homestead. Though the first spring we spent here we got the “Blizzard of ’93,” which is still a big topic of conversation down at the auto parts store. 3 feet of windblown white stuff and sub-freezing temperatures, electricity out for 9 days. ‘They’ finally came by in a National Guard Huey helicopter to see if we were still alive, spotted the wood smoke and decided we were fine. It started on March 13…
So. Got the new seed catalogues in January. Ordered and received the new season’s seed bounty in February, started some things still in flats. The local organic super supplier – Painter’s Greenhouse – opened on March 1. Now I get almost daily warnings from them via email telling me to either NOT plant anything I bought out yet, or cover it with plastic because it’s gonna freeze. ARGH!
Thus It was that I re-started a project I’d begun 4 years ago – a bed quilt. I’m one of those people who knows how to sew, to crochet, to knit, etc., but hardly ever actually finish anything I start. But this Christmas it was so cold that we taped up the back door and hung a blanket over it to keep out the cold, and our daughter the decorator replaced that blanket with the quilt top I’d made all those years ago out of three color-coordinated sheets I bought by the pound at the mill outlet in Swannanoa. I’d managed to get it big enough, then realized that the pattern would be much better if I cut it into quarters and rearranged things. That being far too much trouble at the time, I folded it nicely and stashed it in a corner shelf of the blanket bin in the basement, for if I ever got ambitious.
And that is where daughter found it. She decided it looked a whole lot better than the wool army blanket we’d put over the door, which is next to the living room corner where we always put the tree. More Christmas-y. Thus I got to look at the darned thing all of January, and by February I’d decided to go ahead and quarter it and start over again. Maybe finish it this time.
