Scrapbooking vs. Quilting vs. Time

Hello All!

I hope the new year is starting out good for everyone!  I am always desiring to keep history in the past while looking forward where lies hope for the better, no matter what kinds of challenges we are currently facing. Even if your life feels like total bliss, c'mon admit it! - you know there's always room for improvement in some area of your life.

"Endevearrrrrrrr to perseveeeerrrrrrrr", says the old indian in the Josie Wales movie.

Anyhoo, that's not the subject I want to get into today.  I haven't blogged for a while now because, now that the holidays are over, everything is back to humdrum normal and I don't have anything to say.

But that's a good thing.

Really, that's a good thing.

Well, actually it depends on what humdrum "normal" means.

But anyway, I finally "finished" my Halloween quilt yesterday.

You can see that I had a lot of help from my feline friend.

It's very hard to sew with an animal sitting on your sewing project, but she just had to make sure all my stray threads were completely and thoroughly dead.  Thank you, Beaner Weaner.

Now that I'm up to the very last step of sewing the binding on, I told PW to start looking through my quilt patterns and pick one she liked because my next project will be for her.

I gave her my whole stack of magazines and books and expected her to take a few days to carefully choose which one she would want.  This a quilt, something specially made for her, something she will hopefully cherish for a long time, so I would think that she'd be excited and really take her time to choose carefully.  But she only looked at the top book, and had one picked out in 5 minutes.

Really?  Are you absolutely SURE you don't wanna browse through the rest and see if you like something else?

She was sure.

Okay, so today we started looking at different fabric ideas.  The pattern calls for 4 pre-cut charm packs OR 1 layer cake, and 2 jellyrolls.  I put her on the Missouri Star Quilt Co. website where I like to buy that stuff from cuz they have SO many choices!  But she wasn't finding anything she liked, so we went to the quilt store just 1/2 a mile down the road from my house.

Here is what we walked out with:

As you can see, they are not charm packs or jelly rolls.  No, that would be too easy.  Instead, I will have to do a lot of cutting before I can do anything.

She started out wanting red, black, and white, which was fine, but then she saw the brown material and liked it.  But it clashed with her black/white/red theme, so she ended up going with browns, greens, grays, and yellows.  I'm not quite fully satisfied with these combinations (yes, that black fabric has ears of corn on it!), but it's her quilt, she picked them.  So we'll see how it goes.  Who knows, I might actually like it when it's all done.

Now the problem is, how am I supposed to work on two different hobbies?  I really want to keep going with my scrap booking, but the quilting is pulling me in the quilting direction.  

For the past couple years I've been trying to get Justin's 1st year baby album done.  It's taking so long to get it done because "life" keeps getting in the way.  I am getting close to the end - he's 10-1/2 months old now!  Just a month and a half to go and his first album will be done!  

But here's another interruption - when he was that age, we took our first trip back home to Wisconsin as a married couple and as a family (this was in the year 1989).  So now I gotta make a Wisconsin album too (on the side of Justin's baby album).

please try to ignore my poofy 80s hair

So, I wish I was a clone so I could be upstairs working on these scrap book pages, while at the same time working on PW's quilt downstairs.

Should I finish the album before I start on the quilt?

That might take awhile  - I can already imagine PW bugging me to get started on her quilt.

Or do I put the scrapbooking on the back burner while I get another quilt made?

Argh.

I am just gonna have take turns!

Isn't that what my mom always used to tell us when we were kids?

The frustrating thing about wanting to do what you wanna do is that it seems like there's never enough time to do everything you wanna do.

But NOT wanting to do anything at all, I think, is even worse.

So, even though I get flustered about having too much to do and too little time, I am glad that I at least have some interests to keep life fun and enjoyable.

And now that I took up the time to write all of this, I have no time left for scrap booking OR quilting today, cuz "life" happens, and in order to keep life going, we gotta eat.

"Time keeps on tickin', tickin', tickin'.....into the future.........."

I don't know how many more years I got left, but I hope it'll be enough to pump out a bunch more quilts and albums.