A Blatant Act of Avoidance

That's what this post is. It's warm and very humid this morning and I feel like a slug. If I had known better I might have named this blog The Snail's Trail. It's Monday morning and there is no reason I could not be sewing or doing something else productive. Yet here I sit. Besides the housework, which I'm not going to do anyway, I have a raft of creative projects I could be engaged in. It's rather frustrating to be sitting here, apparently unable to pick up a piece of cloth or a pen, knowing there are deadlines to be met and deadlines that have passed. Arrgh!

One of those deadlines is my journal for The Sketchbook Project. It's not due until January but I feel compelled to work on it now, not later. I picked up a couple of old books at the thrift shop last week, thinking I would use them somehow. So far those ideas have not materialized. But I have not given up on them entirely. My little travel sketchbook is brimming with the various ideas I've had for my Sketchbook. I think what I need to do is to collate them onto one or two page(s) in my Studio Journal so I can see at a glance what I've done and what I might choose to do. Maybe that will help.

The other project I need to be working on is a new quilt for my Dear Husband. I made him a quilt for his birthday some 15 years ago and it's showing its' age. I think I've finally come up with a plan at least. He loved this print:

I thought I'd use big pieces of it with some fussy cut images from this print:

His first quilt is a strippy format; I believe this one will be also. Which means I only have to make about 14 blocks and that shouldn't take an awful lot of time. The thing is that my long-arm quilter, Heather, has me penciled in for a date in November so I have to have the top and backing ready by then. I figured I would use my 15 minutes of play to get these blocks made. I just haven't sat down at the sewing machine in what seems like forever! I consider the time I've spent coloring and pasting in my Sketchbook journal play, just of another type.

Is it all starting to feel like work now? No, not really. I think it's just the weather, the changing of the seasons... something along those lines. Miss Responsibility, sister to Miss Perfection and daughter of The Judge, may be the source of my discomfort. Not only am I feeling the deadlines for these two projects looming over me, I have unfinished commitments to the Bead Journal Project and others to fulfill. I know full well that the best and perhaps only solution is to take action on any one of these projects. Just a tiny baby step, and that will lead to another and then another... And eventually this miasma will pass.