An Unexpected Opportunity

Today there was really nothing on my plate, and so I set out to do only the things I wanted to do. It began with spending a little extra time on my embroidery. I finished the corn, and since I had the right color floss in my needle,

I started on the cabbages. Then, I was curious to see how it would look to add the darker green to the cabbage leaves, and so I did that until I was pretty tired of doing embroidery for the day.

After that, I decided it was time to re-pot the second round of dill and basil into larger pots.

I needed to do a little clean-up in the greenhouse anyway. I needed to rid the place of the old bloomed out dill and basil, since those plants have given their all for the season. I'm hoping to coax another crop of dill and basil out of the greenhouse before the season is over. Also, I had some lettuce that needed to be discarded. There is a new round of red leaf that is ready to start picking now, and I'll probably start another round of green leaf. For today, I was satisfied to re-pot the dill and the basil and get them set up on their timed drip sprinklers.

After that I did the tiniest bit of housework (the best way to do housework, in my humble opinion...in tiny bursts...really tiny bursts). Then, I was ready to do what I'd been wanting to do for a solid week--get on with quilting the True Hope quilt.

So I was quilting along and rolling the quilt as I went until I noticed as I was rolling that I had made a grave error.  Oh my.

Oh this did not bode well for my afternoon of quilting.

It was only creased in that dark gray section which happens to be smack in the middle of the quilt back. After spending some time looking at it (because, honestly, how was I going to stop that from happening again?), I realized that it had creased in the place that had formerly been the fold of the fabric as it came off the bolt. Although I ironed the back before I sandwiched the quilt, I decided I would need to iron it again once I had all of that picked out. Oy.

So, I only said a few bad words when it occurred to me that the Universe had just smiled on me with a tremendous opportunity! Why yes! It was my opportunity to spend the rest of the afternoon practicing patience, and to learn new vocabulary words with more or less than four letters! How could I have not seen that coming? In my haste to be pissed off about having to pick out a rather large section of tight quilting, I had failed to see the fabulous occasion for me to practice skills that had become rusty (i.e., patience and tranquility). These openings do not come along every day.

And that is how I spent the majority of the afternoon. Pick, pick, pick, pick. It was positively splendid. If by splendid, you mean tiresome and tedious. I was afraid I was going to pick threads from the fabric and make a hole. I probably did, but nothing obvious. Oy. Not exactly what I had in mind when I started the day.

Nevertheless, the day ended well. I didn't accomplish as much as I'd hoped (quilting wise, that is), but I did manage to get the second of three rows of flying geese quilted.

See? No creases. Thank goodness, because I might have committed hari kari with my seam ripper if I had done that again. With one more row of flying geese to quilt, there is still time.

When I came upstairs, I found Little Mister flat as a pancake on top of the china cabinet. He likes to get up there on warm days. It's cool on his tummy. It's unusual for him to come in on his own this early.

His day must have been filled with opportunity too.