What? You too?!
Have you ever taken a ramble through your home and noticed all the piles and projects and good intentions glaring back at you?
Me too.
Craft supplies brought home with such big plans, eventually packed away in shoeboxes with lids, and put up on a shelf behind a closed closet door.
Baking and cooking gadgets and supplies purchased to whip up some wonder torn out of a magazine from the dentist's office (tell me you do this too), but then the bundt cake is never baked, the veggie lasagna never makes it to the table. The gadget drawer grows with all those doodads I can't even remember what they're for, so they're piled into the back of the car and taken to the local charity drop off.
Self-striping yarn by the skein, never even taken out of the wrapper, or perhaps begun but not finished to be worn, embroidery floss in a rainbow's scope of color that never makes it to the Aida cloth. Books rescued from the shelves of the used bookstore, for fifty cents apiece, but they remain closed, gathering dust in the bookcase. Skirts and doll dresses to be sewn and given away and just given away, still on the bolt.
I tend to tuck them away where they are out of sight, out of mind, only they're not. Now and then I remember, catch a glance of them, or see something that brings them back to mind, and oh the guilt...
I was in the fabric store a few weeks ago, and saw the very fabric I'd purchased at least two years ago. We'd picked up a table and chairs for our townhouse in Idaho, but the chairs had been given a cursory covering in chevron fabric never intended to host a backside.
And I'm not a chevron fan.
It may be my age, but I'm thinking it's just not my thing, and wouldn't have been twenty years ago either. The lines are too hard and firm for me. No whimsy, no fun. Geometry was never my thing, not even in high school.
I'd paid a chunk of money for something I thought was perfect. Brought it home, left it out on the table for months. Then eventually was honest, and dragged it to the upstairs closet, to sit next to other good intentions.
I wonder if it's like Toy Story? Do all those projects sit on the shelf quietly during the day, then at night they come alive and talk about how they all have abandonment issues?
When we moved into this home, a year ago, I carted the fabric to the downstairs bedroom, neatly tucked it into a cubby, and there it sat.
Then I saw the fabric hanging on the bolt in the store. Remembered I'd brought it home and planned to cover the chairs. They were still covered in that grey chevron I'd never, ever liked.
Lately I'm in the frame of mind to finish. Finish half-read books. Finish half-knit socks. Finish mostly done quilts that are sitting on the floor of the closet instead of on a bed.
And finish recovering seats for chairs that I've disliked for two to three years.
Recovering a dining room chair takes about an hour each. That includes the taking apart, removing all the staples and the fabric, cutting out a new one from the pattern of the old one, stretching and stapling it all down again, reassembling, then admiring the work. The linked article recommends using oilcloth, which isn't a bad idea if you have little people in your home. Or visiting your home. I figure by the time my chairs are showing wear I'll be ready to change them out again, and the cost is really minimal. Joann's has great choices for upholstery if you want to go more traditional fabric style, and great finds if you're willing to dig through their back bins.
Admiring the work should take at least a few minutes. More if you've had the project on a closet shelf for multiple years.
I wish I knew what it was that is motivating me to pick up the pieces of all these good intentions lying around me. If I could figure that out, and bottle it up, I'd be sitting pretty for sure.
In the meantime, at least the dining room chairs are. Sitting pretty that is.
I'm a little weary of the teal blue I painted the top three years ago, but left the three leaves white. Should I paint it a brick red to match the chairs and the rug on the floor, or go with a dark charcoal grey? That grey is the rage right now, which means it won't be in another year or so. Either way, the leaves need to match the rest of the top. Until they do, I'm pretty sure I'll hear them whispering my name from the dark recesses of the furnace closet downstairs. And I'm over that feeling.
“The typical expression of opening Friendship would be something like, 'What? You too? I thought I was the only one!” ― The Four Loves
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