Finishing Update

Well, here we are, almost out of July. You know what that means, of course? It means that summer is MORE THAN HALF OVER!  Wahooooo!

I have never been a fan of the middle third of the year. In the pre-self-tanning-lotion years of my teens when my friends were spending long afternoons slathered with baby oil and lying on a beach towel until they were broiled the exact perfect shade of crunchy sexiness (at age 15, which, ick), I could manage about 30 seconds in the sun before I was convinced bugs were crawling on me, and the sun was burning my corneas through my eyelids, plus this is boring and I hate it. So all my life, summer and winter, my natural skin color has remained the delicate shade of a goldfish's belly just before it is flushed.

But I digress. My point was that the year is half over so it's time to check in with the word of the year, which I'm sure you remember is finish. (You did not remember? Huh.) I've added several things to my finished list this year, and it is amazing how exhilarating it is to move an item from in-progress to DONE.

I present for your amazement Boy#1's T-shirt quilt, which my goal had been to get done by his mid-June birthday.

In 2012.

Yes. I have had that garbage sack of T-shirts from his youth and childhood around for quite literally years and years. There are shirts from his high school years, and I believe one was even older than that (I don't remember exactly when he began to work as an umpire for rec league T-ball games). But after I finished Boy #2's quilt--the sloppiest, sorriest piece of stitchery ever produced--I got to work on this one. I cut out the squares, then these squares sat in a heap in the sewing room while the earth circled the sun several times.

This spring, I was determined to make this quilt a finish. I simplified the sewing process, queued up Midsomer Murders on Netflix, and sat down at the sewing machine. Last week I stuffed the finished quilt in a used gift bag and handed it to One during our 24 Hours of Togetherness. Three years overdue, the quilt was done.

It isn't a work of art--a county fair judge would probably refuse to give this even a green participation ribbon. But it will be nice and warm on fall evenings on the screened porch of Boy#1 and Lovely Girl's new-to-them house.

And, coincidentally, at the same time I got done with the quilt I finished the final season of Midsomer Murders that Neflix offers. That's 15 seasons of quaint British sleuthery and one quilt finished and the year is only half over. That feels astonishingly productive, but perhaps I have a different scale of production than most people.

How is your finishing coming along?