Making it Under Deadline

The most important thing is to get started, right? Because I have resolved to start this blog by New year’s Day, 2013, and thrown every conceivable procrastination device in the path of this goal, acting no better than Congress over this Christmas vacation week.

I’ve tried first to learn a CMS (content management system). Someone told me to learn Joomla, and I’m up to Chapter Ten in an actual book I bought at an actual, brick-and-mortar Barnes & Noble. I might eventually move my blog and my website into Joomla … but that may take another week. Better to start writing.

Border print from Tanzania

I’ve sewn several skirts and a dress first, because daughter #2 was over for part of the week, and who can argue with time spent sewing clothes for and with one’s daughter? She had this wonderful dark green border print that her friend the adventurer had brought her from her six months volunteer teaching in Tanzania -- a trip that included scaling Mt. Kilimanjaro; something the girl had to accomplish before starting law school at Tulane. The same night my kid returned home to DC, she finished the skirt on her new machine. She texted me a picture around midnight. Ta da! Beautiful orange birds hiding among beautiful dark green pleats.

I have another skirt in the works for my sister, with wool so fine the nearest I can find to it at Joanne’s (not nearly as nice) was going for over $29 a yard. My sister picked up acres of this in grey and tan at a garage sale for $5. Her skirt is 80% done -- but I won’t see her for a while. Better to start writing.

I have to finish preparing for a “Are You Smarter than a Fifth-Grader”-style game show I’m organizing for the Hebrew School kids and parents of my congregation, but that’s not for two weeks. Better to start writing.

Then there’s the news. I have to know about the fiscal cliff and Hillary’s blood clot and “Gangnam Style” promotion in South Korea and Indian women protesting outrageous treatment and Russian Jews in Israel and stories much more arcane than these because they’re all there tempting me in the margins of Google News or in print on the kitchen table.

Could I cop the writer plea? Procrastination is what writers do. And in other media and for other purposes, writing is what I get paid for.

McCalls 6570

But as with most who write for money, it’s the non-paid, extracurricular prose that’s where the heart lies and the ego feeds. And if I don’t get that started, I’ll be remembered as the one who sewed. Not what I intended. I’ll remember myself (less eternally) as the one who fled from the keyboard to the sewing machine for the less iffy and much more tangible proposition of DIY wardrobe. Considering Lord & Taylor can’t lure me out of the house with screaming good sales, I’d call that avoidance. Fair statement?

I’ve also delayed blogging because it’s embarrassingly narcissistic: I strongly suspect that more people write blogs than read them. If I want to attract any readers, I’ve got to put some value in here.

M6579 pattern envelope pic

Notwithstanding my use of sewing as a procrastination device, I hope to attract some fellow sewers. Making clothes is a whole new ball game, now that sewing’s gone social like everything else. People review patterns and pin up pictures of their projects. You can see, before you cut, how things look on bodies like your own around the Latin-lettered sewing world, not models or drawings. You can find 25 Youtube demonstrations of the narrow hemming foot -- and those are just the ones in English. I can’t believe the number of sewing blogs out there, some miserably spelled, some wonderfully written. I’ll gladly contribute to this conversation.

I also hope to attract some readers with the other broad, recurring themes of my life, some introduced or hinted at here. Taken all together, I share them with a good chunk of the reading world.

There. I’ve started, just a tad past deadline.  Just like Congress...