keeping it real.

i am a night person.  always have been.  as much as i love mornings and think they are peaceful and beautiful … my natural body clock would rather wake up at noon and work till 3am.  i just function better that way.

yesterday i woke up early.  i was really sore from running the day before and i think the soreness was making me uncomfortable and i wasn’t getting a good sleep.  i woke up around 6:30am … poked around the internet until 7am … and then decided, i have so many things i am working on/want to be doing … i will not waste the day laying in bed, surfing the web and trying to fall asleep.  so i got up.

i had a granola bar and some coffee.  i made out my shopping list and my lists for what i wanted to accomplish this week and that day.  i fed and let out the puppy.  i sewed two maple blocks for my Modern Maples quilt (four more blocks to go!!!!!).  all before 8:30am!  i was cruising.  had i become a morning person??

when i was browsing my phone before i got out of bed, i checked my email and noticed that The Frosted Pumpkin had sent out their first week of the Autumn Sampler. i thought to myself, let’s see if you can do just one square a day! and maybe sort of keep up with this one! (i’m still on July on the woodland sampler. and i buy pretty much every pattern they make and then file it away for “someday”. because i can not resist them.)  i would cross stitch this for an hour or two, see where i was at … but i wanted to start my crochet work for the day by no later than 10am.

let’s fast forward to about 11am. i had ripped out stitches no less than like 10 times. i kept.making.mistakes. my thread was snagging and knotting. i skipped like ten zillion stitches. and this was just the border. i was frustrated and agitated and annoyed. this was not the “crisp fall morning, checking things off the to do list, relaxed, calm and content” morning i had in mind just a few short hours ago.

then, because i had run out of printer ink a week ago (and kept forgetting to pick up more), i had downloaded the pattern onto my phone and was using that as my chart. (why i didn’t use my ipad WHICH WAS RIGHT NEXT TO ME i have no idea. i’ll blame it on not enough sleep or coffee.) the Pumpkins protect their files and have a 3 times downloaded limit … and when i thought i was opening a saved file, i was really just redownloading it … so then i got an error message saying i reached my file download limit.

that was when i decided it was time to shut it down.

i unpicked almost the entire border.  i emailed the lovely pumpkins and asked them to give me another chance.  i threw all my cross stitching supplies onto the kitchen table and dug out my crochet work.  and i didn’t speak to cross stitch for the rest of the day.

that evening, after downloading adobe reader (TO SAVE THE FILE!!) onto my ipad, i started again.  i made like 8 million more mistakes and ended up creating this rats nest of knots and thread on the back (i have no idea what is going here … i never usually have this problem!  i’ve done cross stitch many times and never really have an issue!!) … but i got it done.  it took me like two hours … but i got this far:

huzzah.

so now i have to crochet for like a zillion hours in the next week to accomplish what’s on my to-list … but i am hoping that the autumn sampler goes a little smoother from here on out!  please!

and i’ve learned a very valuable lesson.  do not wield needles before noon.

… or before copious amounts of coffee.

thus ends this cautionary tale.

xo