Does your mind ever grab a random thought and just kind of take off, like Alice down the rabbit hole? This happened to me yesterday while working on an apron for my son. The pattern is for a simple butcher's apron and he'd requested some embroidery. The fabric is 100% cotton Chinese twill, fairly heavy.
To assemble the neck strap and ties, the instructions said to "turn a loop using a loop turner." Now, I've never bought one of those because a safety pin generally works just fine. After about 10 minutes trying to work the safety pin through the neck strap, I'd turned about 1 inch! My fingertips were getting sore and so was I. A quick search on the Web found a suggestion for adding a length of ribbon to the safety pin. In all, it took more than 20 minutes to turn that 14 inch strap!
As I sat looking at the tie straps, I knew there was no way I was going through that again. And that was when I realized I did not HAVE to turn the loop, no matter what the revered instructions said. Instead, I pressed the two long edges in about 3/8" and folded the strap in half lengthwise. It took about 4 minutes to press and stitch both straps and, for what it's worth, they look just fine, thank you.
And this is point at which my thoughts tumbled down the rabbit hole! I'd had to actually give myself permission to NOT follow the printed instructions. At what point in my life had I first done this without guilt, I wondered. Since childhood I've been nearly neurotic about not making a mistake; talk about an emotional burden! It's always been absolutely essential to color inside the lines. My doodles bear witness to this---never random squiggles, but rather precise geometric shapes, connected and shaded with close attention to symmetry.
Perhaps it was while cooking that I first deviated from the recipe. It would be nice to say that my innovations always yielded grand results. The truth is that more than one dish ended up in the garbage. And yet dismay from wasting the food did not keep me from risking failure again. It's more like risking success, right?
I walked against the current in the 80s when I chose to let my twin sons self-wean from breastfeeding, secretly enjoying the horrified expressions of observers when my boys tugged at my blouse and proclaimed, "Mama, I need to nurse NOW!" No regrets all these 20-something years later.
This is the year of my sixtieth birthday. Although I don't consider myself old, it's likely time to wear purple (with heartfelt thanks to Jenny Joseph) and attempt anything I want with a chihuahua on my lap.
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