No, I havn’t started a foot-focused knitting project. In fact, I haven’t really started any knitting project at all. This post is strictly about the sewing. Or possibly it’s about procrastination, and is only masquerading as a post about progress. Which takes us back to the title, I suppose, becasue really I do feel as if I’ve slipped on a pair of seven league boots, only instead of traversing many miles in a single stride, I’ve managed to walk briskly from August right into October. This feeling is supported by the fact that time spent working (read: sitting at a desk) goes. So. Slowly. But all the little in between bits pass by in a blur.  Sometimes it feels like I’ve merely stepped out of my car in one week and entered it again in another.

The feeling has been growing since the beginning of August, about the time I started this apron. It was going to be simple. Easy. A way to ease myself into the sewing world, since the half a dozen unfinshed garments I have stowed cleverly out of the way seem to be telling me that jumping in head first only works when there is water in the pool.  Things were looking good. And then I decided that I wanted these pockets. And that, of course, meant embroidery. So I got a stitch dictionary out from the library and amused myself with making a spoon and several teaspoons worth of sugar crystals.  This was done realtively fast for me, and I predcited the apron would be done before my birthday.

Or I did, right up until I realized I had to do something for the other pocket. I spent days and days agonizing over what it should say, and when I finally did decided September Happened. At least, I think it happened. It’s all a little hazy and I don’t really have anything to show for the time I spent there, which makes me think I spent the whole month trotting around in my seven hour socks. The long and short of it is that, at the beginning of October, the second pocket looked something like this:

Well, Monday night I was at Bible study and, in an effort not to figet during the endlessing notes, I put my hand in my pocket and found, drum roll, the above, folded, with a needle stuck carefully through it. I unpicked my unfortunate attempt at stem stitch and made a simple ‘R’. Yesterday I picked it up and put in the N, E, Y, J, O and heart that completed the pocket. Just like that. Maybe two hours, tops, and suddenly the thing I had been putting off becasue I was sure it would be boring and difficult was done. I tripped happily up the stairs to sew the backs on both pockets.

The happily delusioned can stop reading here, x-out of their screens, and just float away in a cloud of ignorant contentment, confident that this story ends with me happily hand sewing the pockets to my apron front. Those already embittered with the world, or trying to find out how to get the magic out of their own dimension-defying-footware, have probably already guessed what happened next, for it is exactly the thing that would happen to someone who left their sewing machine out, untouched, for three months. Thirty minutes after tripping up the stairs, with the bobbin finally full and loaded, I put my foot to the pedal and heard “whirr, whirr, bliiiiiiiiiiiiiiit.”

“Bliiiit“

I think I’ll come back to this project later. Maybe after a short walk?