Crafty Setbacks
Good morning, dear friends! I come to you today from my comfy chair, with my cup of coffee and a bit of frustration. As you know, I sometimes work on crafty things of varying natures. Most recently I’ve taken up cross-stitch as my handy work of choice. I’ve really enjoyed the few projects I’ve completed and I was so close to finishing a third when I made a terrible discovery.
So I’ve been working on this piece for a while now, right? It’s a quote from a beloved children’s book which I was cross-stitching, possibly to frame, I’m not sure yet. It’s for a friend who doesn’t know it’s coming so I haven’t felt too bad about the fact that it’s been taking me longer than expected to finish, mostly due to getting distracted and not having free hands. This week I decided to buckle down and get it done so I can start on other projects which I would like to actually finish for specific dates. I even brought the project with me to D&D yesterday so I could finish the lettering, which I did. I was working on a little design to under the words and showed it to the rest of my party to make sure it looked like what it was supposed to when my friend Casey asks. “Is it a quote from something?”
“Yeah,” I replied and told her where the quote was from. She then revealed to me that I had spelled a word wrong. I looked, thought really hard about how that could be possible, looked it up even, and she was right. I had spelled the word “awfully” as “awffly” somehow. Even as I stared at the correct spelling it took my brain a few minutes to register the mistake. Indeed, I had manage to bungle an entire word in the middle of my cross-stitch and hadn’t noticed until it was almost complete.
This is incredibly frustrating, being so close to finishing and now not so close anymore, but, as Casey very kindly pointed out, I don’t necessarily have to start completely over. The line which contains the mistake isn’t connected to the line below it, so I can just start at the end of that line and take out stitches until I reach a point where I can correct the spelling and move on. This is still a lot of unfortunate work, to take out all the stitches and then put them all back in after coming so far, but it must be done, and it’s better than starting over from scratch.
I really should have seen this coming. I’m terrible at spelling in general so I knew someday I would be working on a project and think “Yeah, I got this, I know these words” and I was wrong. Funny thing is, I know how to spell “adventure” like the back of my hand and still checked it like five times, but “awfully?” nope. Not once, apparently. Or if I did not close enough. So the moral of the story is, check your spelling before you start stitching! Also, if you see a friend working on a thing and something isn’t right, TELL THEM! Seriously! I’m so grateful to Casey for letting me know before I finished and gave it to the people it’s intended for. That would have been super embarrassing.
On the bright side, at least cross-stitch is apparently easily fixed. The string is probably not going to be reusable, but at least I can fix it without starting over. If this were a knitting project I would be crying so hard right now because there’s no coming back from that. Crocheting is a little better, but still a lot of work undone, over half of it, in fact. So today I’ll be correcting my mistake and hopefully getting back on track to have this finished by the end of the week. I hope you all have better luck with your crafty projects. Have a lovely day, my friends.
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