Finally!!  Something to show for Finishing School Friday.  I was despairing of ever having something to show again, as school has started and I’ve been slammed with busyness.  Today was the first day I’ve had to take a breath.

I was able to work on this shopping bag/tote that I’ve had cut out and partly sewn for over a week now. I wasn’t really happy with it during construction, but decided that today, before I started any other sewing projects, I would finish it.   I remember long ago standing in a new dress in front of the mirror while my mother was sitting on the floor, marking my hem with straight pins.  I didn’t like the dress at all.  I thought it didn’t flatter my perfectly fine 17-year old teenage-girl body in the ways I wanted it to, in order to catch Dan Ord’s eye at church.  I don’t know what I wanted, but I didn’t want this.  I must have said something to this effect to my mother (not mentioning the boy, of course), who mumbled through the pins in her mouth: “Don’t judge a dress until you get the hem in.”

She was right, of course, about this and so many other things.  I wore that dress out, and yes, got the boy.  But in dressmaking and in life, we have an idea in our head of how the end will be, but somehow what we are working on, and what our vision is, have a parting of the ways.  Maybe it’s because we want it to be finished, to be done.  And we are called away and so the quilt, the bag, the dress sit, unfinished.  But I kept at it all afternoon, doing loads of laundry, talking to the man who came to replace our windshield (rock divots from our trip to Yellowstone), and made a batch of cookie dough.

It began last May with Carrie, a friend, who came to stay with one of her friends, Gina.  We hung out together for two days, goofing off, playing, eating pastries at 4 p.m. in the afternoon and ruining our dinner, but who cared?  When she and Gina left, they presented me with two swaths of quilt fabric: the raindrops print in blue and green and the wild floral print.  I loved them both, and couldn’t decide between the two for lining the bag. So, I used both.

I finished the last of the top-stitching a few minutes ago, shook it out, and wow.  I liked it!  It’s the old put-in-the-hem principle at work, one more time.

In case you didn’t go and visit and read about being my slammed by school post on the other blog, here’s one of the pictures for you, a dreamy pastoral sunset scene, taken in Paris, Idaho.  Enjoy, and have a good weekend!