quitting

Another busy day today, getting things ready for the workshop this weekend.  The event is right around the corner, and as the minutes tick by, I'm finding that I need to adjust my expectations of myself.  There are things I'd planned to do that won't get done, last-minute projects that will be scratched off the list, and absolutely "perfect" ideas that will just have to be "good," instead.

I'd like to think that this is all really good practice for the Big Day coming up in June.  It's important to remember to take deep breaths and to treat yourself well.  At some point, you need to just sit back and be satisfied and enjoy the results of your hard work.

Of course, it's one thing to be able to recognize all that, and it's another thing entirely to put it into practice.  I'm actually pretty lousy at calling it quits.  I have a very hard time saying, "Enough is enough."  I always want to chase the dream up until the very last second.

There is one situation, though, in which I can almost always be relied on to quit.  When I am not immediately good at something--something that I've never tried before--my first instinct is to stop trying. I don't like losing.  I don't like making mistakes.  I don't know if it's just my nature to be this way, or if it's some indirect result of how I was raised.  Regardless, I've found enough things that I'm at least moderately good at to be able to get away with avoiding the things that I don't take to right away.

All of which brings me to the drama of the day.  The pom poms.  If you read the wedding blogs, or flip through the magazines, you know that tissue paper pom poms have been all the rage for quite some time now.  I thought it would be fun to have a few for the workshop space on Saturday, and when I saw that Martha had a how-to on her website, I knew that I was set.

Now, Martha has never steered me wrong.  I've always maintained that if you are willing to follow her instructions without question, you will not fail.  Baking a tart, getting grass stains out of cotton, decorating the table for Thanksgiving.  There's nothing Martha can't help you do.

If all that is true, though, then how did I end up with something that looks like this?

Such a sad little muppet of a pom pom.  To say that I was disappointed would be an understatement.  I was overwrought.  I was bereft.  It had seemed like such an easy thing to do.  How could I have made such a mess of it?

Of course, the answer is that I needed a little more practice.  After a few hours of being vaguely mad, and some of that deep breathing I was preaching about earlier, I gave it another go.  I really had to make myself do it.  Mostly, I was dreading another tissue paper travesty.

Instead, though, I got a pom pom.  And then another one.  And another one.

The weird part is that I skipped some of Martha's directions.  That whole trimming the ends to look like flower petals?  I ditched it entirely.

And it worked.  These things aren't works of art, but I like them anyway.  They're bright and fun, and they're a nice reminder that I shouldn't take myself--or my little projects--too seriously.