Lesson learned

You know how sometimes when you’ve been working on something for a while and you just want it to be finished now already – you put your head down and bolt for the finish line? And if there’s a few little corners cut or things not done quite up to standard in the rush you just go Who cares? Don’t be such a perfectionist! No one but you will ever notice.

Or maybe you tell yourself that’s the best job you can do when really deep down you know you could make it better except you can’t be stuffed fiddling with it any more.

Yes, well. Check out Exhibit A:

Many moons ago – possibly even before the first duckling arrived, but so long ago I can’t remember any more – I designed my own quilt, based around a beautiful printed panel I bought. Naturally, being me, the finished quilt top got stuffed in a drawer and never quilted, till earlier this year I had one of those seemed-like-a-good-idea-at-the-time moments and entered it in a quilt show.

Then of course I had to finish it. But ohh! the horror! when I dug it out of the cupboard and saw those terrible mismatched seam intersections. This wasn’t going to be a quick quilting job. Present-day me couldn’t bear to enter something so dodgy in a big prestigious quilt show, as if that was the best I could do, even if lazy-beginner-quilter me had been satisfied with it.

So out came the unpicker. Man, I hate unpicking! So much that I was tempted to just let it go. And there were so many of these hideous seams to unpick. But I got through it, thinking unprintable things about my lazy-ass close-enough’s-good-enough former self the whole time, and managed to produce a much better finished object.

I’m glad I took the time to fix it, though I hated every minute. It would have bugged me ever after if I hadn’t.

So, lesson learned. Do the damn job right the first time! Words to live by, I reckon.