Oh, what a dirty word! We all do it though, don't we?

I recently learned a very good lesson about procrastination. I learned that when I avoided a small problem, in my mind, that problem became much larger than it truly was.

The problem was a sundress that needed a small patch. Last summer, I'd sewn matching dresses for the girls, but on one, the piece of the bodice had folded over and gotten caught in the stitching that connected the bodice to the skirt. It was slightly creased, and frankly, Rachel's long hair covered the flaw, but I tend toward perfectionism.

So I removed the errant stitching and replaced it correctly. Unfortunately, this left a hole in the bodice (after doing the original sewing, I had trimmed the seam allowance). I wasn't sure how to patch this hole and have it look perfect, so the dress was guiltily stuffed in my pile of things to do later.

Fast forward ten months...I've been off my feet all month and working on a lot of sewing jobs. I decided to tackle that sundress patch. After all, if I ruined it, that wouldn't be any worse than it sitting in a box unused. I was debating matching the pattern of the print fabric, because, as I recalled, that patch needed to be large enough to cover a hole about 3 inches wide by 1 inch tall.

When imagine my pleasant surprize when I looked at the dress and realized that the hole and discovered it was only about 1.5 inches wide and less than a 1/2 inch tall!

I had it fixed in less than an hour. Rachel has worn her dress twice since then.

More importantly I learned a valuable lesson about myself: the more I stew about a problem and the more time that passes, the bigger that problem becomes in my mind.

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