And, that comes with its ups and downs.  I love having the summer “off” (even though I am teaching a class), but it is hard to be on such a long break. The winter break I get between semesters never feels long enough with the holidays in there, but summer is such a long expanse of time that I get used to the slow easy mornings of messing around on the computer and having a chance to eat the breakfast I actually want to eat.

This summer is even more fun and lazy because the boy is home with me all day, or most of the day.  And, actually, it has been wonderful.  We get on each other’s nerves some, but we have never really had this much time off together just being happy.  We have gotten to play with our new Wii fit every morning, laughing at the TV when we get told day after day that we are obese – you gotta love BMI.  And, we are just generally taking it easy, which is something that I don’t do very easily or very often.  But, I am really getting to love it more and more.

That makes weeks like this even harder.  I have a bunch of stuff I have to do, and I can tell you that I really don’t want to do any of it.  I would so much rather keep working on my studio, which is what I am going to call my new crafting room I have decided – I have always wanted to have a studio!  And, I want to work on baby blankets and clothes, and I want to scrapbook.  All this has helped me determine that Monday mornings are the hardest in the summer.  If I can just make it through this week, I can go back to summer break!

I think that the first thing that you have to do when dealing with an adventure into the imperfect is to stop judging other people’s imperfections. This act of calling attention to other people’s perceived weaknesses is likely just a way to make the expounder feel better anyway. We all just need to feel better about our imperfections, and maybe we will not judge our own stuff quite as critically. So, maybe, if I can just let things be, then it will trickle into the rest of my universe.

I will let you know how it goes. Until then, I am off for a grading marathon today!

As I am sure that readers who know me have noticed, I love to make gifts for people. And, I love to create things that I have seen somewhere else or in my brain and recreate them. However, one of the first things that I will do when I give you anything is show you where the imperfections are. I also rarely keep anything I make for myself, and I am beginning to more clearly understand why.

For about four years, I have been planning on making a quilt of my husband’s and my old t-shirts. All the shirts that hold sentimental feelings, but we not longer wear them. This was originally because I knew that as a military family we weren’t going to be able to keep collecting, but there were a few things that I knew that we wouldn’t be able to let go. So, I thought this was a wonderful idea.

So, I have been taking baby steps on this quilt for some time. The first major step was cutting the shirts up. Then, I went back in and trimmed all the pieces. I looked around online to see if I could find any really cool examples, but all the ones I found were so carefully planned and executed that I knew that it wasn’t the right way for our quilt to come together.

So, I found a backing that I love, and I got the batting that I think that I am going to use. But, since I did all that, nothing has gotten done. I am completely stuck. I don’t know if I should carefully try to lay everything out, or if I should just wing it. Honestly, the worst thing that will happen is that we end up with two quilts if I run out of space on the one.

However, after reading the blog entry for today, I have been thinking a lot about all the projects that I end up working on. Most of them are perfectly laid out in my brain, but I have some trouble with the execution. The blocks don’t line up, or the painting isn’t just quite right. And, I have trouble seeing past the imperfection, which is largely why I think that I don’t keep the things that I make for myself.

So, I have decided that I am going to be try to let myself be more imperfect now. Instead of it being something that I hide from, I think that it is going to be something the I embrace. I am human; I make mistakes. Thank god! I personally don’t really like perfect people, so I am not sure why I want to be one. However cliche is sounds though, there is one thing that I can do perfectly…I can just be the person that I am in the best way I know how.

So, if you get an imperfect something special from me, I hope that you love it (which is the whole point, right)!