The Stick-to-it-tiveness of Old Age

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I have always loved creating things. As a child I tried lots of arts and crafts projects. Sometimes I was drawn to the raw materials like beautiful yarn or a set of brightly colored markers, other times the finished products, like a cute skirt or a nice Christmas wreath. But as a young person I often would start a project, gather all the needed supplies, organize them and begin, but not always finish.
I can’t count on one hand the number of knitting projects I started. Conversely there are not enough fingers and toes in my whole family to number the items of clothing I sewed. Of course as I got older I learned some things about myself and creating. I discovered what the fun part was about doing arts and crafts and did that and learned to outsource what was more tedious for me.  
Needlepoint is a perfect example. I love stitching but would never attempt “finishing,” a project. Finishing in the Needlepoint world means fabricating a stitched canvas into a pillow, ornament, stocking, belt or whatever it is meant to be.
One of my real weaknesses in arts and crafts is my love of beautiful fabric. I have been known to buy fabric with no plan on how I was going to use it. This summer when I was in Maine and wandered into an art and fabric store I fell hard for a bunch of fabric. It was then that I decided I wanted to make a quilt. I had never made one before and had no instructions or teacher, so I just winged it. As I started work on it I decided that I wanted to make one big enough for our king sized bed. This probably should have been decided when I was buying the material, but I was not so organized.
Making the quilt top went faster than I thought. Then I had to find a backing material, which took a little while. Once I had all the pieces of the quilt I realized I was not interested in ruining my first huge project by trying to “quilt” it myself. My friend Cliff Elam told be about his friend Tina Schwager who had a long arm quilting machine. Ah, I can pay her to quilt it. The answer to the part of the project that would bore me.
I went to meet her and knew this was going to be the beginning of a perfect friendship. Last week I picked up my quilt from her. The quilting that I had envisioned and described to her was exactly the modern look I wanted for this project. I brought the quilt home to finish it by hand sewing on the binding that covers the edge of the quilt. That was the slowest part of this project, but I was so excited to get my first quilt done that I kept at all 387 inches.
Tonight it is complete. Shay thinks I made this just for her. She snuggled in the folds while I was stitching the binding and now that it’s done has wrapped herself in it.  

Such a difference in old age to work on a project from begging to end non-stop and not abandon it part way through due to boredom or becoming attracted to some other shinny new thing. I have already completed a second quilt top that I gave to Tina when I picked up this one and have bought the fabric for a third quilt I will start tomorrow. I love being young enough to learn new things and old enough to finish them.