Have you ever had a craft go wrong? And it just ruins your whole day? You spend all day working on your craft project, neglecting the children (ok, parking them in front of the tv), planning on fast food for dinner ’cause there is no time to cook, house doesn’t get cleaned kind of all day. You think you are done with your project. And then something minor happens. But in your perfectionist mind the incident makes your project imperfect and therefore totally unacceptable. Yup, that has happened to me more than once. In fact, it happened to me this afternoon.
I was having a most productive morning. I painted furniture. I did laundry. I was on a suburban housewife roll. So I ventured into my craft room and decided that the moment was right to finish a pillow that a friend had custom ordered. I will be seeing her Thursday night so I wanted to be able to give her the order. I already had the pillow made I just needed to transfer the graphics on to it. By the way I found the cutest graphics at the etsy store of Graphiques. I sized each Fleur des lis with precision. I printed each one (don’t even get me started on printing woes!) and then carefully cut each one out. The transferring process is rather simple (a tutorial on another day). I ironed the transfers on my pillow, which was sewn to perfection by the way.
I decided to take just one more step and throw the pillow in the wash to soften it up a bit more. I wanted the pillow and graphics to look really soft and lived in.
This was a fateful move.
Of course, the pillow had to be ironed after it came out of the dryer. Little did I know, that when I transferred the graphic on the pillow the first go around I must have gotten some ink on the iron. So in my effort to make this pillow just right I made it just wrong by smearing black ink all over it! Ok maybe not all over it. I’ll bet if I showed it to you, you wouldn’t even be able to see the smears. But I could see them! This was the moment where a good craft went bad. These moments have the ability to bring a crafter to tears and firmly believe that their life is over and they should just quit crafting forever!!
In a moment of desperation, I googled getting ink out of fabric. So now what was my nearly perfect pillow has pretty much been saturated in hairspray. Why? Because that is what google said to do and I am a desperate crafter! I won’t tell you the other cleaning products I added to it in some delusional hope that I would wake up from this crafting nightmare. So the pillow is in the wash again as I write this. I wonder how it will come out of the wash? I have a feeling I will be doing a crafting do over. But then again maybe it will come out looking worn and lived in which is kind of what I was after in the first place. Which would be just perfect.
Bet you can’t even see my mistake can you? It is soooo emotionally draining to be a perfectionist!!
Looks good to me.