Unfinished jobs and a missing tea cosy

Why is it so much more appealing sometimes to start a new project than finish off all those little ones that can lie, incomplete for days, weeks – years even?

I have a pair of trousers that have been giving me an increasingly irritated polite cough to catch my attention for a few weeks now. They need a hole mended – it is an easy job and yet, despite having had my sewing things out several times since knowing they needed repair, they have remained untouched.

It would only take me five minutes so why I haven’t just cracked on with them I can’t quite fathom, but I am sure I can’t be alone in this type of behaviour. I know someone who has been waiting for their window sill to be tiled for so long now the whole room is under consideration for a revamp. The more people I speak to the more it seems that for some reason, a lot of us do the same.

I know I am a terrible one for not being able to concentrate if I have a new idea I want to try out. It’s as if I need to exorcise the thought before I can carry on with anything else. I have tried ignoring ideas when they crop up and carry on with the more mundane need-to-be-done things, but it’s like they sit at the back of my head poking me over and over gently but insistently until I give in and pay them attention.

I have been a bit sofa-bound lately due to some medication making me rather useless and so this was the perfect time to do some of the gentle jobs – like hand sewing a hole in trousers. I set myself up on the sofa with my sewing kit (in a lovely old leather suitcase I bought at a car-boot sale) and a few small things to do.

I made myself a pot of lemon and orange tea but – where was the tea cosy? I could not find it anywhere. I have a feeling it has fallen behind something in the cupboard of doom (our name for the kitchen cupboard bursting with all those useful things that you accumulate but have no easy way to store) and for the life of me I didn’t have the energy to have a go at sorting that out.

Well, there was only one thing to be done then, wasn’t there? I needed to make a new tea cosy before I could get on with anything else. And so I did – the trousers huffing at having to wait a little longer.

On the subject of knitting and unfinished work, my mum and I, both have-a-go knitters over the years, decided a while back to try and make the same cardigan. We had a lovely time picking out the pattern and choosing the wool and set about the project happily together. Then, as it does, time and life got in the way and the knitting was put aside and spoken of regularly but never brought out into daylight; that is, until a week ago when I thought now would be the time to resurrect it. 

Finding it stashed at the back of my fabric cupboard I decided that, seeing as I hadn’t got far at all and also not feeling entirely confident I knew exactly where I had got to in the pattern, I would undo it and start again. It went well, I was forging ahead and then I came to a point I felt mildly intimidated by. I announced to my mother that the project was back in hand but that I had come to a sticking point. A couple of days later, after digging hers out from a forgotten corner she came round for us to tackle it together. 

“Why did we choose this pattern?” She asked. “Because we thought it would be quick and easy,” I responded which, considering it had been over a year since we bought it all was rather ridiculous. It turned out that she had last downed tools on hers at the same point I was now stuck on and I’m proud to say we figured out the next step together. We must make sure we crack on this time – otherwise, at this rate, it will be a few years before a finished product is actually produced.

And so, I suppose, I should now really just get on with those trousers – but I might first nip into the garden to pick the rhubarb before it takes over and then, of course, I will need to do something with it and, with all the time I’ve had to sit and think lately, there are a few new ideas I would just like to try first…

I’m hoping there are others like me, I’m sure you are out there. Do let me know if you have an unfinished project too – it may take my mind off those trousers which glare at me every time I walk past them.