On birthday traditions & Procrastination

Back in the grand ol’ year of 2020, I was stress sewing. Hand sewing with felt was my coping mechanism for those first couple of months of the pandemic. I worked on other projects (namely the Easter countdown from The Sugar House Shop - there were a lot of sequins in that one!), and then I developed my own. Of course, what I needed in the midst of a pandemic was to (1) start grad school online and (2) make my daughter a hand-sewn birthday banner. And not just any birthday banner, but one that included a retrospective of every birthday theme she had ever had.

So I embarked on sewing a banner than included her name in sparkly felt from Benzie Design (it’s so nice - the glitter does not shed AT ALL). And then I made two end panels for each birthday theme.

I’ve kept it up since then, though each year I procrastinate a little more and cut it a little closer. I also won’t lie - I still haven’t completed the panels for her third birthday. But seeing as we’ve moved on quite a bit since then, it’s not a pressing need. Some day, I’ll get around to tackling Toy Story.

I’ve known for literal months that her desired party theme for this year was Transformers. Not just any Transformers, but G1 specifically. She knows an alarming amount about G1 Transformers.

I knew immediately that the two panels for this year would be the Autobot symbol and the Decepticon symbol, because that would certainly be easier than trying to recreate a whole Transformer. :-) I dreaded the fiddly cutting that it would entail. I even considered buying a Cricut to have it cut it out for me. LOL. But as a minimalist, I talked myself out of that one. Finally, yesterday afternoon I forced myself to buckle down and start.

As per usual with most of my projects, I started on the floor. Hence the carpet background. I literally LOVE to spread out every single thing I need all over the floor when I start a project. It doesn’t matter if it’s sewing or knitting or embroidery, I plop down on the floor and literally surround myself 360-style with materials.

I wasn’t wrong. There was definitely some fiddly cutting. (Looking at you, the top three pieces of the Autobot symbol.) But I also grossly overestimated how long it would take me when I was just planning it in my mind. In reality, one afternoon of sort-of focused work yielded these two cuties. I am overly pleased with how they turned out.

I posed them with a small fraction of my daughter’s Transformers collection - that would be an area where I have not successfully implemented minimalism. :-) But it brings her a lot of joy, and she’s only young once.