The Time it Takes

It took me five minutes to load one bobbin this afternoon, and yet only 10 minutes to load a total of 5 bobbins. 

With the first one, I had to set up the thread, find the bobbins, & set machine dials. Before it got going too far, the winding thread fell over & knocked two bobbins on the floor. Of course, one was hiding because they are clear. Finally, they were loaded. 

Why this matters is that doing them one at a time would add 15 minutes to the bobbing loading. Several years ago, I stumbled on a site called http://www.flylady.net/. Her theory is that you can get your home clean by using a specific plan and only spending 15 minutes per day doing housework. No kidding. It works. Well, it works for me, so I take those 15 minutes seriously.

Many quilters have reasons why they can't do the housework, including mine: I hate it. Thing is, I love a clean house, and I love being able to find what I need.

I test the limits of my quilting machine by loading and using five bobbins before cleaning it, yet, so far, I am getting away with it. I feel mighty smug that all my 2014 machine work is done with only the finishing handwork stage to complete, and of course, the various quilt blocks for swaps.

If it needs servicing, none of my projects have pressing deadlines and I can have it gone for up to three weeks before I start panicking. I've even spent time reading again beyond the browsing in my quilting magazines. Time is a good thing to have in small or larger increments. 

And none of it is wasted.