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You Reap What You Sow

I just sat down to write a blog post, opened up WordPress, and found this stub of a post that I started back at the end of May:

“If you want different kinds of results, you need to plant different kinds of seeds.”

This is relevant in so many ways, both literally and figuratively.

I’ll just run with this one.

If I were writing this with paper and pencil instead of typing on my laptop, my eraser would have torn a hole in the paper by now.

I guess I’ll just start with the main fact I’m dancing around: I’ve gained 40 pounds in the past four years.

Selfie in a formal portrait style.
August 2019
Me sitting at a park bench. My face looks puffy.
June 2023

On one hand, the reasons why I gained the weight don’t really matter at this point. What matters is getting back down to a healthy weight. On the other hand, if I don’t pinpoint what happened, then how do I fix it?

Let me give some background, and peel this onion a bit.

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I Made a Baby Quilt!

When my coworker invited me to her baby shower, my first thought for a gift was a baby quilt. The quilts and blankets that Fake-Aunt Sheryl made for my son over the years were useful and super cute at the time, and have become cherished mementos in the ensuing years.

(Plus, now that I know how to sew, I understand the level of effort that went into each of them, and appreciate how Sheryl’s skill improved over just a few years.)

Now, I’d never actually made a quilt before — which is ironic, given that my initial interest in learning to sew was to make t-shirt quilts for myself, rather than paying others to make them for me. In the almost six years I’ve been really sewing, I’ve used quilting techniques to make “mug rugs” (aka coasters) and pillow cases, but this would be my first actual quilt.

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