Nice Try, Grandma

SO MANY WOMEN I know sew gifts for loved ones. It's often the REASON we sew!!  And when it turns out the way you hoped -- there isn't a better feeling in the world!!

LP, in Texas, at the Harry Potter Christmas dinner.  The placemats were PERFECT!! 

Of course, I am delighted for my friend LP.  But, sometimes -- things don't go the way you hoped.

The year Lilly was three, I was so delighted about Christmas.  She was getting her first baby doll. For weeks, I'd been making outfits...and I made matching nightgowns for Lilly, and her Mom, the doll AND Sophie...

I had my cousin Linda paint a little train case, using the nightgown fabric as inspiration for the pattern. WOW...

When Lilly opened the gift, she said, "Nice try, Grandma..."

You can see she was MISERABLE about my gift...and we were both quite annoyed with the men in the room, who could not stop laughing...

In this picture, even Sophie looks disappointed...

She never played with the doll or any of those clothes. And I never saw anybody wear the nightgowns.

I was devastated.  So sad, and disappointed.  Lilly's reaction was almost enough to make a girl want to STOP SEWING GIFTS!!

But I was saved by the wisdom of Eileen Roche. Editor of Designs in Machine Embroidery magazine. My friend Eileen is an experienced GIFT GIVER...and somehow, she has come to the perfect ZEN attitude about making gifts for people. She has a very unique point of view...and I have completely adopted her philosophy.

AND, like all good advice -- if you will only TAKE IT -- it could change your life...

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Eileen says, 

"Here’s how I look at sewing gifts for other people. I pour my heart into it, pick the project and the materials with that specific person in mind and then I throw myself into it. I think about them the entire time. And when it’s complete, I am done – I mean, I could literally, throw it away because I know I already got what I wanted to get. I wanted to honor them with my time, talent and thoughts. I wanted to spend time focusing on them, kind of ‘spending time’ with them (although they’re not there). In my mind, the process is the gift.

So don’t look at the time and energy that you spent as a waste, look at it as a gift to yourself. The gift of thinking, imagining, fantasizing about how much they will love your gift. The fact that they didn’t, well -- screw it. That’s their loss, just a total loss, it’s not your loss."

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That is some of the best advice I ever got....and I'm sharing it with you. Because, my guess is -- TODAY MIGHT BE A GOOD DAY for you to adopt this new philosophy...