Every week for the past thirty years or so, I make a menu plan. I look at cookbooks and cooking magazines, consult with Mr. Hunting Creek and make my menu. Then we look in the pantry and see what we need, I make my list and the week is laid out for me. We don't always stick exactly to it, but it is nice knowing that I have all of the ingredients to make those seven meals on the list. I started making a plan because I discovered that I was completely capable of buying a weeks worth of groceries and having nothing to eat for dinner after two days. Then back to the store I went. This gets expensive. Recently, while going through fabric in my cave, and making plans to have a dedicated sewing room (now that my daughter has her own place). I had one of those uncomfortable epiphanies: I had been buying fabric all wrong my whole life.
I would go through a fabric store or online store and just pick out what I liked. No list. No plan, just a sailor on leave with a month's pay going crazy. What I have ended up with is the most beautiful, impractical collection of unmatched fabric a sewista could have. Vintage kimono? Check! Silk suiting? Check! ( I no longer work in an office, either). Charmeuse, silk velvet...you name it, I have it. And in all of my favorite colors. But, if I considered what I actually wore every day, I'd be challenged to find three things that matched in the whole collection. I could never do a SWAP, I realized, because I never once bought fabric with a plan!
My daughter has offered to help arrange my new sewing room (she is a demon organizer. I sometimes wonder if she is really related to me, since I come from a long line of messy hoarding women, and she is neat, organized and most emphatically NOT a collector of anything. Kids today!) She has forbidden me to buy any fabric until what I have is all folded on shelves and organized. (Of course she knows that once she is finished I'll mess it all up.)
But at least I'll be sewing with a plan. Do you suppose it's too late to learn?
P.s. to the persons who emailed me saying that they couldn't read my handwriting: don't feel bad, sometimes I can't read it either! The menu reads: Asian Chicken Noodle soup with Chile; Carnitas Burritos, rice and beans; Steak and Snowpea Stir-fry; Chicken Sausage Calzone; Baked Potato Soup, salad; Fish, quinoa pilaf, roasted vegetables. (Yes, we really do cook like this every day. It's not difficult, once you get the hang of it.)
