If the little things make you happy, then the big things don’t seem to matter so much …
While the thinkers and movers worry about the state of the world, I tend to think more about decorating it.
I’m building fitted wardrobes in the bedroom, I’m making a Macramé deckchair, and I’m sharing smiles and happy thoughts with as many people as need them at the moment, and you can imagine in these times the need for smiles is many indeed. Can you also imagine that when I hit the end of my finger with a hammer, that my wardrobe and deckchair making came to a very sharp halt.
I don’t think I did any damage to the finger, as more than one person has commented, I hit the wrong nail, and Tom Thumb himself would have be proud at the resulting black bulbus swelling on the end of my finger.
Hubby is often in awe of my ability to just sleep at the drop of a hat, that’s all well and good when I need to rest, but if my concentration drops below the level needed to hold the hat, it just drops off and away I go with the fairies and unicorns. My crafting keeps my brain ticking over enough to keep it awake, so with no one-handed crafting on the go at the moment, I resorted to a jigsaw to stop myself falling asleep.
I have a few jigsaws which are special and will be staying around for a long time. One of these is “Whiteside Cottage”, a 1000 piece jigsaw, bought for me as a Christmas present when I first voiced the intention to do jigsaws on my large kitchen table. Each time I do one of these jigsaws, I write a note in the lid with the date to help me remember the times I’ve done it, and what was happening at the time.
It doesn’t take me too long to do a jigsaw and after starting it on the Sunday, I was putting the last few pieces in by Tuesday evening … Shock! Horror! There was a piece missing. The missing piece didn’t spoil the picture. Look again at the first photo and you probably didn’t even notice it was missing.
What a dilemma, the memory of receiving the jigsaw is bigger than the missing piece, but I have a Venice jigsaw in my collection with one piece missing, and although that one piece doesn’t spoil the picture either, (I unwizely bought it from a charity shop) after the initial time I put it together, it’s not come out of the box again.
On Tuesday evening I folded up the puzzle board with the jigsaw still made up in it and put it away under the settee in the room in an attempt to delay the decision as to whether I would keep the puzzle or not.
Wednesday follows Tuesday, and as is my routine on a Wednesday morning, I clean and tidy ready for a few crafting friends to come round, to craft, drink coffee, and often to eat cake with me in the afternoon. This week, the unusually warm weather pursuaded me to move the craft afternoon to the back garden in the cool shady spot I’ve created for just such an occasion.
I set about the “Crazy patio” and the “Other end” with a sweeping brush clearing up the moss that the seaguls had disguarded from the roof, and the sawdust left behind from Sunday morning before the “hammer incident”.
After a nice tidy pile of dirt and dust was achieved, I went for the dustpan and brush… But wait! What’s that? A little piece of blue cardboard just poking out of the pile!
Well I never… It was my little missing piece of jigsaw.
I’m not sure how, but somehow it had made its way into the garden. It hadn’t be lost for ever in the vacuum cleaner, (to be fair, I hadn’t hoovered then so that last comment can be put down to poetic licence), it hadn’t been soaked by rain, or blown away over the wall in a sqwall. And if it had been facing the right way up I would never have noticed the familiar piece of blue cardboard.
I put the piece on one of the table mats on the kitchen table where it’s been sitting waiting for me to dismantle and put away the jigsaw.
Before I took the jigsaw apart, I added the last piece to it and smiled. Hubby wasn’t quite as enthusiastically pleased as I was, but as I said at the beginning of this post, if the little things make you smile, then the big things don’t seem to matter so much.
Photographic Memories 