Sewing like a pelican

I have to beat this channel jacket into submission.

It's ruining my golf game.

This is what I would like to say about golf:

• You don't have to be an athlete to do it. Look around the course. If you bombed out in high school gym class that fact is completely irrelevant to golf.
• Golf is a mental game. It gets better if you are relaxed and just look at that little ball and put the rest of it all out of your head.
• However if you look at that ball and see a sleeve with all the lining you still have to hand stitch hanging out of it, well you are going to hit that ball about 3" and feel just like you did in high school gym class.

(BTW on a completely unrelated note those jokers at Augusta better start admitting women asap or I am going to have to go over there. This exclusive golf club stuff is not about golf it's about power. How often in my career did I see women work all weekend and see the men come in Monday morning with the new agreements they had made over a game of golf on Sunday?  If the only reason I am not allowed in is because of how I look then, well you sure better come up with a better reason. That sort of nonsense has caused nothing but grief and it's stopping now).

OK, that feels better.

My husband and I golf every evening and if I don't get this jacket out of my head I'm not in the game.

Thank you so much for the fitting comments. 

They were sooo helpful. And Shannon as a woman of a certain age you nailed my upper chest. I trimmed off about 1.5" total from the front armhole and the fit is much improved. I put in one sleeve last night and am going to do the other one today, plus a whole lot of lining stuff.

When this is all over I am going to write what I learned. 

That's what I always say to students when they freak out over a bad mark, "What have you learned? What would you do differently next time?" I even say to them that a bad mark can be more meaningful and useful than a good mark because it teaches them more. I now know why they find me so annoying.

I even went for a long beach walk to ponder your comments and my frustration with this jacket.

That's when I watched the pelicans and realized how much they know about sewing.

Pelicans are very strategic. They know what they are looking for and they focus their energy on the job. You don't see a pelican stabbing around in the ocean hoping they get lucky and hit a fish. They cruise around and dive bomb very specifically. 

They don't feel they have to sew everything; they are not seagulls throwing themselves at every wave. They don't hang around there for hours, like the vacationing humans do, where there are no fish. They know when to draw the line and move on.

They get smarter as they go on.

I am giving this jacket another day or two and then going back to the instant stuff that is more suitable for a sewer on vacation, or for a sewer like me who just wants to have fun.

The thing about a pelican is they aren't there to prove anything, they just do their particular job really well.

They see the fish, the ball, and the jacket. They know they are not Coco Chanel.

And they couldn't care less.