Time management and cloth linen napkins...

One thing about doing homeschool - the days fly by and I feel like I have little or no time for anything.  I have to be really careful to stop and rest because I do not want to.  I want to just keep going and get everything done.  Thank goodness for house cleaners, at least I am not driven to wear myself out cleaning bathrooms,  doing the floors and dusting.  I really do have to think about time management and pacing.  It was easier in the summer when I did 3 days a week homeschool and had every other day off, mostly I rested but I had 4 whole days a week to do stuff.  Now I look forward to weekends to do things for me.  The end of this month Brad is taking the kids to Kalahari for a vacation.  I am sad that I shouldn't go but looking forward to the time in my house alone.

Here is my lack of planning and time management story of the day.  I decided to go online and buy some more cloth napkins.  A month or so ago we decided to spruce up our dining room table and the kids begged for cloth napkins and napkin rings because they look cool.  We bought some neat little Bamboo cloth napkins that looked great - until we washed them.  They came out of the dryer as wrinkled up balls of brown cloth (think crumpled paper balls).  However we go through SO many paper napkins it feels really wasteful so I thought switching to cloth napkins would be a good idea.  But of course I wanted to buy wrinkle free.  So after about 20 minutes searching Amazon and every other place I determined that not only are all cloth napkins expensive (2-4$ each).  That if you want wrinkle free ones you much be rich or insane because they are $5 or more each.

So I just happened to stumble onto a blog of a lady who made her own napkins and boom - I knew I could do that.  I have plenty of wrinkle resistant cloth left over from costume making from SCA and Christmas concert days so I dug into my stash to see what I had.  I found about 6 yards of a light wieght brushed white cotton denim in my cheap cloth stash (from back in the days when I would buy out any cloth that was 1-2 dollars a yard).  And I decided right then and there to get my sewing machine out and make that cloth up into napkins.

I did it but not nearly as quickly as I thought I would, and I was frantically trying to get it done after school because I borrowed my daughters school table to set up as a sewing station.  Finally finished at 7 pm after a rest when I started to get too tired to do it.  Then I packed up my gear tossed the 12 new napkins in to be washed and finally ate some dinner.  My biggest problem is I did not want to stop.  I have plenty more cloth where that 6 yds came from and I want to make enough napkins to have 20-30 of them so I can stop buying the paper ones.  Even now - though my back is aching and it feels so good to take a moment and put my feet up - I am still fighting the urge to go get more cloth and finish up my napkins...  not very good at time management, I want to start something NOW and work on it without end until it is done.

So I am starting of list of all the things I want/have to do and I am going to make a schedule for myself, not a OCD schedule but more of a list with an estimate of how much time things will take and then I am going to do them one at a time.  Oh and I am going to make more napkins... but not on such a spur of the moment!