Taking a Break and Thoughts About Being a Lefty

Whew -- tonight I took a break from learning CS5 -- a well-deserved break. In the past week I've learned many useful things such as cut, copy, and paste, using brushes and some filters, color reduction, and I'm still playing with making repeats. Learning is slow-going, but eventually I'll know what I need to know in order to do what I want to do.

Anyway, I finished my baby quilt for the October issue of Quilter's World magazine. I tacked the binding down and finished the hanging sleeve. Whenever I work on binding, I always think about my friend Cathey. She was having trouble making her corners smooth and asked me to show her how I did it, so I did. She went home then and the next time she was working on binding, she tried and tried and tried to do it the way I showed her but after a long time, she still couldn't figure it out. Then she remembered a very important detail -- an often overlooked detail in the world -- Cathey is right handed and I am left handed. It seems that she couldn't bind her quilt trying to do it right-handed the way that I do it left-handed.

It's a funny world, don't you think? How many times do you righties take for granted that things are easy to do? What about you lefties? Have you ever struggled to figure out how do to do something left-handed that you saw a right-handed person do and couldn't figure it out? Well, you are not alone. Sometimes right-handed ways of doing things don't always translate for left-handed people. This even includes quilting. Luckily, it doesn't happen very often since we lefties are pretty good about translating a right-handed world. Still, I'll never master inside curves with a rotary cutter....