4-H quality, or not so much

Growing up, my mom was a 4-H leader for my sister, me and a few girls in the neighborhood. We'd work on learning skills throughout the summer and enter our projects (baking, cake decorating, sewing, etc.) into the county fair in the fall. If we did well enough, we were selected to enter in the state fair. We knew what the judges would be looking for: the perfect golden brown and consistent crackling across all four cookies of constant size; the perfectly raised, lightly browned, banana bread with an even crack down the middle; perfectly detailed stitching, evenly gathered, no puckers, all threads neatly trimmed. You get the idea. We called this "4-H quality". If it was going to be good enough to win, it had to be 4-H quality.

In my family, we still somewhat affectionately refer to this level of perfection as 4-H quality, or, in the words of Mary Popppins, "Practically perfect in every way." It's mostly a joke with my sister and me now.

I've been sewing quite a bit lately, and have been thinking about "4-H quality". I'm slowly but surely coming to accept the realization that pretty much nothing I do is 4-H quality. I've sewn two dresses for Macy, a pioneer trek dress for the neighbor, and bound a few quilts over the last several weeks, and not one of these was even close. As far as baking is concerned, we can't even go there, because cold cereal and mac'n'cheese don't even have a 4-H quality level to discuss, and that's about all I've done for several months! (Much to Jeremy's dismay, I'm sure. I should mention that Jeremy seems to bake all the cookies and banana bread around here, and he hits 4-H quality just about every time! Go figure.)

Usually my comments about a finally-finished project go something like this, "Well, it's certainly not 4-H quality, but it will do." After all, who cares that I didn't pick out all of my basting stitches that held the gathers in place for final stitching? Okay, so maybe I'm settling on the quality, but now I prefer to think that I'm settling for sanity, sans perfection!