Old-Fashioned Fruitcake
To make a Barren Tree bear Fruit
Having girt and tucked up your clothes, and having taken an axe or hatchet, approach the tree with resentment, wishing to cut it down: but when any body comes to you, and deprecates the cutting of it, as if responsible for a future crop, seem to be persuaded, and to spare the tree, and it will fruit well in future.
Thomas Owen, Agricultural Pursuits (a translation of Geoponika, 1805-6)
quoted in Lost Crafts: Rediscovering Traditional Skills by Una McGovern
Time flies when you’re… experimenting on yourself.
It was nearly two and a half months ago that I wrote the introductory post of the Grand Productivity Experiment, resolving to Do Something about my general state of disorganization and unproductivity before it brought my grey hairs in sorrow to the grave.
(A note to those who haven’t been following this from the beginning: the introductory post outlines the first method tested. The Phase One post reports back on that and outlines the second method. And so forth.)
But I’m darned if I know what to call it. Follow the process, if you will, and advise accordingly.
As so often happens, necessity was the mother of this design. I got sick of constantly mislaying my tiny scissors – the ones I use for snipping off ends of thread, yarn etc. What with working on the rose quilt and churning out a stream of granny squares for prayer blankets – not to mention wrestling with socks – those scissors were getting a lot of use, in a lot of different places.
