The Seam Ripper is a necessary and useful item if you sew. The seam ripper has a sharp point that allows you to get under a stitch or a knot of threads and break the seam and pull out a seam that you realize to late that was wrong.

My brand of sewing seems to be twice as much seam ripping as actual sewing.. as for every line of stitching that is kept I feel like I take out 2!

This weekend as I was taking out a truck load of seams from a project that is teaching me lots of life lessons, I thought about the gift and the lessons of the seam ripper.

So here are a few of my deep thoughts from my time with the seam ripper.

1. Just because something looks good from the front, doesn’t mean it looks good on the back.

2. Just because something appears to have been done correctly, doesn’t mean that it was.

3. It may seem like a tiny mistake when you make it, but if you take the time to fix it, you realize that it was a big one that was on track to derail the entire project.

4. If you stop and think about what you are doing before you do it, you will save time as having to go back, take apart what you have already done and start again the right way takes twice as long.

5. Learn how to use the tool so that you don’t make a mess of the project.

And there you have it… a few life lessons that we all need to be reminded of.. even if you don’t have a monster project to finish that you made an utter mess of so you have ignored it for two months and now you have to take miles of seams out of the quilt in order to fix it and finish it!