When I help young children sew, they usually trust me. It may still feel arduous to cut the fuzzy fleece he or she chose for a stuffed bunny, but they don't also doubt me. 

Slightly older students sometimes do. Pinning is one of the sticking points, excuse the pun. I try to jolly them into poking a row of straight pins into the two layers of fabric in anticipation of sewing a seam, and sometimes they think they know better. They skip that step. 

What happens next may be messy. If the fabrics migrated, as they are wont to do given the chance, the seam may have missed one entirely, or introduced pleats where none were wanted. 

This week I tried to keep a girl company while she ripped a seam that would have been the finale of the week before, enabling her to proudly walk out the door with a fashionable apron. But when I left to help another student, she ignored the pinning part and zoomed across the fabric like an off road vehicle. We gently put it away until this week. 

It is not my intention to add guilt to such mishaps, though I would hope that she understood that pinning saves time. I remembered the cross stitch project a friend is working on.

"Well, well, well. Here I am facing the consequences of my own actions."

It occurs to me that God is trying to help me avoid those problems too. But I have been known to interpret it as overbearing. The advice about coveting, the one that shows up not once but twice in the Ten Best Practices, will actually save me time. Pinning my desires in place, with adhesives like gratitude, can keep me from flailing all over the place.