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via Nordstrom.com

A couple months ago, my friend pinned this BEAUTIFUL CHEESE KNIFE SET onto one of her Pinterest boards and I got the wild hair to recreate them for her birthday using the random pieces of flatware that I had been hiding saving down in my hoard basement.

I already had the flatware and the letter sets, so how hard could it possibly be, right?

Oh, glory!

I know these days that everything on a blog is supposed to be beautiful, glossy, and perfect, but as you may know, I’m not really that type of gal. I make mistakes, I will never be perfect, and let’s be honest, most of the time it’s the oopsies that I learn the most from.

So, I’m going to tell you the rest of the story…

On the morning of my sweet friend’s birthday I headed downstairs, bright eyed and bushy tailed, to start on my special gift. I carefully picked out the best pieces of flatware I could find, making sure that they eclectically coordinated. Next, I got my letter set, a board, and a hammer then set to work.

My first mistake was not researching the project enough. I had stamped pennies and keys before so I didn’t think it would be a big deal, but yeah baby, it was.

I should have bought one of THESE jeweler’s bench blocks, but that would have been the smart thing to do. Instead, I used a piece of 2×4 from the scrap pile. My flatware moved and bounced off the board EVERY SINGLE TIME I hit the punch with the hammer.

*smacks head*

Check out the sheer awesomeness of that A and N in Parmesan! Wow, that is pure unadulterated skill, right there folks.

How about missing the whole top of this B? I seriously went over it again and again, but it just didn’t want to be there. B was picky like that.

Sadly, this lone goat cheese knife was my greatest success of the day.

At around the 2 hour mark I had officially lost my mind. I should have stopped there and walked away, but I just kept powering through. Yep, you guessed it, another oopsies.

Then, came the nail in the coffin, the dreaded cheddar knife.

Do you know how many times I misspelled the word Cheddar?

FOUR TIMES!

Yes, I went through 4 different knives trying to get it right. I know how to spell cheddar, dang it, but for some reason after “squirreling” just once, my mess up cemented in my brain and it all went down hill from there.

After 3 hours and more wasted flatware then I care to think about, I called it a day. (P.S. taking pics of detailed, shiny flatware is difficult, so please give me some slack.)

This project just wasn’t going to work out and if I didn’t stop, I was going to stab something with those horrid knives I loathed so much.

I had decided that there was no way in heck that I was giving my friend those knives. I would just write her a nice card and she wouldn’t even have to know I tried… and failed… miserably. I left the little bundle of defeat sitting on my table and went about the rest of my day.

As the afternoon turned to evening, I kept thinking about those silly knives. My friend lives in a beautiful home, her husband owns several businesses, they spend the month of April in Hawaii. She could easily go buy that set she pinned from Nordstrom’s.

And yet, I just felt like I needed to give them to her.

I wrestled with my pride for the better part of an hour before I finally threw those ugly things in a gift bag and stepped onto her doorstep.

Guess what? She didn’t care that I had failed.

As cliché as it sounds, it really was the thought that counted. Somewhere buried in the bottom of a drawer, my friend has a little reminder that she is really loved and I have a reminder that I’m human and can’t do it all.

The point of my little story?

Well, basically that we aren’t perfect nor should we pretend to be. Life is hard, and in my experience, it’s even harder when we are trying to carry the burden of perfectionism on our shoulders. We’re all going to mess up, we’re going to have off days, so do your best and then be ok with the outcome.

It reminds me of one of my favorite quotes by Gordon B. Hinckley,

“Anyone who imagines that bliss is normal is going to waste a lot of time running around shouting that he’s been robbed. The fact is that most putts don’t drop, most beef is tough, most children grow up to just be people, most successful marriages require a high degree of mutual toleration, most jobs are more often dull than otherwise. Life is like an old time rail journey…delays…sidetracks, smoke, dust, cinders and jolts, interspersed only occasionally by beautiful vistas and thrilling burst of speed. The trick is to thank the Lord for letting you have the ride.”

Sometimes we’ll win and sometimes we’ll fail, how we handle those failures and what we learn from them is our choice.

Happy crafting y’all.

**What is one of your most memorable failures, craft or not, and what did you learn?**