For the past two days, the sewing/craft room has been operating at full capacity: 6 personalized coffee mugs, 4 heat-pressed t-shirts, 2 embroidered hand towels, 1 embroidered couch throw . . . and a partridge in a pear treeeeee. (Yeah, ok....no partridge.)
As of yesterday morning, I still had two more gifts to make, and all of the presents needed to be wrapped. I would have to go buy stuff to make those two more gifts, and I needed to go to the post office to mail (overnight!) one of the gifts. And I'd need to cook supper. While I drank my first cup of coffee, I made a mental list of things to be done. I decided to start with the gift-wrapping.
We did not put up an actual Christmas tree this year. We were both simply too lazy to get the tree out of the attic. One of The Husband's vendors had given him a big gnome full of popcorn, candy, etc. The gnome was cute, and Christmas-y. And pointed on top, like a tree. So he became the Christmas tree. We had temporarily set him atop a stack of coloring books on a dusty, cluttered end table in the living room. When I wrapped the first present and took it to the living room to put it under the "tree," I thought, I've got to do something about this awful mess. I cleaned the table and searched the sewing room for some Christmas fabric to drape over it.
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| The Gnome Tree |
The Christmas fabric was in a Rubbermaid tub that has not been opened since last year's pre-Christmas crafting frenzy. Besides fabric, the tub contained a finished Santa Claus table runner, a finished set of placemats and napkins, and a few other Christmas things that had been in the antique mall booth I'd closed down in the fall of 2019. I also found a large piece of polar fleece fabric, just the right size to make a couch throw. This polar fleece provided material for one of the two gifts I still needed to make. It just needed to be trimmed, hemmed and embroidered. I could run the fleece through the serger and trim and hem (overcast) it at the same time. And I could finish the gift-wrapping while the embroidery machine was running. GAME ON!
I got 1.5 sides of the polar fleece hemmed when the serger gave out. The motor would run, but nothing would happen at the needle. No time to investigate (my guess is that a belt is broken). I switched to the sewing machine and set it to do an overcast stitch. The stitches didn't come close to matching the serger's overcast stitching. Plus, the feed dogs on this old sewing machine are about worn out; it has trouble pulling fabric evenly through the machine. I had to push the polar fleece from the front and pull from the rear. This resulted in uneven stitching. Oh, well, maybe the gift recipient won't notice. I hooped the ragged-ass couch throw and took it to the embroidery machine.
Aaaaaand the embroidery machine started breaking the thread.
Every sewing machine in the room had revolted!
Finally, I got the embroidery going, and left the machine running while I went to the post office and to buy a sweatshirt for my brother-in-law, the last gift I intended to make.
Well, guess what? No sweatshirts out there in his size - not in our little town, anyway. I ended up going to a t-shirt shop for a nice, long-sleeved t-shirt. I'd texted my sister-in-law about what size he needed (he's lost a lot of weight this year). She did not answer, so I made a guess and bought a shirt. I was halfway home when she answered. I'd bought the wrong size. Turn around, go back to the t-shirt store, swap shirts.
The rest of the day went pretty smoothly. The remaining gifts got made and wrapped. By dinnertime, there was a pot of creamy chicken corn chowder on the stove.
The kids and the folks on the hill will be coming for dinner tomorrow night - nothing fancy - maybe chicken & dumplings and some nibbles, maybe some left-over corn chowder, maybe a banana pudding. Tomorrow will be "cooking day."
Today will be cleaning day and "what-did-I-forget?" day.
I should get busy!
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