Saturday, December 15, 2007

We interrupt this broadcast.....

Unfortunately our Christmas prep was rudely interrupted by a destructive ice storm. We had a lot of tree damage (detailed here, if you're interested: http://cynthiadean.blogspot.com/2007/12/ice-storm-2007.html) and a relatively brief loss of power. The kids have been out of school for a week, though, and that has really put a monkey wrench in my shopping / knitting / mailing / planning for the season.

Ah, well. We'll muddle through somehow, and the fun memories will probably be the ones that last.

Here's one in the making:


The snowman stocking is for George -- he drew the snowman; I appliqued it. It is hanging in front of a stocking my mother made for me some 40 years ago. I've been "meaning to" make a stocking for George for six years; for the last four I've been "meaning to" make one for Charlotte, too. This year I decided it was time to get down to business.

Charlotte and I haven't begun the design process yet. She doesn't make representational drawings, so we might choose a picture from one of our Christmas books. We'll see. I'm limited by the colors of wool felt I have on hand. In fact, George and I started out to make a nutcracker, but I don't have black and George couldn't accept boots & hat of any other color. I was really proud of him for suggesting the snowman instead of pitching a fit.

Of course it then turned out that I didn't have any black seed beads to be the lumps of coal. I went to Michaels to find some, only to remember that they have a crummy selection of seed beads, mostly giant bags of one color. Since I didn't have time to go to Hobby Lobby where I could get a small tube of black that I might possibly use up in this lifetime, I opted for this assortment:

24 colors, 8 grams of each color -- it seemed like a pretty good choice to me. And in fact it still does, but when I went to open it I found this:


which really bugs me. The label was obviously designed to hide the giant gap in the middle -- it was even taped down so you couldn't possibly shift it and notice that the bead containers were about 25% smaller than the package implies. I kind of think that if they felt they had to pad it that much, maybe it wasn't a good deal after all.

I'm trying to get past it, though. Merry Christmas!

Wednesday, December 05, 2007

Christmas is coming .. now in double-quick time!

We just decided that instead of staying home for a low-key Christmas we will drive 13 hours to Colorado for Christmas with both sides of the family ...

and that we will have an early Christmas here (to save hauling big presents for the kids to Colorado and back) ON THE 15TH.

So I just lost 10 days of Christmas prep time, and added all the packing & planning of a big trip.

We must be out of our minds. But Dean's brother and my sister live 10 minutes apart, and both sets of grandparents are traveling there for the holidays --- it just seems like the right choice.


Gotta run -- I've got things to do!