The Annual Struggle

Cue yearly agonizing over Christmas gift making…

I’ve said before that Christmas is not my favorite time of the year. Most of the work to get ready for the holiday traditionally has fallen on me, and while I don’t want our friends and relatives to think that we didn’t enjoy having them be part of our celebrations (we did), I am not going to gloss over the fact that it added a lot of stress to an already stressful time of year. I have yet to meet a church musician who is happy during the month of December. There is no getting around that.

I also hate the overwhelming commercialization and consumerism. I am someone who tends to buy things for people whenever I see something I think they would enjoy. “Hey, I saw this and it made me think of you,” is a much better reason for getting someone a gift than, “Hey, I had a list of people I had to buy for so I got you this thing out of a sense of obligation.” I’ve started picking up gifts throughout the year and setting them aside to gift at Christmas, although I’d much rather gift them in the moment.

And finally, as someone who enjoys making things, I’d much rather give a handmade gift, especially if I can figure out what I can make that the person will actually enjoy receiving and using. (I do not want to be the aunt or grandmother who makes the pink rabbit PJs for Ralphie for Christmas.) I love it when people tell me what they’d like me to make for them. My sister wants a minky pillowcase. DD#2 has put in an order for a faux fur pillow to match the faux fur cover I put on her makeup table chair last year.

It is the curse of makers, I think, that we cannot go to the store and buy a cheaply-made Chinese product when we could make something like it that would be so much better. It’s hard to spend money on something that you suspect will disintegrate after the first trip through the washer.

I think I am getting closer to finding a balance this year. Some people on my list are getting books, ones I’ve picked up as I’ve run across them. Other people have asked for specific (purchased) items and I am happy to get them what they want. And that leaves a few people for whom I will be making something this year. That was the focus of my sewing over the past couple of days and I’ve really enjoyed myself. Of course, it means that I can’t show you much of what I am working on. I can show you this, however, which is a bit of product development thrown in as an attempt to use up some larger fabric scraps:

I am feeling the itch to do some more machine quilting.

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The husband got the estimate for insulating the new shop and I am pretty sure that’s going to get done some time in the next couple of weeks. He tells me that once that’s done, he can sheath the walls with plywood and begin moving stuff over there from the old garage.

He has the plans for the bathroom tacked up on the wall:

I probably will never use the bathroom in the new shop because that round thing on the left side of the picture is the air compressor. I hate that air compressor. It is a huge air compressor that exhausts itself—very loudly—every 10-15 minutes, usually right at the moment I have come into the garage to get into my car. The surprise of it exhausting has just about put me into cardiac arrest on more than one occasion. The day it gets moved from the old garage to the new shop will be a happy day for me.

And this means that I can start thinking about creating an actual sewing machine workshop out in the old garage. I have a few ideas; I’ll probably start in the spring by gathering all of my machines from their existing locations and putting them on shelves so I can inventory what I’ve got.