Handmade Christmas

This Christmas, we have the added pressure of my daughter wanting to get her friends something. She felt bad last year because some of her friends bought her stuff and she was not prepared to reciprocate. So this year, we have a month to prepare to make some cool little handmade (Made with Love) gifts. I have been trolling the internet and found some cool ideas, but I have to have some labels made. My daughter and I have talked for years about making some of her own clothes and she has a line name already chosen, so I must get working on that. Today I learned how to make a dress form very inexpensively and so now I feel like we can really get started on this little dream. I will clean the house and get started on sorting fabrics that we can use. I have bags of scraps upstairs just waiting for new life. Of course, my husband will start moaning about the threads and pins he will undoubtedly find on the dining room floor, so I am thinking of setting up shop downstairs in the basement. I won’t get in anyone’s way and I won’t have to tear down everything for dinner every night. Now I know this may not be an exciting blog entry for you, but for me it helps to solidify my thoughts and make plans, so tough, just deal with it. I am going to take a trip to goodwill to get an old t-shirt to make the form with and maybe find some fun old sweaters, you will see what we make out of them later!

Latest Obsessions

For those of you with kids, you are probably quite used to the daily and weekly obsession changes. I mean I am simply minding my own beeswax when a breathless 10 year old comes running up to me babbling about something or other. At least 9 or ten times a day this week he inquires if his Phillies World Series Championship Hat has arrived in the mail yet. Today is sunday, so technically I should be off the hook. I even gave the little $%#! the tracking number so he could follow the package and stop bugging me. It didn't work. He still keeps looking in the mud room for the package and talking about it. I am sure in church today when he lights a candle, it won't be for Great Uncle Tony or Poppy, it will be for that damn hat. After the hat arrives, he will be onto something else. Bakugan figures and cards seem to be an ongoing obsession, every Monday he wants to race off to the Toys R Us or the Walmart to see if new creature marbles were delivered. If my husband says he wants to take a ride to get a Starbucks, my son throws in a Toys R Us request.

My daughter has a new one too, she is reading that Twilight series by Meyers and cannot put that first book down. I got it out of the library yesterday afternoon, she will finish it very soon. She is talking about using her babysitter money to buy the series because she wants to "keep them" for her kids. She wants to re-read them like her Harry Potter books. I have always pushed for Library books, because I want to keep the library in business and because if you read as fast as my daughter and I do, you know that any book has to be absolutely amazing to actually purchase. I cannot afford either of our book habits. We would spend more than the heaviest cigarette smoker on their worst weeks. Unfortunately, I had bought the second book in the series for my daughter thinking it was the anthology, it wasn't so now she wants to own them all. We couldn't even get her to talk to us yesterday, she laid on the ottoman in a very uncomfortable pose and just read. I will get that book after she is done with it to see what the hub-bub is all about. If it is good, we may send a request to the Library Fairy that the entire set will be under the bookshelf on Christmas morning.

Bad Hair Life

Jay Manuel needs someone to tell him that his hair looks bad. I find it hard to believe that everyone follows his fashion advice while he has that look on his head. It reminds me of the inside of my uncle's Volkswagon bug from the 70's. Shame, he has great eyes and a decent figure, but the hair has got to go...please.

The Emmy Award Fashion Watch

Katherine Heigl must have either burst a breast or either that- those waterballoons the stars use to prop up their cleaveage sprung a leak in the heat. When Ryan Seacrest was interviewing her I couldn't help but notice that her right breast looked funky. Part of it was falling down. She was absolutely gorgeous and her dress was amazing, but the breast was an issue that was unavoidable since her breasts are on the level of Seacrest's eyes.
Later I saw a noticeable wet spot beneath it as she made her way along the carpet. It was a shame to mar such an outfit, it reminded me of the story my mom used to tell us about stuffing our bras. I came home after school one day when I was in 5th grade. I had "borrowed" my sister's bra and stuffed it with socks. My girlfriends were all very developed, and I of course never even saw breast tissue until I was 17. Well, turns out my teacher (I hated my teacher that year) called my mother to tell her that I had developed unusually fast between breakfast and lunch time in school and that my breasts were extremely crooked.

My mom shared her own embarrasing moment of her life: when she was 14 her "falsies" floated out of her bathing suit in the pool at her cousin's house and were wrapped around her neck. The moral of the story is, girls, if you don't have em, don't fake em, it never works out. These days, in the time of exploding, leaking, and deflating saline and silicone breasts, it is important to listen to your mother's wisdom.