She is the absolute WORST, and I can't believe I do anything for her at all. But again and again she ropes me into doing favors and projects and there are always annoying deadlines and obligations connected.
My only New Year's Resolution this year is to STOP LETTING HER THROW ME UNDER THE BUS. It stops here. She's gone too far this time.
She, of course, is "Past Me." Past Me is constantly overestimating how much time I'll have or how much motivation I'll have or in the case of these stockings...how much memory I have.
We spent the first half of December looking through all the Christmas boxes wondering where on earth we put our Christmas stockings last year. Past Me took everything down, saved the ribbons we use to tie them to the banister (found the ribbons right away). But no stockings. Anywhere.
Spoiler alert: The trash. She put them in THE TRASH.
Past Me, bless her heart, hated the stockings we had and decided that we were finally going to get new ones made. She was SO CERTAIN we'd manage it in 2023 that she THREW AWAY our old stockings, but she forgot to leave me a note or something because I did not remember this until we had emptied every bin or box that we thought might contain Christmas and a little tiny flutter of memory came through. Of course, by this time it was already December 20th, and I have 4 kids.
And of course I needed to make sure we actually LIKED THEM because if not, then Future Me would be as angry with me as I am right now with Past Me.
So I bopped on over to PNQS, clicked the magic button on the home page that allows me to shop OESD while supporting PNQS (handy!).
I found some embroidery designs I liked as well as a full stocking pattern to use (thank you, OESD!), and because I can't leave well enough alone I tweaked them a bit for my needs. (The trick is to mark your pattern piece, take a photograph straight down, match it to the grid on your program, and then trace the piece with a line of stitching so you can keep everything in bounds and aligned correctly!)
Once you've created your design, it also helps if you're rocking the BERNINA E16 with a jumbo XL hoop, because you can set it and forget it with all the heels and a couple toes in one hooping. (I left my pattern piece lines in place so I could easily cut them out without confusion when it was done stitching!)
I marked and hooped cuffs two at a time to save on stabilizer, and kept Bing Crosby on my iPad next to me.
Is it even Christmas if I'm not frantically trying to finish something like this?
Would White Christmas sound the same without the chunka-chunka sound of stitches in the background?
As the cuffs were stitching, I moved over to the BERNINA 790 Pro and got them put together. The laser line was MAGICAL for keeping my embellishment stitches exactly on the line. I've never had such perfectly aligned anything in my life, so I'm just thanking all my lucky stars and reindeer for that Christmas miracle. (I used a little strip of stabilizer behind the stitches to keep them flat and perfect.)
Finally, FINALLY on Christmas Morning around 1:30am, I had everyone but mine completed, and that was just going to have to be good enough for the big guy in the sleigh, because mama really wanted to go to sleep. I tied them up, filled them, built a mini trampoline for the 6-year-old, woke up my husband and told him to add his bit while warning him mine was going to be a grocery sack and I didn't want to hear a word about it, and went to bed.
My only New Year's Resolution at this point is to be kind to Future Me. I'm going to stop throwing her under the bus and signing her up for things. I'm going to remember that she's sitting there next Christmas, not in any kind of hurry, just drinking some cocoa and both watching AND listening to White Christmas, nothing to do but eat some cookies...
...and probably build some ridiculous toy contraption because while I can promise that Past Me has reformed, Amazon Me is a whole other problem...don't even get me started on that trampoline.
Thank goodness I like them, because I don't want to do this EVER again.
