Hoarders R Us

Ai yi yi.

We; got home from the family Christmas gathering about 9:30 and tho I was exhausted and all I wanted to do was crash on the bed, I couldn't even sit on it until I got it cleared off. It took me two hours and it still isn't done right. Stuff is stuffed in willynilly.

The unmade bed was layered in pillows and blankets, bath towels and clothes, books, wrapping paper and tissue and product packaging and shopping bags and several of my crochet projects and several more loose balls of crochet thread and things I bought for myself while shopping for last minute Christmas gifts this afternoon.

While shopping for my gift for Ed I was also shopping for more crochet thread for two time sensitive projects. One for my Mom's birthday January 3 and the other for my niece's baby due January 7th. Besides four skeins of Sugar N cream yarn for the first and five skeins of bamboo crochet thread for the latter, I picked up two skeins of bamboo and one of cotton for my bookmark projects. I am totally running out of room to store the thread.

Recently I started keeping balls and skeins of thread and yarn in project kits in order to keep some of them out of the overstuffed drawers holding my thread and yarn collection. But now I've run out of room to keep the project bags. And besides it is another bad habit of mine (related I'm sure) to collect projects until I'm so overwhelmed I can't finish any of them.

The project for my Mom is the same one I started a year and a half ago. I was supposed to embroider a sweat pea vine on one of her sweaters that my sister had created several small bleached spots on. I blogged about it several times summer before last. I'd hoped to have it done by her birthday this year (11 and a half months ago) but had gotten discouraged by one issue after another stemming from my not knowing what I was doing. The biggest issue being that embroidery floss does not play well with yarn. The sweater is knit in a cotton sport yarn and I've been trying to find a compatible cotton yarn to work the flowers and vine for over a year now. I had looked at the Sugar N Cream brand before and thought it might work if I could find the solid colors I needed--green and at lest three pastel shades. But all I ever saw were the variegated colors. A couple weeks ago I found the shade of green I needed for the vine. Today I found lavender, rose and aqua.

The bamboo thread I picked up today was to augment what I got in the Joanne.com order last week. At the time I sent for it I thought I had until March so had not ordered enough to complete the baby afghan I had planned for my expecting niece in Montana. I'm still not sure I have enough but by the time I've used half of what I have I will know exactly how much it is likely to take to finish.

I was going to list the Christmas presents I got today but I'm wiped out. I had only three hours of sleep before Ed woke me to get ready for the shopping. I came so close to not going. Ed offered to take me on Sunday instead. That would have been fine for the afghan thread but it would have meant not including my gift to Ed in this weekend's family festivities and that didn't sit well. It has been several years since Ed gave me money to shop for him. Last year he wanted his laptop and the year before it was his MP3 player and though I went with him, he did the shopping and selecting.

This year I got for him. I'd known for months what I wanted to get him too. He had been expressing and interest in getting back into his hobby of bead weaving with seed beads. I got him a beading loom and about ten packages of seed beads covering most of the main colors in the palette. Both brights and pastels. I added a few storage containers since the packages were cellophane and would not hold the beads once opened.hub

He got me another set of headphones to replace the ones he got me for my birthday and which I killed two weeks later on Thanksgiving morning when I let my netbook slide off the bed where it landed on the plug and broke it clean off.

He added to that a USB hub with four ports. I've been complaining about having to unplug the DVD drive or the mouse in order to plug in the printer or camera.

He added to that a crochet stitch guide that is a set of cards in a box instead of a book. 101 stitches to learn.

He put all of that in a cloth 'gift bag' which will serve as another craft bag. It is just like the one he put my headphones in on my birthday only different pattern.

Ed got a set of chocolate brown fleece sheets and a cooling platform for his laptop from his Secret Santa who turned out to be his Sister for whom I had been Secret Santa.. The one I made the shawl for.

I got a set of black Jerzy sheets for the bed, a fleece jacket and a sweater-shirt from my Secret Santa who turned out to be my niece again. The niece who lives locally and is still in high-school. I was her Secret Santa last year.

Ed got 2 pair of jeans from his folks and I got fleece lounge pants and $20 check to spend on thread, beads and ribbon for my bookmarks.

Well. another family gathering begins in twelve hours.....