Pre-Christmas Days

Hard to believe that Christmas is two days away. I thought this year I'd be totally ready for it, but what do you know. I'm not. You see, in this household there is a fun tradition for the Kid. He gets presents twice - on Christmas day (Canadian heritage) and on New Year's Day (Russian heritage). When he was little, buying presents was easy. But now he only wants certain things. Like there are two computer games on his wishlist this year. I found one of them on ebay (and it hasn't arrived yet!!!!!) but the other one is not available. So I'm stuck with getting him some clothes (not a real gift by any stretch). Maybe I'll just get him a cellphone, I don't know.

 

Anyway, mental anguish aside, Kid and I went to see a play the other day, and it was a perfect chance to wear another one of my consignment shop finds. This burgundy thing by Elie Tahari. Since I bought it I lost some more weight (about 17 lbs weight loss in total, yeah!) and it fits a bit looser in the waist than I'd like to. But I love it just the same.

 

You cannot wear it as a dress on it's own, there are three snaps under those buttons and that's it, so you definitely need pants. I just went with the easiest all-black version. Big-ass earrings and bracelets, that was it for jewelry.

Looking at the pictures I see that the "dress" is a bit wide in the shoulders as well. I'll have to think what I can do about it. Maybe I'll just pin the sleeves up a bit myself.

Talking about sewing at home, I came up with new half-covers for the sofas. I bought a huge tablecloth, cut and hemmed it, and this is the result. The tablecloth came with six napkins which I successfully (in my opinion) turned into three cushion covers.

I've had the white cusions before. You can't use them on their own, the dog would turn them into "dog's breakfast" within a minute.

Apart from the usual tree (under usual constant attack from the cat) I decorated with fruit. There, bananas and mandarin oranges.

And now for my Christmas gift to myself. I finally bought some "grown up" cups. Got tired of the mismatched kiddy mugs that filled my cupboard. For some reason my family elected me the dumping ground for odd cups. I still keep those for the Kid and his friends, but these real porcelain cups are what I use now. Like a grown up. Yes.

The shop had only pink and blue ones, so we now have a his and hers version.

And the main event this season is the new TV. Our Christmas present to each other. Snooker gave it his stamp of approval.

And this is it, 32" screen, not huge but enough for our living-room size. HDMI and all. I used to laugh that with the old TV we were forever missing what was happening on the sides. Well, we're on it now.

Just noticed that the plastic cover is still on the frame. We're so classy!