Give yourself a Christmas present ...

 

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A Fair Division of labour ...

... as I was listening to the radio the other day, there was a comment about the different jobs that men and women do at Christmas.  It struck a chord.

Women:

buy the presents
wrap the presents;

buy the food
cook the food;

buy the cards
write the cards;

buy/find the decorations
put up the decorations, etc, etc.











Men:

Buy the batteries!









That sort of struck a chord with me.  Mr Fixit's comment when I told him? "Yep, that seems fair enough.  I've bought the batteries by the way."

It's beginning to look a lot like .....

Christmas....

This morning we decided that Christmas was coming, whether we wanted it to or not, so Mr Fixit and I got the trees out and got decorating.  That really means, he checked the lights and then found something else to do in his workshop while I got decorating.  Being somewhat minimalist in my tastes, it really didn't take too long.  There are two more trees, one in the dining room and one in the hall, but they are more "sculptural" so they don't get decorated, just plugged in.  We've just been out in the wind and rain and strung lights over 3 bushes and round my father's porch, and that's it. Christmas sorted.  Apart from wrapping that is.  All the cards are done and sent, the food's all ordered, so now Christmas can happen.

Yesterday was my quilt group's Christmas party ( you can pop over and read all about it here if you like.  I'll wait.) and we all had fun making key fobs

This was mine, and I've just noticed that the ribbon is sewn on all wonky! I'm sure it was straight, so I reckon one of the Christmas elves popped in overnight and did that.

 It was also the Grand Handing Out of the name badges, and here are some of them.  I love how different they all are.

This and that ...

OK, what IS she doing now?

Our dining room chairs had cream fabric seat covers which can not be removed for washing.  That was perhaps not my cleverest idea with very young grandchildren around who sat at them to eat, paint, play with PlayDoh, sprinkle glitter all over cards they'd made, etc.

As you can imagine, they have become marked over the years and they'd got to the point where I either needed to replace the chairs or buy a new dining room suite. That's when I had the brainwave. Why not take the chairs apart and recover them?  Mr Fixit was quite impressed, as I think he'd resigned himself to the idea of me going out spending money on a suite.  So, fabric ordered online, staple gun and staples also purchased, and we were ready to go. Then, I discovered that my wrists are not very strong, so I could not remove the staples holding the original covers and nor could I use the staple gun - clever huh? Anyway, they're all done now, and look pretty good really.

I also treated myself to this the other day

It is wonderful.  I just chop up veg and stuff, add it to the pot with stock, turn it on, come back about 20 - 30 mins later and I have yummy soup.  I can even sautee the veg in the pot if I want to, and have the choise of having smooth or chunky soups.  All in one pot.  How clever is that?

Spot the deliberate mistake ...

... so, remember, last week Scrappy and I were meeting up to make name-badges for other members of Yorkshire Modern Quilters?  Well, by the end of the day there were about seven rejects in the bin (4 from me and 3 from Scrappy) and we had nothing completed, so we got together again today. Scrappy finished hers (no pictures, cos the name of the recipient is a secret) and here's a mock-up of the name badge I decided to make.

Can you spot the deliberate mistake? I made the badge, added the lanyard, etc and was proudly admiring it when all of a sudden Scrappy started laughing and then quietly asked me if I thought I should add the name to it!

Oops.

By the way, she didn't think I'd post about this.