A productive day - and a Christmas tree!

After a lovely Thanksgiving on Thursday, yesterday I spent the day relaxing and working on some projects that I've been meaning to finish for a while now.  First I mended two sweaters that have been sitting in my drawer with holes since last winter, including this one that had a hole in the right elbow.  It's a delightfully warm and lightweight cashmere hoodie, so to fix the hole I needle felted a little heart over it.  Robert says he's never going to stop teasing me about "wearing my heart on my sleeve."

 I also finished the second of these two project bags.  They have a large buttoned pocket for yarn and a small sleeve for a pencil sewn into the lining.  I think they're the perfect size for sock projects.  One of them is headed for New York, where a new friend my mom and I met at yarn school last month lives.  She gave me some really lovely sock yarn, and I wanted to make her something to say thank you.  I hope she likes it!

Then this morning, Robert and I went out and bought a Christmas tree.  Then we went and got a simple felt tree skirt, six strings of white lights, a bunch of little red ball ornaments, and a lit-up star tree topper.  We also put on several gold and silver Rosendahl "Karen Blixen's Jul" ornaments that I already had.  Robert carved a little wooden tree ornament, and has plans to carve some more!

A UFO crossed off the list!

This week has been pretty relaxed, and on Thursday morning I got out my sewing machine and hemmed this tablecloth that's been on my UFO list for several months.  Robert's Grandma gave me the fabric when we visited last summer, and a few moths ago I got as far as cutting the large piece down to size, but I gave up on hemming it because the linen (?) didn't seem to want to crease for the hem in a nice way, and I was afraid of ruining it with a sloppy hem.  And I hate pinning.  But on Thursday, I got down to business, turned my iron to its maximum heat and maximum steam settings, and started pinning away.  My fears were totally overblown.  I did pin about every two inches, but that was probably overkill.  I was interested to notice that the grain played a huge role in how easily the fabric took the crease.  The long edges creased very easily, but the short edges were more reluctant.  This is why I thought it would be so hard - last time I had been trying to start on a short edge.  Luckily this time I happened to start on a long edge.  My machine was so happy to be sewing on "normal" fabric and thread again.  I was remembering my denim skirt (which the machine really didn't like at all) and my workout t-shirts (which stressed me out because they're knits).  This sewed up like a dream, on all my normal stitch and tension settings!

Chicken and pigeons

Robert and I have been in our new apartment just over a month now, and for the past two or three weeks, we've had a pair of pigeons attempting to nest in our juliette balcony. I say "attempting" because these two pigeons are extraordinarily bad parents. They built a nest, and the female laid two eggs (much to our dismay). Then all of the nesting material fell through the grate and/or off the side. Then one of the eggs apparently fell over the side. Then, last week, Robert noticed that the remaining egg is broken. But none of these misfortunes have prevented the pigeons from sitting on the egg, and the male(? - I'm not 100% sure which is which) pigeon keeps on trying to bring twigs to reconstitute the nest. This has been totally unsuccessful, because he's just a little too fat to comfortably fit between the bars of the balcony. He flies up with a twig in his beak, tries to come through the bars, flaps his wings a few times, drops the twig to the ground, and flies off for another one. Every time. It would be very amusing, except that the pigeons are kind of noisy and gross and generally annoying.

In other birdie news, my needle-felted chicken from a previous post is finally framed and hanging up in our kitchen: