Making Lemonade from Lemons: A non-sewing project...

 Two years ago I looked at my Christmas lights...cheap ones from Hobby Lobby...and realized there's way too much purple in them.  It kinda made the whole house look bluish/purple...we had snow on Jan 2 (following the high of 70 degrees then storms with tornado warnings on Jan 1), so I actually have a real, Christmas-looking picture here (This is RARE in Alabama...):

So last year I went in search of some nice red, white and green lights.  I found some that were recommended by a friend...pretty, tear-drop shaped lights.  Ordered 7 strings to begin the switchover processes; can't afford to buy all the lights at once, lol.   I put them on the bushes and left the Hobby Lobby lights on the railing.

But before we took those lights down, about 3 strings of those lights on the bushes had half the string dark.  And when we did take them down, a number of the pretty bulbs HAD WATER IN THEM. And, the teardrops were glass...pretty fragile glass...and a few were broken.  A few more broke because they tapped each other as we were moving the lights around. Yes, the lights were rated for indoor/ outdoor use.  Obviously, though, they weren't up to the elements.  We spent a day plugging and unplugging lights and managed to get all but two of the strings working again but I can't put them outside and, TBH, I'm not sure they will work if we plug them in this year.

So I began another search for red/green/white LED lights for the front of the house.  I have been looking since, oh, I dunno, July or August, for said lights.  And have found nothing.    Or at least, nothing I wanted; there were some that had, like, lime-green lights....nope.

With time running out, we went to Lowe's.  Where I bought two strings of white, two strings of red, and two strings of green LED lights with the intention of just switching the dadgum lights around and make my own red/white/green light strings.

So, instead of doing the Christmas sewing that needs doing on my day off (since Veteran's Day was Saturday) today...I switched lightbulbs in half the string sets.

That was way more complicated than it should have been.  Turns out each string has five light sockets/ bulb bases that are larger than the other 95, so I had to be careful to NOT put a regular bulb into one of the larger ones; it doesn't make contact and the string won't light.  I finally wised up and started marking the off-sized sockets and the bulb bases with a sharpie marker.  I have a LED light repair kit, which includes a 'bulb puller'... a skinny little rounded fork thing to pop off the lights.  It helped quite a lot, actually, but my fingers are still sore.  I'll probably do the rest of them later this week, but now that I'm onto the peculiarities it should go faster than it did today.

I'm even thinking about buying some white lights from Hobby Lobby, to match the multicolored lights, and just switching out the purple lightbulbs; I think that will help warm up the garland.  Might even be good enough that I won't have to switch the lightstrings on the garland.

Then I can decide what to do about the holly bushes in front of the porch...lol.

A PS....I went to add the labels and realized I had typed the whole post ON THE WRONG BLOG.  

Copied all the HTML and pasted it in here, then deleted the other one...

Yup.  It's Monday...

A Quick? Favor for a Friend...

 Not linking this post to social media, lol, since part of the deal of doing favors is that NO ONE ELSE hears about it.... 

Anyway, I had a friend who had some bibbed insulated outerwear pants that were just a little too short in the torso.  She's a tiny lady, and I'm not sure what size range these pants actually are, but she gave them to me last spring asking if I could add a bit to the shoulder straps so she had a bit more wearing ease.  

I figured I would just add length to the adjustable strap so it would have more room but I wasn't in a hurry...after all, we were heading into summer, this is Alabama...in my midwest-raised brain, these were pants to be worn on a snow day.  I told her I would do them the next time I had black thread in the machine.

Which was, of course, the MOTG lace dress.  Got past the wedding, didn't sew anything because I had a mess to clean up.

The day before I left to go to Florida, she texted me wanting to know if her pants were done yet.  It was going to be a bit chilly (read: lower 50's - upper 40's) for the fall festival outing at the local corn maze and she wanted to wear them.

Never occurred to me that someone would want to wear snow pants with the temps above freezing.   The midwest is still strong in me at times, even after 40+ years in the South...

Well, I clearly couldn't do them before we left, so I told her it would be the first thing I did when we got back.

Looked at them Sunday night...literally the day we got home...and realized it wasn't going to be as easy as I thought.  The adjustable straps were sewn in a loop around the buckle, like a bra strap.  I couldn't do the modification the way I thought.  I couldn't recreate that loop if I took it apart; no way my sewing machine could get in that tight spot to sew the end down.

What to do what to do what to do...

Wednesday it hit me...what if I lengthened the other side?  Where the buckle comes up from the front?

Took a look and that was just a simple loop. So I got some black grosgrain ribbon on the way home from work Thursday, and yesterday it took me all of about 20 minutes to add 4" to the front of those straps.

She had told me she didn't care what it looked like; but I don't think this looks too bad....

Next up:  Christmas stocking for the three people who were added to the family this year...gonna hafta get creative for those, too...

A bit of whimsy...

 So, the last couple of weeks....

My Sweet Babboo is, as I have mentioned before, part of a historical group that recreates 18th century frontiersmen...it's an extension of the boys' ministry at our church.

And, a couple of weeks ago, this organization had its every-other-year Territorial Rendezvous...a 3-day frontiersman- era campout for all the guys in the Southeast Region.

And it just so happened that this event was at a facility that was about 15 minutes south of where our youngest daughter , AKA The Flute Player, now lives in Florida.

So you know I tagged along, and got dropped off at said daughter's for the weekend whilst hubby shot black powder rifles, bow and arrows, threw tomahawks, etc. in the woods.

After the campout, he picked me up...we took the kids out to dinner (her brother The Actor is now on staff at the same church, so he and his new wife are in the same area, which is convenient; we can see them all at the same place), then we drove up to Holiday Inn's Orange Lake Resort and checked in for the week.  Timeshare points being put to use.

Now, this resort literally backs up to Animal Kingdom at Disney World.   So we spent that week Doing Disney.

And, as it just also so happened, My Sweet Babboo's birthday happened to be Tuesday whilst he was there.  And he wanted to do Mickey's Not So Scary Halloween Party.  So the kids came up and joined us and we were there from about 5 to midnight.

Now, this is a costumed thing.  And we did it in 2019 when we did the very first family Disney trip.  I managed to put together an Edna Mode costume, whacking up what had been intended as a wearable muslin for a Burda magazine dress,  but didn't get any good pictures then.  But, hey, it's been 4 years, and it's a good costume, and it's just hanging in the closet...so I wore it again.  And this time, I made sure my sweetie took a picture.  He took two, actually, but one was dark and the other was over exposed.  So...going with the dark one.

A couple of days later, I did a meet-and-greet with Edna Mode herself, lol, so you can see if I was close on my costume...

I will likely forever be looking for opportunities to pull that out and wear it, lol.  It's just too fun.

But...whoa, y'all. We were gone nearly two weeks, and jumped into a really busy week when we got home and...my laundry pile is as tall as I am, lol.  I'm gonna have to excavate that mountain before I do any significant sewing again...