Working on ornaments

If it's December, it must be Christmas ornament time.  I've been doing personalized ornaments for at least 40 years and it's about the only holiday thing I'm compulsive about.  Don't care if I bake cookies or not, don't care if we're home or away, don't even care if we put up a tree (I love a real tree but it's physically difficult to wrangle it into place and decorate it -- so we gave that up several years ago).  A couple of years we didn't even put up outdoor lights and the world didn't come to an end.

But always Christmas ornaments; couldn't live without them.

I try to make each year's batch different from the last, and that's getting to be harder.  Although certain family members say they like sewed ornaments best, I enjoy trying out different materials. Since some ornament recipients read the blog, and I have to keep it a surprise until they actually open their packages, I won't tell you much about the plan this year except to show you some of the tools I am using.

Construction is complicated this year because of my bad back, which sometimes isn't happy when I stand up to work.  So for the last couple of days I have been doing a trash-TV-ornament marathon.  I'll watch TV for a while, working either on the sit-down part of the ornaments or on a sewing project.  At the commercial, I'll hit pause and go in to work at the workbench for a bit.  Sometimes I can get three minutes in before I have to go back and sit down, other times a bit more.  Usually by the next commercial I've recovered enough for another couple of minutes of work.

At the moment I am all caught up on the sit-down finishing, so the big pressure is to come up with enough stamina to do the stand-up part.  I estimate I still have two or three hours of stand-up, and several more of sit-down, so I'm starting to get nervous.  Hoping for a good day (that happens every now and then) when I might even be able to work for more than a few minutes at a time.

But I'm only an hour of work away from getting the international packages in the mail, which takes the worst of the pressure off.  And fortunately about half the ornaments are for local delivery, so I have until December 24 to finish.

In past years I have made an offer to my faithful blog readers: leave me a comment and I'll choose one of you to receive a personalized ornament.  That has been fun, so let's do it again!  Entry deadline is Sunday night before I go to bed.  Don't leave it till the last minute; I might be really tired that night.