And that loud crash from the basement was…

My sewing box.  A big-ass toolbox containing every kind of sewing notion a gal could want.

Look!!  Extra storage in the roll-back top compartments – perfect for thread.

www.jandofabrics.com should totally pay me for this ad!  Also, underneath all the crap in the bottom – there is a corset waiting to be re-boned.  Sounds dirty right?

I had forgotten to close said box after grabbing needles, thread and big-ass snaps for Rissa’s revamped duvet cover.*  I had also forgotten to chase the cats out of the craft room – hence the loud crash.  I headed downstairs in trepidation, to discover the ironing board overturned, my sewing toolbox face down on the floor and all of its contents strewn across the craft room.  My cats, Steve and Lola, were looking oh-so-innocently at the destruction they had recently wrought.  “Don’t mind us here.  That box?  It must be on crack.  It just jumped off the ironing board all on its own.”

Lola Ebola Virus

Steve

Needles,
measuring tapes, thread, buttons, thimbles, piping, busks, hooks & eyes, boning,
ribbon, pins, snaps, fringe, iron-on patches, stitch-witchery, bobbins, seam
rippers, regular interfacing and… that white fabric marking pencil thingie… all on the floor.  And there I am, in my bare feet,  having miraculously managed to walk into the middle of the room without impaling myself on the hundreds of nearly invisible straight pins that had flown from the sewing box to the concrete floor and rag rug.  Frankly, I had forgotten that I even owned straight pins.  Any sewer worth her Brownie sewing badge knows to use only the coloured large-head pins, in case accidents like THIS happen.  I was lucky, the only thing I trod on were thimbles, hooks & eyes and the small thread spools.  Of course, all of which still have a pain-inducing level comparable to that of walking barefoot upon Lego.

Bobbins hold approximately 180 feet of thread.  Murphy’s Law of Bobbins states: When a bobbin falls to the floor, it will always roll to the farthest point in the room, leaving at least half of its thread tangled behind it.  And unless it is cheap-ass thread you DO NOT just cut and run.  If you sew with Gutermann, you gather it up and wind it all back onto the bobbin patiently, grumbling and cursing to yourself, and in my case, threatening to take the cats’ intestines and turning them into violin strings.

*Back to Rissa’s re-vamped duvet cover, which started this whole debacle.   It wasn’t a duvet cover at all, but rather a somewhat quilted comforter.  A huge, honkin’, bigger than queen-size, but not quite king-sized comforter that was too big to be washed in my washing machine, but really needed to be washed, because it had blood on it from when David stubbed his toe one night and bled all over it when he was getting Rissa settled into bed.  (breath)  Not wanting to spend the money on dry cleaning nor on a new comforter/duvet cover,  I got it into my head that I would open the sucker up and take out the haphazard stitching that held the quilting batting in place so that I could then wash it.  You know how sometimes you start a job thinking that it will be a simple feat, but then it turns out that you’ve now wasted  SEVERAL hours of your time and energy and would have been better off just running to Zellers and buying two sheets and sewing them together to make a duvet cover, except that you’re already SEVERAL hours into the project and can’t stop or all that time will have been for naught?  This was one of those times.  By the time I finally got all the stitching out and washed the cover and ironed on the stitch witchery and had to find 8 snaps (only 4 of which matched), it was two day’s later.  And as soon as Rissa put it on her bed, all the snaps opened and the quilting batting escaped, which means I need to buy many more snaps or at least sew a bag for the quilting, which would kind of be like a duvet cover for INSIDE the duvet cover, which is cuckoo-bananas.  Yes, I am THAT stubborn and cheap.