Sewing in the Congo: making stuff out of stuff

     During our Christmas break from home schooling, I managed to do a little sewing.  I took some curtains and sheets and made, well, curtains and sheets.  I bought some curtains from a departing friend a few months ago and had not managed to get them hung anywhere.  They are the kind that has large eyelets at the top.  In the states I would just run to Wal-mart or Home Depot and get the hardware for hanging that type of curtain.  Not an option here.  My mom sent me some lime green ribbon and thread for Christmas by way of Josh, so I turned the curtains upside-down and sewed the goofy European-style whatever-you-call-it (seriously, I have no idea what it is called) onto the new top to make it compatible with the tracks/hooks system thingy (sorry, don't know the name of that either) already installed in the house.  Then I ran the ribbon through the eyelets, wrapped the ends around to the back, and tacked it down.  We really like it. The curtains weren't wide enough for the window so I made a center panel out of a white sheet. 

I also fixed a fitted sheet for my bed. We foolishly packed queen size sheets for our bed when we came here. I don't think anyone here has a queen sized bed unless they shipped it over from the U.S. MAF loaned us a "Congo-king" size bed when we first arrived. The mattress was made locally out of foam, so I was able to roll it and stuff it into my too-small sheets.  The flexibility of the foam combined with the really snug sheets in such a way that when we got into bed each night the mattress enveloped us like a hotdog bun and cooked us in our own body heat.  (no comments about pigs in a blanket, please)  It also made getting out of bed an interesting challenge in the mornings, sort of like the commercials where the little old lady says "help, I've fallen and I can't get up!"  We eventually bought a bed from some other departing friends. (Do you see the trend here? If no one ever left this place we wouldn't have anything in our house!) It's a California King from the states and my sheets were not going to stretch that far. So, when I had the chance to buy some king-sized sheets from my friend who sold me the curtains, I grabbed it. I took a strip off the top sheet and rehemmed it. Then I added the strip into the fitted sheet, near the bottom so it wouldn't show when the bed was made. I didn't have any instructions and had to "wing it" so the project took a lot longer than I wanted it to, but we have a fitted sheet now that doesn't have to be tucked back under the mattress every morning. Yaaay!
AND...I finally finished scrapping my Christmas photos. FROM 1993! I made one layout and reused it for the sake of expediency. I had a ton of photos because that was Josh's first Christmas and everyone has a bajillion photos of the first baby. (I'm really, really sorry, middle and youngest children.)

This past Christmas while Josh was here I took unusually good photos. I do that about once every five years. Then I took my memory card out of my camera so we could put one of the photos on Facebook for Josh. Now we can't find the memory card and that one photo is all I have from Christmas day. So, since the photos I took a couple days after Christmas can't tell the whole story, we had a great day.

Josh even blogged a little about it. He is a contributing writer on a blog for TCK's - third culture kids. You can see the wonderful sweet things he said about his family HERE.  I think I might go read it a few more times.