Tuesday, December 12, 2006

Anything Else?

Note: This post was written on November 23rd(U.S. Thanksgiving). I finally got around to doing the editing on December 11th. Sorry for the delay.

You'd think that rebuilding a $5.00 toy stroller would be easy. Well, at least that's what I thought this morning.

Right about the time that PC was born, Sir and I bought Dolly some 'baby' toys. Among them was a miniature umbrella stroller that within two weeks was starting to fall apart. The frame was in perfect condition and it was just the cheap fabric that was being worn through and torn.

This morning after watching Dolly happily push her skeleton of a stroller around the house, I decided that it shouldn't be that hard to make a new seat for it and started by taking the rest of the original remains off of the frame.
Then, came the challenge of actually getting through the project. Find a seam ripper.... ok finally. Now, take the old seat apart... done. (For anyone else - try to remember how you take things apart as you do it. It will make re-assembly much easier.) Next... oh yeah... go find some fabric - we made a trek out to the shed. Cut out new seat pieces - hey, at least that part was easy.. as long as Dolly let my scissors alone. Set up the sewing machine. This involved re-arranging the living/dining room temporally. Then all the problems showed up.

First off, I didn't thread the machine properly so as soon as I started to sew, gobs of thread would wad up underneath my pressure foot. While I tried unsuccessfully to figure out what was wrong, Dolly was shedding most of her clothes and PC was starting to get impatient and fussy. Finally I called Auntie Kedg and in less than 30 seconds she had pinpointed the problem, and gave me instructions to fix it (Sometimes one can really feel blond).

At last! I was ready to sew. I relocated my son, gave him some toys, put Dolly's favorite CD in the CD player and let her jump to her hearts content. Then I started sewing. About halfway into the project I burnt my hand again on my 50-60 year old sewing machine (the light bulb gets really hot and you skin sticks to it if you're not careful when lifting the pressure foot - yeah, ouch.) I ran out of bobbin thread on my very last ¼ inch seam. And after just over two hours, I finally finished making a little toy stroller seat while my son screamed his lungs out in the background until he finally fell asleep and my daughter went through everything on my nightstand in the other room (between needing my help to dash off to go potty). I think that next time I'll wait until naptime to get a project done!

4 comments:

  1. Aww! Well it looks like you did a wonderful job on the stroller Joy. I also want to say that every one of the photos of your kids on this blog are fabulous. They are so cute. I especially liked the Hannah on the counter ones. :)

    ~C

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  2. It doesn't matter to me that you're posting "old" posts. We haven't seen it before so it's new to us. I know how you feel when you have things to post and not the time to do it... one more thing to fall behind on! As if we need that.

    BTW Sounds like Dolly is using her stuff well! It sure looks great now.

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  3. i love that apple toy! whenever I come over to your house I always jingle it ^_^

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  4. What? You've relocated your son??, Why?, When?, Where? Did TaTa help?

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