Shep is not even three, and I’ve already discovered he’s impossible to buy for. We’re doing this thing where the kids only get five gifts for their birthday, and for the life of me, I can’t come up with five things that kid would want. Other than produce.
But then I had an idea.
There’s this brown bear that I bought at the Gap long ago when Neko was a baby. I thought it was darling, and Neko thought it was unremarkable. So it went in a bin in the basement. When Ellery came along, I brought it back out. At the time, we were reading the book Corduroy quite a bit. Shep promptly adopted him, and declared him Corduroy.
However, the Gap sells these bears in the buff. (Which is a little ironic, if you think about it, since they’re a clothing store.) It was clear to me that Corduroy needed overalls.
So I managed to squeeze in a trip to the fabric store, dusted off the sewing machine, and hunkered down with a somewhat-helpful pattern. Four hours later, I have overalls and a birthday gift checked off the list!
Okay, I know four hours is kind of a tedious amount of time, but I had to reacquaint myself with The Machine and tackled the automatic buttonhole attachment for the first time. And not to sound like an über sewing nerd, but omigosh is that attachment a gift from heaven.
And in true Corduroy form, I kept misplacing one of the buttons. I had several long searches for it and began to wonder if my replica was going to be a bit more accurate than I’d intended.
So when you visit after Shep’s birthday (4/23), and Corduroy’s new duds are in circulation, don’t look too closely. They’ve got lots of little oops things here and there. Nonetheless, they make me smile.