It was heading towards the festive season; the season of panic, reflection, over indulgence and stupid social events. Crys wistfully looked up at her bulging calendar and straight down toward her bulging jeans. She wasn’t sure that all these events where she had to pretend to like people were survivable and certainly her jeans were worried that the over consumption of Christmas calories would result in Crys resurrecting her ancient maternity jeans with the comfy elasticated waist.
She loved the busyness and hated the busyness in equal measures. She knew she was fortunate to have so much to pick and choose from, but after a while, her ‘people-ometer’ spun so wildly and encouraged rapid retreat.
Looking again at the calendar, she spied one of her favourite events, the Sewing Group’s Secret Sewing Swap which often degenerated into a cake fuelled evening of laughter. The rules were simple. One gift, valued at approx £15, suitable for a sewer and you left a clue of things you’d love, ready to be passed onto your swap partner.
Crys looked down at Marie’s scrawly writing on the envelope and prised the flap open, really hoping that the partner was one of her friends.
‘Andi’. She stared passively at it.
Why did she get the bloke? How was she supposed to know what he would like? Then common sense trickled through and gender really didn’t need to enter into the equation; a sewer is a sewer. Surely anything she’d like would be suitable for him. She continued onto the ‘I would love’ list. It made amusing reading.
‘Sanity
More hair
A girlfriend
Sewing clips
A Clapper
Quirky fabric
Surprise me’.
Well then. Sanity? Nope. More hair? Well she did have a wig that could be amusing. A girlfriend? Hmm, Crys really wasn’t in the market for a relationship although Andi had a few charms.
Sewing clips would be an easy purchase, she could even sew a little WeeBrawBag that was the perfect receptacle for a fistful of magic clips. A Clapper was one of Crys’ favourite tools and if she was savvy she could pick one up from The Sewing Tree, her favourite fabric store in Prestin. She found ‘quirky fabric’ intriguing, but that was really an individual choice and she could get that one badly wrong. She was with Andi on the whole ‘surprise me’ thing. One of the fail-safes in the Swap evening was that you were able to add your ‘less than perfect gift’ into the centre of the table after opening and other people could pick it up if they fancied it. So a surprise wasn’t quite as risky as it seemed and who was really going to dump their full expectations of the season onto one small gift?
Crys decided she’d spend the next few weeks checking out ideas online and pop to The Sewing Tree to see if anything inspired her. The sewing trip came around sooner than expected. Cary texted to ask if she was up for a coffee and it so happened that their go-to latte place was just around the corner from the fabric shop.
She literally skipped through the sun-bleached doors. The old-school bell rang as the door opened and echoed the sound that would be made as her funds tumbled out of her bank account. There was always something new and exciting to see, but thrifty Crys always headed to the bargain corner first. Bolt ends, slightly marked fabric pieces, languishing previous season items and other stuff. Why was rifling through fabric so therapeutic? At the bottom of the basket she found a whole layer cake for £16. She could hardly believe her luck. As she was wondering if it was quirky enough, Shifty Sheila swooped in and nabbed it from under her nose.
‘Oy’, Crys protested, ‘That was mine’.
Sheila smiled sarcastically ‘you should have had your hands on it then’.
She flounced off and Crys wrinkled her nose in her direction. Oh well, maybe Andi wouldn’t have liked it anyway.
She settled on a set of clips as the Clapper had increased in price. She picked out some Guicy Guice fabric that she thought might appeal to Andi and added sewing up a mini drawstring bag to her mental to-do list.
A fortnight later and everyone was at Sewing Group. Even those that rarely attended came out of the woodwork for this night.
Hilary managed to spill her mocktail all over her swap gift. It wasn’t her fault that she’d tripped over Sue’s giant storage case on wheels. As someone who never actually did any sewing, Crys always had been intrigued as to what was contained inside Sue’s behemoth suitcase. Sue had tried to rescue the crocheted toilet roll holder, but everyone was probably thinking that the beverage had done them all a favour!
After lots of cake, fuelled by a sugar high, the laughter and swap began. Previously everyone had delivered their gifts into the basket and the idea was that everyone took it in turns to unwrap. Those with better acting skills spared embarrassing the buyers but mostly the worst gifts meant the best laughs.
Poor old Hilary wasn’t having the best night, after the sopping crochet had been left dripping in the kitchen sink, she opened her gift from Bev (bless her) who wasn’t known for keeping up with the trends and mistakenly purchased hairclips with sewing spools on rather than the bulldog-esque clips that everyone was using for keeping their fabric together instead of pins. Hilary looked so disappointed but didn’t put her gift back into the centre and remained subdued.
The gifts ranged from a blow up pin cushion (how was that ever going to work?), some cute sewing tins filled with pins to a superbly expensive 3 metres of Anna Maria Horner fabric from Di, who always completely ignored the money limit and was on everyone’s wish list to get picked to be her swap partner.
Crys opened her gift tentatively, guessing it contained fabric. Sadly it didn’t, but simply half a metre of wadding. She tried to smile and thought it was immensely practical but pretty boring for a gift. It came to Andi’s turn and he seemed to really like the gift but to Crys’ disappointment, he slipped the gift into the centre and Hilary’s friend jabbed her in the side and she quickly swooped and grabbed the bag and clips, throwing the hairclips back at speed. She saw Andi smile a little.
The evening drew to a close and she ended up chatting to Andi and Sue. She decided to ask Andi why he didn’t like his gift. He winked at her and said that after seeing Hilary’s disappointment he just couldn’t have taken the clips, no matter how beautifully the drawstring bag had been made. He flashed her a smile and asked her if she knew who’d made it as he’d love the pattern.
Crys reckoned he had a kinder heart than she’d realised and thought that maybe, just maybe she was in the ‘market’ after all!
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