Let’s try this one again.

Completely lacking decent pictures, or even much of a clear memory on how exactly it came to be, I give you…Iain’s robe…

This is the robe that almost wasn’t (that much I remember).  If you’ll think back, I was on a tight time line with Christmas sewing this year and the pedal on my machine choose the week before Christmas to start really acting up.  There had been signs of a problem before, but oh, by say, 12-22, it was getting downright uppity.  This, of course, was slowing down my progress even further, not to mention frustrating the heck out of me…

Flash forward two days, and I’m still. not. done.  But I’ve more or less decided to dedicate the day to finishing up.  My machine is giving me more problems then ever.  Iain, checking in on my progress as I fight with the pedal in my attempts at finishing the top stitching on Galen’s robe, says stoically, “So it’s just my robe that you have to left.”  Silence.  Followed by,  “Well, I guess it’s alright if you don’t get it done because I’ve had more Christmases for you to make me things then everyone else.”     And it was precisely at this heart-string-tugging moment, when I was vowing never to disappoint my noble boy, that my pedal decided to outright die.  Right.

Would you think it possible to track down the proper variety of pedal, late in the morning on Christmas Eve??  Because I certainly wouldn’t have supposed there was any chance at all.  And who would have thought that a husband would propose such a thing as tracking one down and then driving as far as it takes to get it? (alright he did impose a three or four county distance restriction)  Well, I would, because that’s just the sort of thing he does.

So by afternoonish I was back in business, but needing to attend to other things, which left me cutting out the pieces to this robe at around 11 pm, on the 24th.  Which is right around the time that I discovered that I did not in fact, have enough red fabric for the entire lining.  Thankfully, I had some of this ocean blue velour that matched the lake part of the print exactly (the outer fabric is a moose print that he picked out, not that you could really tell, because of the aforementioned cruddy pictures).

I actually greatly preferred the blue for the project to the red.  The sales women at the fabric store convinced me that the moose print went with the red on principal of them both being bright.  I never really bought into that (it’s ok I guess, but certainly not great), but Iain wanted it, so that’s the way we went.  Now the blue worked for me and I would have used it for everything, except I only had the one measly yard.  bah.  Soooo…the body and hood are lined with red, the sleeves in blue and I did the pockets in blue as well, just to be able to pick up the color again somewhere else.  The entire time I was sewing the lining, I couldn’t get visions of superman out of my head.

Dare I even mention the several colors of thread I ended up using as spools started running out?

As it turns out, I’ve remembered the sequence of events fairly well so far, but here is where things start to get fuzzy.  I vaguely remember a scene of desperately hacking away at large swaths of fabric while trying to make things line up and something about stumbling into his bedroom at around 3:30 in the morning to drape the finished project over the foot of his bed before collapsing for my standard issue coupla hours of sleep.

And that my friends, is the last of the robes.  But not the last of the Christmas sewing.  So, we’ll have a bit of something different for tomorrow.