Two stores + two parking lots=one handmade hat and scarf

This morning, after I finally got all of the out-of-town holiday packages wrapped (but not mailed, mind you---I don't know when I'll get to that), and I was out the door on my way to work, I remembered that Astrid has a birthday party to go to tomorrow. I could have cried: the last thing I wanted to do after work today was shop. On the train coming home, I decided that I would make Astrid's friend a winter hat and scarf out of polarfleece and vintage buttons. I told my husband that making these items would take me less time than driving to any store--assuming I could even find a parking space. It's Friday evening, and Christmas is Tuesday, and the news says everyone in the U.S. is waiting until the last minute to do their Christmas shopping. As it turned out, I made a major construction error when I was sewing the hat, and I had to redo a big part of it, so the project ended up being roughly equivalent to going to two different stores (in my shopping-aversive mind, that is.) Embellishing the hat and scarf were way more fun than *any* step in the moneyandtime-for-stuff exchange would have been.

I don't know how parents of my kids' friends look at handmade gifts. Last year I made another of Astrid's friends a pair of slippers for her birthday, and her mother's response seemed somewhat confused--polite, underwhelmed, and a little brittle. Are plastic toys and pink princess accessories a birthright for young girls? Ack.

I fear the hat I just made is a bit small (young girls have such big heads, don't they?), but it's pretty "stylish." (When it comes to clothes, this is Astrid's all-purpose descriptor--though her definition of stylish can be quite loose at times. Elliot reminds me that her favorite recent accessory has been an unraveling shiny pink gorra [knit cap] sized for a newborn....she wears it when she's acting out scenes from her private Olympic Games and private Cinderella, not realizing that she looks like a....hmmm....how to put it nicely? Well, she doesn't look like any of the Olympic Cinderellas I know about. That's fine with me.)