[ Holiday decorating: Some crafts just... ]

Holiday decorating: Some crafts just aren't for amateurs

By Mike Dixon

Special to The Capital-Journal

Home holiday decorators, start your engines. Down in our basement, my wife has a stash of garlands and greenery in a box so big that a semi tractor would been challenged to pull it up the stairs to the family room. And the family room is just where she parks it in the pre-holiday season every year.

It was around that time last year that my wife went off to spend an entire day touring craft shops and left me to fend for myself at home. She had already driven away by the time I got up, and I decided to take my oatmeal into the family room where I could eat and read the morning paper.

Even though I had already waded through boughs and baubles for a couple of days by then, I knew that my easy chair was the one place that was free of clutter. So I sat down without looking --- and I felt something.

I thought it might be a magazine, and I wriggled around to see it would conform to the contour of my bottom. When it wouldn't, I got up and discovered that it was a big, freshly minted bow of the wired ribbon variety.

Since the bow just had a few crimps in it, I figured I ought to be able to bend them out. So I started twisting, but every time I bent a crook out of a wire, it seemed like I bent a crinkle into it. Eventually the crinkles became wrinkles and the whole thing began to look sort of crushed and crumpled.

I decided that the only way I was every going to fix that bow was to undo it and start from the very beginning. I got all the ribbon undone, but it was still thoroughly scrunched, and I needed some way to flatten it.

That's how I discovered that some wired ribbons have a low melting point. By the time I had scraped what was left off the sole plate of the iron with a razor scraper, I knew I would need a new plan.

I was starting to get desperate. There was one person, a woman, I could turn to, but I was hesitant because she was my wife's best friend. That would be Marge Brown, a regular Michelle Angelo of ribbon and the very person who had taught my wife the art of ribbon craft in the first place.

I called the Brown home, and Marge's husband answered. He said that Marge was around the house somewhere and to come on over. She was waiting at the front door.

Marge looked at the mangled ribbon in dismay. I told her how the bow was left where it was not supposed to be, in my chair, how I had tried to straighten it, and how it had melted even on the rayon setting. Then I tried to minimize the whole thing; said I knew it wasn't much of a bow but that it was important to my wife and I didn't want her to get upset. Finally, I asked if we could keep this sort of confidential.

"OK," she said, "so you want me to fix the bow, lie your wife, and act like this conversation never took place. Is that about it?"

"I think you've got it," I said.

"That sounds best to me," she said. "But we certainly can't do anything with this ribbon, and I don't know if I can match it."

"Let's try," I pleaded.

She took me to her decorating stash where she looked through all her ribbon spools.

"Found it," she exclaimed. "Here is a full spool of the exact thing."

She began looping the ribbon back and forth, and in minutes she had a bow that could pass for the one I had annihilated.

"Tell me," she asked as she pointed with her scissors, "did the ribbon ends have little V cuts in them like this?"

"That's it," I said, "the exact way she did it. Marge you're a genius."

I took the new bow home and placed it right where I had found its predecessor, and none too soon either, for my wife was home within the hour.

The subject was not mentioned at dinner, but afterward, when we retired to the family room, I carefully moved the bow to a safe distance from my chair. Then I said, "You know, this is a really beautiful bow. When did you make this one?"

"Oh, I didn't," she said. "Marge Brown made it and won a blue ribbon for it in a crafts show. She just loaned it to me to look at before I went on my tour. Marge is coming over any minute now to pick it up. Could you just take it to the door when she gets here?"

Marge was all smiles.

Mike Dixon of Topeka is an occasional contributor to At Home.

Copyright 2001
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