Here she goes again! 

Every so often my wife goes into “creative” mode and rushes out to buy books, instructional videos, equipment and materials to fuel this artistic longing.  Some times it’s cheap – quilling for example – just a few strips of coloured paper, a lethal looking tool and an instruction leaflet – she had hours of fun twirling bits of paper and sticking them together into flower shapes. I never did know exactly what for. But it kept her happy.

Other times it runs into hundreds of pounds.  A few years ago she just had to have this new fangled knitting machine that promised to transfer whatever design you wanted onto a knitted garment.  She thought that all she had to do was choose her design, stick a couple of balls of wool next to the machine and press a button. Unfortunately it wasn’t that easy and after 6 months of hurling wool, patterns and obscenities around, she finally threw the whole lot in a box and sold it at a car boot sale for a quarter of what I paid for it.   The fruits of her hard labour were one scarf and an oversized jumper with a picture of a cross eyed dog on the front.  It must be the most expensive jumper in the universe!

I thought when we moved to rural Spain that the cravings would diminish as there were no decent craft shops around, and buying off the internet proved to be unreliable if not damn right impossible with our postal service. But my optimism was short lived when a new craft shop opened locally. Now she’s in there every week buying fancy papers, glue, foam pad things, cards, envelopes and sticky labels that say Merry Christmas.

“I’m going to make all our Christmas cards this year” she explained as she sat all day cutting out robins and sprigs of holly.

‘We don’t send Christmas cards” I reminded her.

“Well, we are this year.  Just think of the money we’ll save” she beamed.

I hadn’t the heart to tell her that you don’t save money sending out cards that you don’t normally send. 


 

Comments: