Happy 50th Mom!

My Mom. My lovely, adorable, tough Mom turned 50 today. Isn't she purrrrr-dy?

(on the left)


In addition to buying her a very hip birthday gift, I'm working on a design that will undoubtedly be finished in the year 2010. Here's the prototype:



My Mom likes to walk around her neighborhood, and during a recent conversation about the appeal of iPods, I confessed to sticking my Nano in my bra while doing the dishes.

But my Mom, the woman who struggled through child birth, only to be rewarded with my teenaged years, should certainly have a better system, right? She can't go digging in her bra in front of the poor unsuspecting neighborhood children who just want to ride bikes in their driveway. So I've been looking everywhere for an interesting iPod shuffle arm band. No luck.

Out comes the sewing machine and the graph paper. The plan is -- length of fabric + elastic + vinyl sleeve to protect iPod from sweat = prototype.

I chose this basic design so I could make Mom several arm bands in several fabrics. My Mom is a girly girl, so I envision bold pinks and purples and flowery prints. Bold flowery prints should be perfect for her -- shortly after buying her new house, she painted every room pink. Her boyfriend recently bought her a small lawn tractor, and when my brother called it a "pansy tractor" Mom threatened to paint it purple. When my brother snickered and dared her to do it, she did. Now her tractor is purple and adorned with butterfly and flower decals. On his next visit, the boyfriend said, "Oh.my.god. What will the guys at the repair shop say when I show up with this?" My Mom's response? "I don't care." I laughed my ass off and scoured Michaels and A.C. Moore for additional decals.

Clearly my Mom needs several well-designed, custom-made iPod arm bands to match her many outdoor outfits (and her tractor? oy.). The problem with the prototype is the fabric isn't strong enough to withstand the pressure of the elastic, so the seams are popping. For prototype #2, I'll iron down some fusible interfacing and cut on the bias. Wish me luck.

In additon to the iPod, which should be on her doorstep before 3pm, my brother and I launched a sneak attack.* Bro wrote all over her car this morning with soap pen. "Old Lady Driving" on the windshield. "Careful. I'm 50" on the back window. "50" on each of the door windows. We know our Mom. She's perpetually late, so she had to drive to work in her freshly soaped car. And when she got to work ... mwah.ha.ha.

We coordinated with her colleagues at work to decorate her office. Bro snuck in last night, hung black streamers in her doorway, filled her office with black balloons, and blew up a 3 foot tall birthday cake for her desk. We bought "Over the Hill" plates and napkins and ordered a cake to be delivered to her office at 12noon. Hopefully she's eating cake at this very moment and being tormented by her very feisty and practical-jokester colleagues.

Wish my Mom a Happy Birthday, will ya?

*before you jump to Mom's defense, keep this in mind: at every job I've ever had, at some point in the first 6 months of my tenure, a mysterious fax addressed to my boss will arrive. The image? A picture of me from high school. Ouch.