5 months in: Random thoughts

So the other week I decided to try my hand at being domestic, seeing as though I am living alone in my own apartment for the 1st time ever, and sew my own window curtains by hand. Having nice curtains in one’s house is a pretty big thing here in Guyana. Every window and sometimes every doorway have its own curtain and the designs are carefully selected and changed every couple months and for every major holiday. People have special curtains that only go up at Christmas or when someone gets married or when a baby is born. And of course, these curtains are usually sewed by hand. When I moved into my apartment my landlady had put up her good Christmas curtains on all my windows and about 2 weeks ago she took them down to use in her own home when her daughter gets married in early August. This left me in somewhat of a predicament, since the distance between my windows and my neighbors is about 1 foot and my windows were now fully exposed. I decided that the obvious solution to this was to buy fabric and sew curtains. Sounded simple enough. I went and bought fabric, a nice light blue with a rose/bird design (the pickings were slim at the store), got out my little travel sewing kit, and blocked out a whole Sunday afternoon. My apartment has 6 decent sized windows and about halfway through the first curtain I started to think that maybe I wasn’t cut out for the whole domestic seamstress housewife thing. My stiches were crooked, I couldn’t measure to save my life, and the only thing I could find to hang them up was this ghetto looking blue rope. Plus Nala kept thinking that rolling around in the fabric and chasing after the rope was the best game ever. But I powered through, cause already made curtains are incredibly expensive and I had already bought the fabric and I am in Peace Corps gosh darn it, I should be able to sew a few lousy curtains. Four hours later they were done, slightly crooked and hanging on hammock rope but they were up and now my neighbors could no longer look out their windows and accidently see me walking around with no pants on (In my defense, it is stupidly hot here every single day)

Jump to the next afternoon around 5: My landlady, having seen the evidence of new curtains through my windows comes up to check them out. She takes one look, feels them between 2 fingers and just shakes her head and says “Me resew for you. Don’t trouble, me resew.” And epic fail. She takes down all my curtains (And there went my plans to walk around pants-less later) and resews them all herself. When she brings them back 2 days later, they look professionally done and she even hangs them up with special elastic curtain rope that I had no idea even existed. Guess my inner housewife still needs a little bit more work :)