Breaking from our regular programming, I’ll take you on a small diversion today and show you my own recent “small” diversion. While this is needle-and-thread related, it isn’t really embroidery related. At the end of the article, I’ll refer you to a similar past project that has to do with embroidery, though.

I made 4th-of-July decorations this year. This is unusual on a number of levels, not least of which is the fact that I rarely use a sewing machine and I’m not that great at it when I do.

4th of July (Independence Day) is the quintessential summer holiday in most American small towns. It’s a picnic day, a cookout day, a day for fireworks and parades and parks and pools, rivers, ponds and lakes, sandy lots and corn on the cob, and, for most of the country, it’s a sweltering hot summer day where you get sticky and sweaty and bug-bit while eating hotdogs and hamburgers all in the name of celebrating the events of 1776 and thereabouts.

It’s a big one this year – the semiquincentennial. The big 250. And it just so happens that the 4th of July this year, for my family, coincides with extended family coming to town for their summer break.

And that means we’re having a Big Ole Party. And, on another level of Unusual, the party’s at my house instead of my sister’s.

And that’s all a roundabout way of explaining why I got the hair-brained idea to make my own decorations.