Martha Stewart in Cairo

Summertime has been pretty quiet in Cairo. I haven't been traveling for work nearly as much as usual, and it's been way too hot to get excited about doing anything outside, so I've spent a good bit of time inside my flat.

I've taken on a few projects around the place and now have all kinds of ideas for painting walls and redecorating and the like. (You may need to refer to this post to understand why I feel the need to redecorate.) You might say I've been paying more attention than usual to the Martha Stewart-esque side of my personality. My most recent project has been to re-cover most of the furniture. I guess blue and yellow floral stripes just aren't my thing. And neither are black and gold Asian prints.

I started with the dining room chairs since they seemed easiest and posted the progress a while ago. Recently I decided to tackle the living room furniture. I knew this was an entirely new game for me. The dining room chairs project required nothing more than a pair of scissors, a hammer and a staple gun, but I knew the living room would require an actual sewing machine.

I thought I might want to purchase a sewing machine so I began looking. After about three weeks, I concluded that a sewing machine must be an incredibly difficult commodity to track down in Cairo, because I hadn't been able to find a single one. Thankfully, one of my colleagues told me that she had one and offered to loan it to me. I was thrilled at the prospect and took her up on the offer, ignoring her warnings that it's "a little old". I assured her it would be just fine.

I stopped by her flat one day after work to pick up the machine and quickly discovered that it was more than just "a little old". The machine weighs about 46 pounds (ok, that may be a slight exaggeration), comes with a bag of random metal pieces and a can of oil, and I'm pretty sure it hasn't been used in several years. I was terrified I would break it and intimidated, to say the least.
But thankfully, the antique sewing machine came with a small instruction booklet that, while also antique itself, was quite helpful, even if I was scared that the book itself would disintegrate any second!
Anyway, it wasn't nearly as bad as I had expected. I haven't finished quite finished the seat cushions, but I'm pretty proud of my accomplishments so far, so I thought I'd post a couple pictures of my progress.
(I know this is a little off the usual travel/social justice/health subjects about which I usually write, but it's another side of me and has taken up a lot of my time lately, so I had to go ahead and post it. Hope it's not too boring!)