Effing Gnomes

For those who asked for the tale.

How do I know it is Gnomes?  Well, I don't, but that is what we have taken to calling it/them.  It is, for sure, something from faerie that is bent on mischief but is not actually harmfully malevolent. I'm willing to hear arguments for other explanations or names.

I know, I know, people misplace stuff.  This is on a different level.  The first time we really took note may not have been the first interference, but the first that was so clearly out of the usual.  The sewing scissors went missing.

Now, I'm not talking a pair of scissors, I'm talking a pile of scissors used by a housefull of sewers.  All but one or two pairs were being stored in a specific sewing box.  One day, they were just gone.  Michelle looked high and low and asked everyone.  We all looked, and each of us looked in the sewing box where they should have been - more than once.  No scissors.

But we were too busy preparing to move to make it the center of our whole attention.  Maybe we would find them in all the packing and unpacking process? No.

Then, about a month after we were all  moved, Michelle went to get something else out of that same sewing box, and the scissors were all back, just like that.

That was the day we started calling them the effing gnomes.

It is not always clear when it is them and when it is just human error, but there is a pattern of it being sewing scissors, like the pair I thought I had somehow left at a sewing circle type activity.  No one had them and they were not in my bag that I had carried my things in.  I figured they were lost for good, and bought another pair. A month later I went to get something else out of that bag and, you guessed it, they were back.

They take tools from Mike, usually phillips head screw drivers.  He will go to get one out of his tool box and it will be gone.  He will yell about people messing with his tools and stomp around. Then a few days later he will go for a different tool, and there is the screwdriver, exactly where it was supposed to be.

A few weeks ago, he lost his keys.  Mike and Michelle searched carefully through the house.  They both ran their hands down in the cracks under the furniture cushions - several times.  When Marcus got home, he found them, in the crack in the sofa.  He didn't even have to try that hard.  Come to think of it they never mess with Marcus.  Hmmm.

But this latest one, last night, has me really confused. I was starting to get ready for bed, plugging in my electronics and putting things back in my backpack so it would be ready in the morning. I noticed something shiny in the bottom of my backpack that looked like a - yes - it looks like the stitch plate off an older sewing machine.

I took it downstairs, wondering if it was something Michelle or Megan had that somehow got knocked into my backpack, and they were as mystified as I was.  It had a part number on it, so Meg did a little googling and established that it is a stitch plate to a vintage Singer.  Not my Featherweight, mind you, a full size machine from before they etched seam markers on them.  Now we do own two larger vintage Singers, but they have both been in storage for several years and we have not touched them since they were put there.

Somewhere there is a vintage singer suddenly missing it's stitch plate. If it is your's, I have it.  Why they thought I needed it in my backpack is beyond my understanding of the world.

The only thing I can say is effing gnomes.