Confessions of an overly ambitious mom

I do too much.  Ask my husband.  A few weeks ago I saw the most fabulous Christmas dress fabric.  I wasn't even looking for it, but it called my name.  It said "You NEED to make Christmas dresses for your girls out of me!"  So I took it home.  And it sat.  It sat while I wrote lesson plans.  It sat while I taught.  It sat while I worked.  Jonathan has been home for almost two weeks now, and there's no reason in the world I should not have been able to finish these dresses in that time.  EXCEPT, everything has gone wrong.  When I say everything, I mean it, too.  I hadn't had a pattern when I bought said perfect-Christmas-dress-fabric, so I guestimated at how much I would need.  It wasn't enough.  No problem.  I just made the skirts a little shorter, and added an underskirt and tulle ruffle.  I like tulle ruffles, anyway, what the heck?  I found the most prefect trim, but needed thread for it.  You'd think I would have bought that when I bought the trim, but not so much.  It's OK, I had other parts of the dress I could work on in the meantime, namely the tulle ruffle...  and sewing the bodice together, and pressing the seams of the skirt, and hemming it...  Plenty to do.  Not hard work (so I thought) so it shouldn't really take that long.
First I planned on finishing the skirt.  I pinned it together, and had both of them sewn in under an hour.  See?  Easy.  Now to press the seams, and hem.  Have I mentioned that my perfect-Christmas-dress-fabric was beaded?  Have any of you pressed beaded fabric lately?  The glue melted and stuck to the iron.  Lovely.  It's nothing you can actually see, but it DID necessitate a towel between the skirt and the iron.
On to hemming my skirts!  I broke four needles before running out.  Four.  And I'm pretty sure I'm looking at about an eighth of one skirt being hemmed.  Why, oh why is this fabric just now giving me problems on the hem?!  I THINK it may have something to do with the beads coming off and falling down into the machine.  That didn't happen when I was sewing the seams, because all the beads were on the inside.  Think I'm going to try using tissue paper and see if that helps.
Next for the tulle ruffles.  How about gathering tulle?  Tried that lately?  Fun stuff!
Amidst all this drama, my thread broke at least a half a dozen times for no apparent reason, I knocked over the iron, and realised that I'm going to need to cut twice as much tulle as I originally estimated.  Good thing I bought plenty of that!
My greatest annoyance is that I had planned on having these fabulous dresses finished by tomorrow, so we could take the girls to the Gaylord and make pictures to put in Christmas cards (which the girls wrote in for me this morning).  Now, unless I hit up Starbucks on my way home from work tonight, that's not going to happen.
*sigh*  When will I learn?