getting another run

A bit wrinkled after more than two years in storage, but still looking fabulously festive 🙂

Middle Niece was married on Friday. The reception was held at her parents’ house, under a marquee on the back lawn. Among the decorations? The photo is a little blurry – phone cameras have their limitations, after all – but I’m sure you’ll get the general idea. It was lovely to see the made-by-me bunting adorning another celebration. This space was smaller than the previous one, with a steeper ceiling pitch, so the bunting appeared much denser and it certainly draped differently.

On the subject of matters crafty, I’m still knitting the scrappy scarf or shawl. It’s making progress. I’ve decided to embrace the knot. There seem to be many in the yarn I’m using and there’s a limit to my patience for dealing with them. My theory is that you’d be hard pushed to notice the occasional bump when the scarf is tucked under a coat collar, as is likely to be its final destination.

Also, I’ve booked to attend a beginners’ weaving course. It’s being held near the town where I grew up, so Dr B and YoungB will cycle the Riesling Trail (more info) while I learn all about looms, weft and warp and other wondrous new terms.

Whatever you’ve been doing, I hope your plans are all turning out exactly as you’d expected. Mine never do; but I hope yours are!

 

 

almost absolutely random

A tiny part of what I’ve been doing, but I love the colour combination in these lavender bags 🙂

Hellooo, here I am again. Did you miss me?! I’ve been to the cinema a couple of times and one night I made those lavender bags to be a raffle prize (nine bags, a bit over 2 hours of work; nobody would be prepared to pay what that would cost). I used stash fabric and some truly venerable ribbon, which came from Great Aunt’s stash and is possibly older than I am. I squashed all nine into a fancy, little presentation box with a handwritten label that read, “Lavender bags: stick ’em in your drawers :)”. I hope whoever picked that particular prize thoroughly enjoys it.

Mostly, however, I’ve been sewing a lot of metres of wedding-decoration bunting: approximately 270, to be precise 🙂 Without further ado, let me deconstruct the process somewhat.

Because we weren’t sure about what would work in the space, we rough-calculated we’d need 15-metre strips and I made 18 of them, to ensure adequate coverage. Mission accomplished. There were enough leftovers to decorate one of the outdoor areas as well, plus hang a little strip across the front of the bar.

Another guest asked if there’d been a pattern to the way I sewed the bunting? I responded that it had been almost absolutely random; and before the purists beat me up and insist it’s either random or it’s not, let me explain.

There were plain and striped triangles cut from the large amount of hessian that Eldest Niece provided; two different sorts of lace triangles, cut from some leftover curtaining that was lurking in my stash; and a lot of lace strips cut from the continuous rolls provided by Eldest Niece. I cut and counted every bit of bunting, and divided each total by 18. That gave me a count per item, per tape. Unsurprisingly, there were leftovers, so they were totted up and that total divided by 18, then all of those put into an “add a couple of these to each tape” container, meaning from the outset that no two tapes were likely to be the same.

Dr B helped me square up my sheeting so I could cut it into tapes and purchased an A0-sized self-healing cutting mat for me (at my request; also some new pinking shears). YoungB helped with picking piles prior to sewing and accompanied Dr B to pick up the cutting mat whose delivery they’d missed. They put up with my eating and running – that is, I’d get home from work, have tea with them and vanish into the sewing room till bedtime – and didn’t complain too much about my moving their cycles from the hallway so I could set up my cutting station on the only large, solid bit of floor in the house. Finding an adequate space for cutting was probably the biggest challenge, although I’ve since had some brainwaves around old doors and sawhorses; but with a template made from a plastic chopping sheet, my new metre ruler and the large cutting mat, I managed to get the job done.

Once all the tapes were sewn – five three-metre x 2.5 cm strips joined to form a tape just under 15 metres in length – and all the shapes were cut out, counted and sorted into piles, I’d pick the required number and prepare a stack for sewing. This is where the random element truly came to the fore. As I stacked the pile, I’d sometimes turn it pile over before adding the next piece and every now and then that meant a long run of – usually, because there was much more of it – hessian and one lonely piece of lace before an alternating pattern, or a run of two hessians and one lace, but it wasn’t predictable except that I only had a certain amount of pieces to work with for each tape.

I’d then put the pile by the sewing machine and, using the needle plate as a rough measure of distance between pieces, away I’d sew on the sheeting tape. Ideally, the tape would have been folded in half along its length and the pieces of bunting slipped into the resulting crease, but I quickly realised that, while that provided the neatest finish, it would require far more time than I had available to me. I ended up using a wide zigzag stitch and machining the pieces directly onto the tape, leaving about 40 cm either end for tying purposes. Because I used both my Singer and my Janome, the distance between pieces wasn’t precise but it would be fair to say, I think, that the gap was rarely more than 7 cm. I threw in a handful of lavender bags, packed it all into one of those large, striped shopping totes that would probably hold a couple of small children, and Middle Niece collected it the day before the hall was to be decorated. I’m told that unpacking it was akin to a magician’s trick: the bunting just kept coming out of the bag 🙂

So that’s where I’ve been and what I’ve been doing. And now? YoungB wants me to magic up some pockets inside his motorcycling jeans, so that he can add in extra protective armour for a forthcoming long trip. I’m scratching my head about that, because I don’t see how I can do it without unpicking a serious amount of heavy-duty seaming. Should I run now?

 

Bloody Long Walk: bloody long and bloody hard!

We’re smiling, but next year Eldest Niece and I will be busy, we’ve decided 🙂

I managed to make four cooling collars. That’s the most important thing 🙂 I found mine very useful and Middle Aunt wore hers. Mine kept me cool and, as a bonus, protected me from sunburn. Of course I was sewing till the last minute because MY plan for my day was derailed. But no matter, I was able to soak the collars and get them fully plumped up prior to the walk; and there’s mine in action (I’d only just reached the finish, the others had been there for ages). I’m always easy to spot because I’m the shortest. Eldest Niece, Middle and Youngest Aunts also did the BLW, making it a family affair. It was a good feeling to get to the end of the walk, so the sense of achievement probably made our grins wider than usual.

Despite our having done the whole walk prior to the event, albeit in bits and not always in the correct direction, we walked through some new territory because of last-minute route changes that the local councils had requested. I am not generally a fast walker. I know what pace I can sustain to get to the end of the distance I’m doing. Yesterday, I walked at someone else’s pace for far too long and burnt out early. I could DO the pace but I could not maintain it for another 20-or-so kilometres. By the time I reached the Tennyson Dunes and some lumpy, scrambly stuff that we’d always known was going to be tough especially if we were tired, I was almost ready to call it quits. But I didn’t. I sat down and had some dried fruit, nuts and a piece of chocolate, slurped down an energy gel with a swig of water, slapped on another layer of sunblock, gave myself a stern talking to, and picked up my feet again.

And all the while, the thoughts running through my head were along the lines of, “I can do this. I have the energy to do this. It’s bloody long, bloody hard and bloody tiring but it’s not bloody impossible.” If I had mito, I wouldn’t be doing anything of the sort.

Although my recording device had me down to a speed of about 25 minutes per kilometer at one stage, it’s not accurate. I stuck the thing in my pocket when I set out and left it there for the rest of the day. That means simply that there’s no account taken of breaks anywhere, whether that was at checkpoints or comfort stops. Having said that, I WAS walking slowly through the Dunes but I kept going, eventually picked up my pace and managed not to be too downhearted when I reached Semaphore and realised it was still another 5 Km to the finish line at Largs Bay 🙂 I was the last of our little group to finish, by quite a long way, but by no means the last of our larger group to reach the finish line.

Today I was back at work, mildly stiff all over and with a couple of sore spots on one foot – no blisters, however! – but I went for a brisk walk at lunchtime and practically galloped to the tram stop this afternoon. Someone suggested I could participate in next weekend’s event, but I said I’d rather do another Bloody Long Walk tomorrow than a mere 12 Km. It’s not so much that 12 Km is no longer a challenge (it could be), but that I hate the idea of jostling 29,000 other walkers!

And now, now that all that extreme outdoorsy stuff is over, I’m about to knuckle down and do some extreme sewing: metres of bunting. Wish we luck 🙂

 

an old FO

Some readers might recall that I made bunting for Middle Aunt and Uncle’s Christmas present in 2011. Due to technical problems and because I hadn’t photographed it in action prior to sending it off to its recipients, I only blogged about it referentially. Here’s a photo of some of it in action in 2012.

Helping to decorate Middle Aunt’s outdoor eating area

I made 48 such flags – two string of 24 each – and they’re double-sided, so that whichever way you hang them, there’s a pattern. The bias tape I used to connect them was made from some old fabric I’d had lying around for quite a while (and from which I’d made boardies for YoungB when he was at primary school). I used Colette Patterns’ tutorial for making continuous bias.

I made a string of these for Eldest Nephew as well, though his used different fabric and I made the mistake of choosing one fabric with a one-way design. I used it both ways, anyway, and made sure that the direction alternated so that it looked deliberate. Well, it was! He hasn’t complained. (Maybe he’s too scared to do so but in reality, I doubt if he’s even noticed.)

Right, well, back to current crafting. Yeah, not much progress on any of that! But I’m sure there will be eventually. I hope you’re managing to churn out project after project.