Saturday 13 October 2012

Leaving Home

If only for day. Today my Mum and I are going to the Knitting and Stitching Show at Alexandra Palace, which means that Robert has be Full-Time Parent for 24 hours.
Tiago Bag
This of course meant that I had to do every thing I would normally do on or by Saturday by 6pm on Friday so that I could catch my train. But this week, on top of making sure that the children all have sufficient clean clothes and meals available to them while I am out of the house, I had to add making a birthday bag and accessorising a fancy dress costume as Matthew has a party to go to this afternoon.

The plus side of all that drawstring bag making is that I managed to rattle out a couple of stripy drawstring backpacks one afternoon – and I only need one this week!

Having found a bandanna, a shirt, and a belt and sash (for Matthew to choose from) I felt compelled to make him a proper pirate hat using a tutorial I found online. I already had a worn out black vinyl coat ready to cut up, and absolutely no time, so what could be better?

Hopefully Matthew will wear it as gracefully as Rupert the coat-hanger.
Pirate Hat2 Pirate Hat1

Friday 12 October 2012

Christmas? Done!

Of course, it is not my Christmas that I have finished, just somebody else’s.
Christmas Bags

That heap of festive fabric I showed you in the last post turned into this:



Christmas Bag - solo← Which are actually 50 of these.
The purpose of this was to provide, lighter, re-usable and more durable "Shoe Boxes” for a local organisation called Hopestonia to use to send Christmas presents to the children they help in Estonia.
This was a fairly slow moving project, mainly through procrastination, but also due in part to trying to work out what fabric to use, and how to reduce cost as much as possible. Then my lovely (and now closed) local Salvation Army shop had an unexpected donation of LOTS of Christmas stuff (in May/June) including lots of small remnants of fabric. They gave me everything I needed. All I had to do was launder it, unpicking the existing seams and iron all the fabric.
…And then work out how to cut all the slightly random bits of fabric into fairly consistently sized bags, actually cut them, sew them up, fold and sew again, thread the ribbon, stitch it down and hand them all over!
Now I just have to work out what I am doing about our Christmas.