A Hot One

Nice weather on a bank holiday weekend? That is just wrong, but who am I to complain? I first ventured out this lunchtime, tiptoeing barefoot on my stony dry patio, inspecting my thirsty plants whilst the pasta for the pasta bianco cooked.

Girl Lacer had a birthday party this afternoon, I dropped her off and wandered into town feeling distinctly overdressed in just my jeans and shirt and wondering why is it only flabby men who feel they can take their tops off? When I came to pick her up there was good gossip, strawberries and melons on offer and I wanted to stay and chat, but Girl Lacer the spoil sport tugged on my shirt and said she wanted to go!

Pushing the sewing boundaries

I’ve been pushing my sewing comfort zone a bit the last few days (i.e. away from sewing cushions and simple quilts). It started with wanting to make something handmade for two of the three birthday parties Girl Lacer is going to this half term holiday. One of my favourite things on Twitter is the Craft twitter feed, it links (obviously) to their blog and it always comes up with some great craft ideas and one of them was a personalised birthday present idea, which I can’t seem to find now (mmm maybe it wasn’t on Craft then, one of the other great things about the Craft feed, following links from their blog can find you in all sorts of wonderful places). Anyway, it was basically a plain notebook with a fabric monogrammed letter sewn on the front with some buttons to decorate. I can’t remember if this blog post recommended making a bag to put the book in as well, sort of a travelling art kit for kids or whether I’ve seen that on another blog, but I wanted to make a little bag to put the adapted book in, as well as a tube of pencils I’d found in Muji (the plain notebook was also from Muji to). 

Now little bag tutorials are all over the place, several of my craft books include them and I decided to follow the instructions in Weekend Sewing, changing the dimensions a bit to suit the size of the book and the pencil tube. It went well until it came time to create the opening for the ribbon to open and close the bag, now I don’t know if I was being dense or the instructions weren’t that clear but I obviously did something wrong and I mucked it up (and this was the last stage before the completed bag as well). So I had to try again, flicking through some of my other craft books, I found something similar to what I wanted in Zakka Sewing, took the hint to zig zag the edges of the fabric first to prevent fraying (first sewing boundary pushed, I’d never taken my sewing machine off the settings it came with before!), I then sewed the channels for the ribbon first and then sewed the rest of the bag. The final result is not perfect, I still wasn’t 100% happy with the ribbon channel openings but it was ok. I concluded that if I was going to make the bag again (which I have to, for the other handmade birthday present for later on this week), I needed to do a button hole opening and I hadn’t done button holes before (sewing boundary number two).

Thinking about button holes made me think of a Clothkits skirt kit I had brought for Girl Lacer, a long long time ago, where I had opened the instructions, saw that you had to make button holes (for the skirt cord) and then promptly put the instructions away and closed the box and left it in the cupboard, for months. So I decided I was going to tackle buttons holes and you know what? They’re really easy! Now what’s more tricky is sewing a skirt with an elastic waistband (sewing boundary number three), that was tricky, but not too bad.

So over the last few days I’ve made some drawstring bags, personalised a plain notebook and made a skirt, feeling quite productive!

The first, as it turns out prototype bag is on the left, it has since found a good home as a teddy bear’s sleeping bag. The fabric on the K is the same fabric I used to make the second (successful) bag (all from a single fat quarter I should point out, with some fabric spare). The card, I can’t claim credit for, is Girl Lacer’s birthday card to her friend K.

As for the skirt, here it is. Girl Lacer is wearing it as I type and it hasn’t fallen apart (yet).

Anansi Boys

 

the cover of my book was actually neither white or blue but instead a far more attractive black

I finished Neil Gaiman’s Anansi Boys on Friday night and I absolutely loved this book, it’s now ranking as the best book I’ve read this year, so far. Sort of a sequel to American Gods, although it isn’t really, it follows the same idea that different cultures brought their gods with them when they emigrated and Anansi is an African trickster god in the form of a spider. Anansi Boys follows the story of Anansi’s sons and whereas American Gods was very, well, um American, in the way how a) it was set in America and b) the way how the characters travel across America, the whole story has a very wide open feel to it. Anansi Boys is quite opposite in that it has a cosier English feel and it reminded me a lot of another Gaiman story set in England, Neverwhere. Anansi’s son Fat Charlie emigrated to London with his mother as a child from the US, where his father stayed and large chunks of the story take place there (as well as Florida and one of the Caribbean islands). It starts with the death of Anansi and Fat Charlie discovering more about his family than perhaps he really wanted to.

This story had me giggling from the outset and has to be the funniest thing by Gaiman, that I’ve read so far, with incompetence at funerals, scary future mother-in-laws and obnoxious bosses. On one level it’s a really fun read, yet on another level it covers everything from the evolution in human behaviour, family relationships and life after death.

And on one final point, Neil Gaiman is apparently currently writing the Anansi Boys movie script, now that will be one good movie!

Computer trauma

I’ve been computer-less for about 24 hours, I’d been sitting at my desk dining room table, laptop open in front of me but I wasn’t actually doing anything on it, I was finishing off a craft project that I’ll post about later on today probably. Anyway there I am, sitting there cursing the size of my safety pins, computer open in front of me and it goes and crashes on me. Not too alarmed at first, even newish laptops crash occasionally, I had thought it might of overheated or something, I reboot it, it goes through a repair sequence, says to restart, I restart and it’s all ‘lights on but nobodies home’, with me being faced (on the multiple occasions I tried it) with either a black screen or the black and white HP opening screen. Now we’re lucky in that we live in a household full of computers, Mr. Lacer’s desktop, my old laptop which is now used by the kids (or by Mr. Lacer when the kids have kicked him off his desktop) plus a very old desktop of mine that is now used as a server. So luckily a lot of my stuff was on the server, however you remember how much writing I’ve done this week? About 4 – 5,000 words, I hadn’t backed it up, the file on the server was just over a week old, oops. Also I hadn’t backed up my outlook and details of Girl Lacer’s hectic social life weren’t anywhere else (and she’s got a party to go to today). So by Saturday night my computer genius husband (who is also a wood working genius as he was building cupboard shelves yesterday to) was getting his little set of mini screwdrivers out on it. Now Mr. Lacer is the equivalent of me when someone gets ill, if there’s a computer problem, my background is in biology, so like anyone who knows too much I can get a bit “ooh it might be this, it might be that” and he’s the same with computers “ooh it might be the BIOS (?!?) or it might be hardware or could be a virus, have you downloaded anything dodgy?”, whereas I’m a lot more relaxed, I know it’s under warranty, someone will fix it, it’ll just take a while and could potentially wipe all my data (although it was a bit gutting about those last 4 – 5000 words, I did after all know what happened now (whereas I’d hit a block prior to the last week’s work), so I knew I could rewrite). Anyway, like I said, Mr. Lacer got his little mini-screwdrivers to the back of my laptop on Saturday evening and repositioned the memory because ‘sometimes that helps’, we rebooted and hark there was the windows logo. We didn’t know how long it’d last, so I quickly transferred the work in progress over to the server, was in the process of backing up my outlook and it crashed again, this time when rebooting it wasn’t even getting to the black and white HP screen. So Mr. Lacer took one of the two memory cards out, to see if there was something wrong with one of the memory cards and luckily the first card that was taken out turned out to be the dud one! So I now have a functioning laptop with less memory but hey at least it works and I haven’t lost any data.

So the moral of the story is of course to back up more regularly (my ‘excuse’ is normally I write right up to the last moment before dashing out the door to get Boy Lacer and I don’t have time to save to two places) and also to record Girl Lacer’s hectic social life on more than just one place (we do have a paper calendar but it’s a weekly one and it’s annoying having to constantly flick through the bulky thing).