I Made A Thing!

 I haven't done a whole lot of sewing lately.   With being locked down for months at a time, then distancing and it taking 2 years for things to open back up, I had no real need to sew.   No historical clothing needed.   No real life clothing needed.  No crafty things to make other than some masks and things like that.   

Finally I bit the bullet and ordered some patterns.   The indy patterns I purchased come as PDFs, which means no shipping charges or waiting for them to arrive.  The downside is that you have to print them out.  I'm sure there is a printer that does the large architectural copies, but I've only really found easy access and superb service from a smaller print shop, that doesn't have those capabilities.  As well, a couple of the patterns seem to only have the print at home option.  Since the print shop does an amazing job on those, always spot on for sizing, quick and at an acceptable price, I cut and paste or tape each little bit of the pattern to make complete pieces.  Not my favourite job, but better than waiting for items to ship and hope they get here in good shape, or arrive at all.

So far I've most of a new skirt made and an apron which just needs a few inches of hand stitching to finish it. There are a couple of t-shirts, a new historical dress, 2 new skirts, and some dress/tunics on the list, with fabric ready and everything.  

 However I needed a small purse for an outing, so I also made this.  I'm ticked off at myself, for not adding pockets in the lining.   I always do that for all the bags that I make, so I have a place to store my keys, and change for easy access.   I'm pretty happy with the overall results though.   However I'm not sure I like using it.  When I add my phone to it, it's heavy.  Yes, the phone is a big, old clunker, but it still works so I'm not feeling the urge to upgrade.  But I don't feel the weight in a cross body bag.  No time to make a new one though, since I need it today.  I guess that is the ultimate test though, if it does what I need it to do, when I need it.

New socks on the needles, even though I didn't plan on knitting any more.    I needed something to do

while I was watching the telly, so grabbed some sock yarn and started knitting.    The yarn is amazing!    It's soft, superwash, has an amazing colour and knits up beautifully.  It's quite fine and has a nice twist, so would have show a fancy pattern nicely.   However, I ended up just knitting a plain vanilla sock, which I almost never do, because I didn't have time to find and print out a pattern.   I had to restart the sock twice.  The first time because the yarn is so fine that I needed to add a few stitches to the cast on.  The second time because a needle slipped out when I was taking it to use as some busy work when volunteering and I couldn't pick up the stitches as they were too small.  However the third try is a charm.  I did an eye of partridge heel which is pretty.   I had to add an extra 6 rows to the heel flap to get it close to square.  It's still not, but it does fit when I put it on, so all is good. It's Host Garn Highland yarn.   So soft!  So pretty! These are definitely not chunky boot socks!