Today I went to Derrel's and bought the sewing machine I have been thinking about for several months. Mary was quite helpful and taught me a lot. She asked what projects I had in mind, and I told her that I wanted to line the bag my Italian swap partner made for me. I also came up with a project late last night. Since Big Rhino messed up and gave me a 5XL (I didn't know shirts came that big!) instead of the 3XL I had ordered, I was stuck with this shirt. I thought, why not make it into a throw pillow? So that was the project I worked on today.
I learned how to thread the machine, change needles (I need a ballpoint needle for sewing knit fabrics like a t-shirt), make a bobbin, hem, and sew. I also learned how to add stabilizer fabric. Amazingly enough, I made the pillow!
We started in on making the lining for the bag. It has a unique shape that is hard to reproduce, so we are going to put gathers in the fabric near the handle. My homework, if you will, is to finish the seams at the top. Then Mary will show me how to make the pleats and I'll hand sew it in to the bag.
I'm pretty excited at how it went today. I was really intimidated at first, but I got to feel a little more comfortable. I know I am going to have to practice a lot on keeping the hem in the right place as I go around curves. Even the hem guide didn't help. My curves were all over the place. I made some practice buttonholes and I learned how to adjust the tension to make the stitching look right. I think it would be worthwhile to practice anything I want to do on some scrap, just to make sure it is coming out right. For example, it took several different tries to get the decorative scallop stitch to come out the way it was supposed to.
I really got a lot out of my time there and I am looking forward to doing more. I mentioned to Cookie Amy and her mom that I had a stuffed dog growing up that I am sure one of the neighbors made for me. Cathy had a similar one. I wonder if Mom would remember who made them for us and I wonder if I could ever find the pattern. It would certainly be a challenge, but I usually seek them out. I remember telling my mother-in-law that I most certainly could make the Estonian Lace Baby Blanket as my first real knitting project. Turns out I couldn't, and I still have the start of it in a bin in the garage. I don't think I'd try to make the dog just yet, but it would be fun to make it for "Thurston Janeway" sometime before he/she goes to college.
Other than that, it wasn't too exciting a day. I did finally make myself sit down and figure out why the checkbook was out of whack. It hasn't added up since June or July, but I just figured I forgot an entry. I went back to May and rechecked all the statements against the ledger. Everything was in there, so I set out to check the math. There were two errors. One at the end of July and one at the end of August. The first one was the biggie. The second one was only 31 cents off. After I made those corrections, the ledger was back to the same three cent difference we have had for over a year. I am not too concerned with that discrepancy, and since that has been there for a while I knew that everything else was right. Since I was in a fixing mood, I went ahead and added three cents to the balance in the ledger. I also made a big mark indicating that if I every have to do this again, everything from the mark and before is correct. I hope that will save me some time. I don't want to have to do that all over again.
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