Wednesday, April 16, 2008

Up From Here!

So I am working on a new design that will be handy when I am doing bag parties: it's a journal / receipt book holder, and this way I will be able to keep notes on orders and all the receipts together.  There's a pen holder, too.  The designing process can only improve from where it is now.

Taking measurements for this thing was an approximation, as I was not sure how big it would actually need to be.  Yesterday I cut the last bits of an Amy Butler remnant (the gold morning glory one--my fave at the moment, I think, aside from the pink morning glory!) I had--cut them into the complete wrong sizes.  Sigh.

This evening, I tweaked the measurements a bit and tried again.  Everything was going swimmingly until I was 2 steps away from being done and noticed that the pocket I'd left for the back cover of a notebook was about 1/8 to 1/4 of an inch too small.  A pain, but fixable: I flipped it inside out again and stitched up a new seam.  

Then I burned myself on the iron, ironed the opening and stitched it up too--twice, actually, before I got it so the dang thing would actually cover the whole notebook inside--yes, before I attached the part of the snap that should be attached before the sewing of that seam.  

And THEN I noticed that in the fixing of the 1/8 to 1/4 problem, THAT seam had come undone.  This is a prototype, I thought, This does not have to be perfect.  This is a first try.  So I gave a "decorative stitch" to (somewhat) repair that little error.  (Not very decorative.  Not very repaired.)

And at last, I went to affix the snap that I was supposed to affix before the stitching of the top seam.  I would pay somebody to invent a snap affixing pliers that left more room between the thing that holds the snap and the hinge in the pliers.  Because then I would not have to try and bunch up half a planner in that tiny little spot only to--after I'd affixed the snap of course--realize that such bunching would misalign the outer and inner fabrics permanently.  

Thus ends the first round of my attempt at making a planner cover.

By some grace of God, I have not broken anything in my workshop this evening, and I also have enough of the same fabric to try again.  

I am, however, out of snaps.

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