Back to school

My christmas school vacation is coming to an end this week because my Japanese evening class is re-starting.  We went to dinner at a Japanese restaurant recently with some of the other students and some Japanese study tutors, and I was able to use a few words of Japanese plus understand a bit of what the Japanese people were saying.  But basically I'm still pretty terrible.  We both had a bento box main meal - for some reason everything tastes so much better when you eat it out of little compartments!  :)  When I got home, I ordered a couple of bento compartmentalised boxes for us to use at lunchtime.  Perhaps it's because I wasn't allowed TV dinners when I was a kid? (when TV dinners used to come in little compartment trays like airplane food, before 'ready meals' were a thing - showing my age here.)

I've been making a push this week on cutting up fabric scraps and the end is in sight, what a huge labour it has been.  But it is sort of satisfying to have transformed a crate of crumpled scraps into neat piles of strips and squares. I just hope I use them one day.  On my day off though, I took some time out for a bit of fun and made this cute little teacup pouch from this Youtube video.  It has a zip closure and a pocket on the back

So cute!  I used a teacup fabric for the lining as well.  It was a lot of fun to make apart from I had major problems with my zip.  I had a white nylon zip of the correct length, but as I now know it is important that the zip tape be soft so you can fold the ends of the tape under out of the way.  My zip tape was the cheap modern kind that had been melted with plastic for about 3/8th of an inch at either end making the melted bit quite rigid.  It did NOT want to fold out of the way no matter what I tried, and I ended up having to take the pouch apart, cut off the rigid part of the tape, and re-sew the pouch a bit smaller.  I've now ordered some more zips that have a normal metal stop and I might make the pouch again once those arrive.  Oh, and I didn't stuff my handle with tweezers like the video did, life is too short.  I just ran several lengths of soft chunky yarn through the fabric tube which worked fine.

The quilting frame is back up in the living room and I'm trying to do some regular stints on the handquilting.

And I went back to Wilko and bought another of the cheap storage boxes. This one I popped the lid off and labelled all the compartments, and put the tray into the drawer of my sewing table to hold all my sewing machine feet.  I feel so organised!  Much easier to find the foot I want now, and also to remember what all the feet are for.

I've started a new hat using the pack of five icecream colour mini skeins I got at Fibre East.  It's a free pattern with rows of little hearts.  I suspect I might have a lot of yarn left over, perhaps I can make matching wristers.

I finished machine knitting the Sublime Eden vest/waistcoat and I'm blocking the back first.  It seems my tension gauge was not exact (deja vu) so the back has come out a bit larger than it needs to be.  The yarn is a wool/cotton blend so I suppose there's a chance it might shrink up a bit as it dries. The pleats at the bottom are particularly noticeable which is because my machine cast on edge is flaring (I used a crochet cast on).  I may need to undo the cast on onto knitting needles and re-cast off, we'll see. It's unclear from the picture whether the hem is supposed to roll, or whether the yarn is so obedient that the stocking stitch will just lie flat with no hem treatment.  The yarn comes as a five colour cake. I wound off each colour as a separate skein which is why my stripes don't look exactly like the picture.  I also swapped in a darker colour for the right front, I'm wide enough without drawing attention to my hips with a band of white.

At work we have been challenged to do something 'fun' tomorrow because it is Blue Monday, supposedly the most depressing day of the year.  I think when we are crafters, we're less likely to be depressed because we are busy creating. Also, what would be most fun for me would be not to go to work at all, but I don't think that's what they have in mind.