I'm weak

 Not a lot of crafting this week as a massive new time suck has entered my life:  Elden Ring.  This is a 'souls-like' video game that released recently, and DS and I went halves on buying it.  Since we are sharing it on his Steam account, I can only play it when he isn't playing it, but even that has eaten up 14 hours of my life this week.  I have no willpower once I turn it on: I start out thinking 'I'll just play for an hour then go and do something worthwhile' and after that it's an endless string of 'what's over there?' 'I need one more X and I can level up', 'aaargh stupid monster that leapt out of nowhere and one-shot me' etc.  However my proven  ineptitude at combat is continuing, DS has reached level 90 while I am lingering around level 20 and averaging one death (mine) every five minutes or so.  The game is still  addictive and I have a problem  :)

The webbing I ordered two weeks ago has still not arrived although the supplier eventually responded to say it will get despatched eventually as they are snowed under with volume of orders. So I haven't been able to progress the ripstop nylon backpack.  I did cut out most of the copious number of pieces for the Kavi Mini Backpack, a design from the Bag of the Month club that I am still subscribing to.  I haven't made the patterns up for a few months as they didn't appeal to me, but this pack looks like it will be useful for popping into town with. I have some cork for the contrast material, which will be the first time I have tried to sew with that.

Another project with a copious number of pieces is this spinning tool caddy I've been cutting out with my Brother Scan N Cut.  It's from a cutting file by Cutting Craftorium, and on the face of it, it seems like an easy project. You take 1mm greyboard, cut out the pieces, and glue them up in layers of three to create 3mm boards that you then decorate with scrapbook paper. Being terrible at arithmetic, I hadn't really worked through the requirements of cutting three layers of over 30 pieces which the rest of you bright people will realise is around 90 pieces of cardboard plus cutting over 50 pieces of cardstock.  This took a very. long. time....  around 5 hours or more.  It blunted my blade as well, so this is turning into an expensive and time consuming project.  Since taking this picture, I have glued up all the various sandwiches of card and paper, weighing it all down with books on my cutting table over a few days while it dries, and have sanded the edges.  I still need to paint the edges and then do the final assembly.  I am skeptical that the end result is going to be worth all this time and money but I've started so I will continue. On the plus side, the machine behaved really well for the most part.  The mat that I made sticky again with the Pinflair Temporary Stencil Glue is working great, better than the original state it came in.

I finished the pieces for the red garter stitch baby jacket and have wet blocked and pressed them ready for assembly and adding the collar.

I finished the vanilla socks I started in the caravan in the late summer.  They aren't blocked in this picture so the ankle pattern isn't stretched out properly yet, they will look better once blocked.  I just noodled various stitch patterns as my fancy struck me for the ankle, but then had to recreate it for the second sock.  Knitting nerds please note I achieved a similar looking pair with this self-striping yarn.

I fancy knitting a summer t-shirt with some soft mint cotton boucle yarn I bought at Aldi so I knit a tension swatch.  I found a really nice plain t-shirt pattern on Ravelry but unfortunately it requires DK yarn and the Aldi yarn is knitting up at 19.25 stitches to 10cm which is more of an Aran weight. So I'll have to go back to Ravelry and look for a different pattern since I don't feel up to converting the first pattern's raglan decreases to match my gauge.

I bought some embroidered double gauze from Fabric Godmother on spec, it has turned out well as the fabric arrived this week and is so soft and the embroidery is subtle and not scratchy at all.  This is for a summer blouse pattern I bought from Sew Liberated at the same time that I bought the dress I made up a few weeks ago.

We took DS to Milton Keynes yesterday to meet the letting agent and collect the keys to his new flat. I say flat, but it is more like a maisonette over two floors.  Apart from a somewhat manky kitchen, it is all in really good condition in a recent new-build, streaks above anything we could have afforded at his age.  It's like he's jumped the first three or four rungs of the housing ladder that we climbed, but good for him. Over the next few weeks we will help him get packed up and move the first tranche of possessions over.  His girlfriend is supplying most of the furnishings so we are mainly dealing with clothing, PC equipment, his computer chair etc.  It's a big step for us all.

And finally, we had some visitors in the garden this week: a flock of six goldfinches! We don't often get them in our garden, but they seemed to quite like the dead seedheads on the Verbena Bonariensis and were perched all over that, having a good nibble.