Taming the beast

It's been an odd half term holiday, hobby-wise, for me. I've either had energy and inclination to paint, or time to paint - never both at the same moment! Aaagh! However, as well as the two separate games I played with my sons, I did complete two little geek craft projects which has given me a certain amount of satisfaction. This post will be about the dice bag I made, next time will be the oft-rehashed wet palette.

Planning dice for BOYL (samples on their way to me - hurrah!) got me thinking more generally about dice, as one does. Then, while doing a bit of tidying in the loft, I refound the cast-off sewing machine my mother-in-law gave us yonks ago. Now, this has caused my wife some guilt as she says she'll never use it but it gave me an idea - dice bag! After all, how hard could it be? I mean, I've never sewn a stitch in my entire life and the reason M-i-L got rid of it was that this was an "awkward little machine", in her words - and she made my wife's wedding dress!

Behold my foe:

I should point out that it was unthreaded when I got it out of its nook in the attic. This meant I had to read the instructions (!!!) to find out how to set up a bobbin and install that under the foot plate, thread and tension the main spool and get the foot-operated thingy connected (check out my mastery of the technical lingo!).

Next, I needed fabric. Yup, had some red stuff from when I was going to get someone to pad a bit of armour for me back in my re-enactment days (goodness knows how long it has been in the back of my wardrobe), and an old shirt that was on its way to the rag bin.

Then, a pattern and some instructions. If you plan to do this, I strongly recommend the excellent geek-sewing site run by a lovely-sounding Canadian lass who goes by the name Tally online. Might even be her real name; you never can tell with these colonials... Anyway, she puts up instructions each week for things to make and do with a geek-craft theme. Her dice bag instructions are here.

One wise piece of advice was to practise, especially the buttonhole bit, on a scrap of fabric. This I duly did. Pretty smooth, eh?

Can you see my first buttonhole? It's the gaping tear... It only took me fifteen minutes to pick all the shredded bits out of the inside of the machine. Suitably encouraged at my evident natural and precocious sewing talent, I got stuck straight into doing it properly. I measured and cut and pinned and buttonholed and stitched and unpicked and turned inside out and stitched and stitched again. What felt like only a short while later (but am reliably informed by Mrs Rab that it was quite long enough for her to have to occupy a bored child I thought I was entertaining with my endeavours. Oops, minus brownie points...), I had this:

Scale shot. Sensible browsing going on. "Yes dear, I'm just doing some lesson planning!"

What's in the bag?

Dice, of course, you muppet! The clue's in the name...

So, a machine defeated, and a project completed. A fully lined dice-bag with drawstring made from scrap fabric. Proud doesn't come close!

Now, what craft project are you going to undertake? Dare you take up the challenge?

Oh, and thank you for reading - this has been my two hundredth post!
Rab