Sunday's plethora of shoe bags

Today was one of those rare days when I had nothing specific to do (technically I suppose it could be argued that there was plenty of housework to do, but that can always wait until another day and doesn’t really count as something to do), nowhere specific to go, no-one in particular to see. While I enjoy doing, going and seeing, it’s sometimes nice to have a day entirely at leisure.

I did a 5km swim yesterday, followed by a late(ish) night at friends, so ideally my day of leisure would have started with a lie in. Alas, it was not to be: an annoying ticklish cough scuppered that. After drinking a lot of coffee (a Sunday habit that I’ve developed), and watching some dreadful TV, I extracted myself from the sofa and decamped to the dining room where the sewing machine had sat, untouched, for the previous week.

I decided to make some more shoe bags because:

1. I didn’t have much fabric apart from some old pillowcases and sheets

2. I didn’t want to do anything on any sort of scale that would require me to clear the table for the purposes of cutting out patterns

3. I have a lot of shoes lurking all over the place that I am sure Matt, my husband, would prefer were “filed” in a more orderly system

4. I wanted to practice my straight lines before trying anything fancy

I set to work. The sewing machine was loaded with cream thread so I chose a sort of Paisley patterned fabric with cream in it to start with.

The whirliness has the disadvantage that there’s no straight line to follow but the benefit that any wobbliness doesn’t really show. I was pleased with my efforts. They sewed up really fast (I even managed find time to do some laundry) and generally quite neatly.

Bag count: 3

I had enough Paisley fabric to do another one but 3 was enough. So I joined it up with the left over pink pillowcase (from last weekend) and made 2 half-and-half bags.

Bag count: 5

Then it was onto a turquoise pillowcase that was just calling out to be turned into shoe bags. If I was doing things properly I would have changed to some appropriately coloured thread. However, I was after quick results and changing sewing machine thread is not the way to achieve this. So I carried on with the cream thread and made two more bags. The cream thread doesn’t really show.

Bag count: 7

I was particularly pleased to be able to use my turquoise cord. Into one of these bags went my new black sling backs that I had bought yesterday. I was very pleased with these because they only have a little heel (I generally feel tall enough already) and they have open toes (so I can take advantage of nail varnish).

Time for lunch. Matt’s mum, Barbara, had invited us round and we had a lovely curry followed by some of yesterday’s courgette cake. After feeding Matt and Barbara went off to tour the cats’ and dogs’ home (I hope that I’ve got the apostrophes right there). Not being such an animal fan I opted out of this and went instead to the home furnishing store, located conveniently close to Barbara’s. Here I procured a box of pins (I had until this point been working with only 5, although most of the time I just hadn’t bothered with these even) some buttons (they looked nice), a plastic box with dividers in (this was substantially cheaper than the fancy sewing boxes and probably a lot more useful) and a remnant of shiny brown/gold/purple shiny fabric (a lot nice than my description makes it sound).

After filling my new plastic box I set to work with my new material. The pins were essential because the shiny fabric was more slippery than the old cotton pillowcases that I had been working with. Since I had gone to the effort of actually buying fabric it seemed only right to use vaguely matching thread. It could only be vaguely matching because I don’t have a vast array of colours. I chose a sort of magenta which I thought would not look too bad. Cue major delay in sewing progress. Not only did I have to thread the machine I had to load up a bobbin (the words in sewing are funny when you think about it: pinking shears, haberdashery etc). I couldn’t make the automatic bobbin loading function work: the sewing machine is so old that the usual solution for fixing machines of turning them off and turning them back on again was futile (I used the word futile there but what I really was trying to think of was whatever the opposite of obsolete is). So I ended up winding it manually.

Back to the sewing and pretty soon I had some shiny shoe storers.

Bag count: 9

I was in the swing of things now but had run out of suitable material. Fortunately a quick trip to the airing cupboard (although I think technically it isn’t because it doesn’t have a boiler in it) resolved that as I was able to dig out another old pillowcase that doesn’t match any of our other linen (at least I don’t think it does).

Bag count: 11

So that’s over 50% of my shoes bagged up now. And all of today’s achieved without a single emergency phone call to my mum. Looking at it all now my sewing isn’t the neatest, but it’s adequate (these are after all just shoe bags, not robes for royalty). I definitely feel like I had a productive day of leisure.

Saturday's shoe bag

Part 1

Wow, sunshine today. Proper sunshine. Or as Matt, my husband, said when I drew back the curtains this morning: we’re on an alien planet where the sky is blue rather than white.

Clearly the best thing to do on a sunny day is to go shopping. Today we needed specialist shopping: tyres + shoes. So Matt dropped me off for the shoe part the above equation while he headed off to the tyre centre.

It was not any ordinary shoes that I was after. No. I wanted dancing shoes. I have 2 pairs in black. One pair is rather the worse for wear - from a combination of Matt standing on my feet and me standing on my own feet (mostly the latter). The other pair are highly blister inducing (although they do have the benefit of sparkles).

We went out quite early. Well, early for a weekend anyway. Unfortunately the dance shoe shop didn’t open until 12noon. This scuppered the plan of Matt picking me up following the successful completion of both shopping tasks. But I wasn’t too disappointed: I was on the Barbican and the sun was out.

So I wandered around a bit, browsed one of the city’s best charity shops (narrowly resisting purchasing a bureau and several cake stands), bought 30 rather classy Christmas cards (all different designs which was immensely pleasing to me) and then met up with Matt for a bit more of a wander and then some tea and scones. By which time the shoe shop was open.

I have no pleasant memories of early shoe buying and things have not got much better as I have got older. The major advantage of today’s sortie was that I was buying dancing shoes so:
1. Colourful and / or sparkly was absolutely in order (I don’t think I ever had pretty shoes as a child)
2. Size 7 would be an option as well as my usual size 8 because my toes would come out of the end.

The shop was AMAZING. It’s like playing that game consequences (on the topic of games, I beat Matt at both a left- handed and right-handed thumb war this morning) with shoes: choose your style + choose your material (or materials) + choose your heel.  Unfortunately this made to order footwear take 3-6 weeks to come in and I want my shoes in 2 weeks’ time. Fortunately there were 5 possible pairs in stock. 80% of these fitted. 75% of these weren’t black. I chose some multi-coloured shiny ones with a medium heel. It’s the kind of fabric that changes colour depending on what angle you look at it from and I chose them for a combination of comfort and glitz. My only complaint would be that they didn’t come with a bag, but that would soon be dealt with.

My elation with my new shoes was tempered only slightly by the fact that during the time it took me to get them someone failed in their efforts to parallel park and scraped my car. I think it’s only cosmetic damage and it didn’t ruin my good mood.

Part 2

Due to our outing being longer than anticipated I had lost some of the time that I had planned to deal with the garden so upon our return I skipped lunch (I had had a scone and jam) and threw myself into it with gusto.

The first task was to clear the debris from my previous pruning. With a lot of brute force I got a large quantity of tree into some garden waste sacks. As the council seem to have omitted to reinstate green waste collection this year this would necessitate a trip to the dump later.

Then to assemble the mini-greenhouse. This was considerable simpler than the cold-frame assembly that I had done a month or so ago. The only challenge today was being in competition with Matt for space as he was putting the washing on the line. (Look at us with our gender role reversals.) Nonetheless mini-greenhouse erection and positioning was achieved and I was quick to populate it with my various young plants.

I had planned to plant out some courgette plants today, they are not thriving in the intermediate pots I put them in after they germinated. But Matt suggested to me that I could have a bit of a sort out of the front garden. I think he wanted me out of the way while he mounted the hose but this would also give me the opportunity to fill up the garden waste bag to make my trip to the dump worthwhile. So I dead headed the daffodils (I think I probably should have done this a while ago) and then set to work on the weeds. Apart from the dandelions I’m not really sure if they were weeds but I hadn’t planted them and didn’t like them (the second of these being my mum’s definition of a weed).

Weed free

The nice lady who lives up the road walked past with her dog and confirmed that mostly what I was pulling up was indeed weedage, told me that the little blue flowers are forget-me-nots and suggested that I might have pulled up a foxglove. Clearly my medicinal knowledge of the foxglove (it’s where cardiac glycosides such as digoxin come from) is greater than my botanical knowledge of it. But I suppose you’d worry if it was the other way around.

My bags for dumping were now complete but before I could make that journey I would need to tidy my car up a bit. This comprised putting all the stuff from my boot into my passenger footwell and putting all the stuff on the back seats into relevant carrier bags: woolly clothes, rubbish, maps etc.

My trip to the dump was the usual joy I find it to be: as an unaccompanied woman the men in fluorescent jackets helped me with everything. As a bonus today I managed to acquire some perfectly serviceable plant pots that someone else was about to condemn to landfill (or whatever happens to it these days).

Part 3

Matt was heading out for a boys night by the time I got back (couldn’t resist a very minor detour to a combined DIY + garden + craft + home etc. shop). There were many things that I planned to get done in my evening.

1. Eat something nutritious (lunch eventually consisted only of a glass of squash and a packet of my 2^nd favourite cheese flavoured snacks)

2. Do some laundry

3. Make a shoe bag

4. Make a cake

5. Pack for holiday

6. Catch up on some random programmes I’ve recorded from the TV

7. Knit another swan for my 12 days of Christmas knitting. And maybe a turtle dove too.

8. Clean the inside of the lounge windows

Of the above I achieved number 1 entirely with a beetroot, smoked mackerel and rocket salad. Failed entirely on numbers 2, 4, 7 and 8. I managed to put 4 books, a magazine and some pens into a rucksack as a start to number 5. I did about 20 minutes of number 6 (a very interesting programme about tea). And I did make a shoe bag.

I’ve had my mum’s old sewing machine since we moved in here over 2 years ago and it’s only been used once – by her to make curtains. During that time I have been collecting fabric; my intentions towards the sewing machine have always been honourable. Spurred on by my bagless shoes I thought it was high time I put the machine and the fabric to use.

It was not looking good when I couldn’t even manage to get the case off of the machine. Fortunately mum was at home and a quick phone call to her sorted that out; it would be the first of many this evening. It took me about an hour and 3 phone calls to thread the machine. The instruction book (complete with 1970s style pictures) was not bad but I was far from confident. There is a particularly entertainingly named part of the sewing machine called the feed dog.

I decided to make my shoe bag out of one of my granny’s old pillowcases. I’m sure she wouldn’t mind. This had the bonus of having quite a few seams already. I would have to sew just one side and deal with the opening of the bag. Perhaps I should have followed a pattern but I was eager to get on with the sewing. I had a few problems with the machine not going properly but managed a temporary fix with a mini screwdriver. I was using a different colour thread to the pillowcase, mainly because I didn’t have any bright pink thread. This had the benefit that I was clearly able to see the thread. It had the drawback that I was clearly able to see my wonky sewing. I realised after I’d done one seam that the professional thing to do would have been to pin the fabric prior to sewing. But I am a novice.

I turned over the top to make a “channel” for the string bit to go. This ended up being very untidy but I had completed my evening’s sewing machining without breaking a needle (my mum seemed convinced that I would do this) or sewing my finger (the prospect of this has terrified me since someone did it at school, but the phone was reassuringly close by should I need to call for emergency assistance).

I think that it is conventional to put cord through shoe bags but I had none. I would have been quite possible to wait and buy some appropriate cord but I was keen to finish my project today. So I was thinking about using wool. Fortunately my box of wool is stored next to my box of random stuff. Some sort of intuition led me to the random box first and I extracted a suitable length of black ribbon.

I found it quite easy to thread the ribbon into the bag but was then left with the problem that I would also quite easily lose the ends. So I sewed up the exit holes a bit more. Which fixed that problem but I was left with an unsightly melee of threads. I had found some buttons earlier whilst getting the thread out of my sewing box (an empty Christmas chocolate tub) and positioned this to cover the worst of the mess.

For a first attempt I am rather pleased with the finished article. I can see why, when you’re at school, they make you plan things very extensively but it was kind of satisfying just sewing and seeing what happened. I’ve got loads of ideas for more shoe bags. But maybe tomorrow I ought to get on with the more urgent tasks of laundry and packing. And that might give my mum a bit of peace and quiet too.