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.
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