BAGGED UP AND READY TO GO!
A finish! The mini-bag kit I savaged and repurposed to feature my own choice of stitching is now complete, and can be sent to the recipient.
To recap, in order to have better access for my hoop I unpicked the side seams of the evenweave decorative layer, and of the heavy cotton twill lining. The evenweave had no seam at the bottom. The twill lining was left with the bottom unseamed. Earlier in the process the bag could be splayed out flat, with only the bit of seaming at the top surviving – where the lining and evenweave were sewn together with the red handles. Here you see it draped out and in the hoop.
When I finished both sides, I sewed it back together by hand – my sewing room and machine being off limits due to the big basement rehab project. First I sewed the lining using back stitch. Then I attempted a fancy decorative openwork seam in black to reunite the two sides of the evenweave.
It didn’t work.
It looked rather Frankenstein-like. Of the stuff of nightmares. So I covered up the buttonhole stitch based seam with three rows of reverse chain, done with a whole 6-ply strand of my linen floss. The first row of reverse chain went down the openwork bit at the center of my former decorative seam, and the other two courses went left and right of that, hiding the bits that encroached into the body of the bag. Which is why there’s now a thick black stripe along both sides of the thing. Not an optimal solution but the best I could do right now.
And on to the next project.
This one I have to admit I am posting as a tease. I used time over the past pandemic year to design a free stitch-along. It’s a rather large and complex stitch-along, with a distinctly nerd-world/fandom theme. It will be released on The Enablers Facebook group, and also here on String, on a two-week delay, starting sometime in August. I will be creating a new page here on String to host it. Beta-test stitchers from that group have been working on their pieces to proof the design and confirm the directions, and their efforts have been much appreciated. The thing will NOT be a mystery stitch-along (folk should know what they’re in for before they commit), but it will be released one panel at a time, with periods between releases pegged to the complexity of the individual panels.
However, until now I haven’t started my own rendition. I won’t spoil the surprise, but as I warned – I will tease here.
Obviously not a historical redaction (for a change), and that’s going to be part of the fun.
PENDING
Some movement here at String Central, but not as much as I would have liked.
First, on the Great Basement Rehab, we are in hiatus. This being an old house, of course they found asbestos. Which we expected. Not friable, immediately dangerous asbestos, but materials that would be of hazard to the crew doing demolition. Most notably, in the adhesive that sticks down the floor tiles in the old sewing/craft room, and in some intact cladding around various pipes. Some of those pipes may be moved, and others will be less bulky to encapsulate if the cladding were absent. So it all goes. Unfortunately due to demand, the earliest the asbestos remediation team can deal with us will be the last week of May, so for the past week or so until then, nothing will be accomplished.
Except cleaning. The demo team was able to do quite a bit of wall removal down there. Some of the walls were old lath and plaster, which make a TON of dust. In spite of taping over the door to the basement with a plastic airlock, a ton got upstairs, all the way in fact to the second floor. It infiltrated through various holes in the floor around the pipe penetrations of the hot water radiator heating system, in between floorboard expansion voids, through the seams between mop boards (baseboards) and floors, and through the required vent to bring extra air to the kitchen (a code mandate for the gas stove/high capacity exhaust vent in the kitchen).
It took four moppings to remove that stuff from the bare wood and tile floors, and many vacuumings to see the original color of the rugs again. I’m still cleaning/washing every other surface and soft item – behind furniture, inside the kitchen drawers and cabinets, linens in the linen closet, behind books. Even the formerly clean socks in my sock drawer will benefit from a no-heat air tumble in the dryer. Right now I am concentrating on high traffic/high touch and food-prep areas. When construction resumes there will be more dust, so there is no point in going nuclear on what’s there now only to do it again in June/July.
To illustrate the dust that accumulated in just two hours, I moved this cork trivet from the place I had put it earlier that morning.
Yes, that’s a collection of little plastic bulls from Sangre de Toro Rioja wine bottles. An everyday plonk enjoyed here as a sentimental favorite, often enough over the years to have accumulated a herd.
On the stitching front, I’m well into the second side of the small tote bag project.
Here it is mounted on my sit-upon hoop. You can see that the bottom of the bag is just a fabric fold – no square box bottom. When I picked out the side seams of the evenweave there was no join at the bottom. However the lining will need a bottom seam. Prior to my surgery, the side seams of the lining only extended halfway down, and its bottom was unsewn – in a futile attempt to make stitching on the evenweave outside easier.
The design is yet another one from T2CM, but this one is original, loosely based on historical aesthetic, but with no point source or specific inspiration that’s been adapted. It’s a slightly eccentric framing interlace (the bits framing the tumbling lilies are just a bit taller than they are wide), I’ve worked it before, also with stairstep voiding, but done monochrome, with a different directional treatment, and without the concentric rings in the inner circles:
Note that last time I also used single ply for the fill and two plies for the interlace, but in the older bit the flowers were also done in one ply.
I’m about a third finished with this side. The rest is just “wash/rinse/repeat.” The next challenge on this piece will be the re-seaming. I will finish the lining on the sewing machine, but I intend on working some kind of decorative seam treatment on the evenweave outside layer. What it will be is as yet undecided.
String-Or-Nothing 