Forty Six

Wherethejourneytakesme - I'm sure that your granddaughter loved the top hat. They are completely awesome and I'm wondering if I could ever have an excuse to wear one. Bear's top hat is a proper stovepipe as well - the crown is eight inches tall! 

I'm planning on making a bag for the hat, to keep the dust off (if he ever takes it off). I've got some fabric stashed. I'm just thinking about the sort of bag I want to make, with a flap over the top. I can perhaps attach stick on velcro dots or something as a closure. I'll share if I make it. Until then, I'll stick it in a pillowcase. 

I can see me getting carried away with the bag. You can make a perfectly serviceable shoe bag type thing with just a draw string. That's two rectangles of fabric, a short length of cord and some straight stitching. I just need to make it big enough for the hat and then have the opening tuck under the hat as it's stored. I could even just keep on with the pillowcase. Unfortunately I have been watching too many craft videos and I'm seeing myself messing around with linings and complicated shapes. It never helps. 

I may have a go anyway as I need practice in measuring and cutting. I feel about five when I say that, but it's true. Do you remember the muslin that I got for curtains for the porch? The ones that were giving me eye strain? I thought I would crack on with them and I finished the top. Then I wanted to insert the hessian ricrac type stuff (which is fraying, I may try fabric glue to keep it together). 

I thought that the easiest way to get a straight line across would be to tear it. Muslin tears easily enough, and surely it would tear in a straight line. It didn't. I think that the original piece wasn't cut true - and I can't blame them. If you are cutting vast swathes of fabric daily, you just cut the best line and assume that the customer has enough sense to check. I don't have that sense. I know that I should have done it. I can't believe that I didn't check. But here we are. I snipped the selvedge three inches below the top casing for the cord and tore. It went in a diagonal, getting higher and higher until it ran into my stitching. I don't know whether you can tell on the pic. If you start at the top right, you can see the depth of fabric underneath the heading and as you go down it gets narrower and narrower until it hits the seam.

I may have said some rude words.

Fortunately I hadn't dealt with the hem, and I had loads of fabric spare, so I tore across both curtain pieces, made sure they were the same size and started again with the heading. My eyes hurt. And the hessian stuff will be applied, not inserted. I'm not tempting fate.

I went through the herbs and spices today. I felt over run with small spice bottles. There have been so many times when I've tried to remember whether I had something while shopping and grabbed a spice just in case, or bear has asked for something, or I've made something out of the ordinary and forgotten about the spice afterwards. One of the biggest casualties is oregano. I think I got a good deal on it a while ago and had a couple of the small jars, but now I almost always use the Italian herb blend, bought in bulk and kept in a very large plastic tub (and used at a rapid rate). Cooking has been fairly routine and I haven't been baking, and I've not used all the spices that I had in, so a lot of them have drifted out of date. 

Herbs and spices don't really go off if they are kept dry, but they lose their taste. Besides, the spices that I bought recently in the big packs, like cumin and tumeric, are far stronger and more vibrant. I got rid of all the ones out of date. That was forty six small glass jars.

And what is worse, they may be some more lurking in the back of cupboards. All sorts of stuff haas been shoved in all sorts of places. I have a bag full of forty six little jars ready to take to the bottle bank.

I'm so annoyed with myself. I can't believe how much waste there is. I could cry. I've started a book, where I keep a track of herbs and spices and their use by dates, so hopefully I won't fall into the trap of that so easily. I still feel incredibly low. 

All in all, today has been a day which has reminded me that I need to do better. 

Hugs and good health to all.