Nice! Got all the stuff that involves the oven finished before the house gets too hot to want to cook. There’s a pasta salad chilling in the fridge for after Man Cub’s soccer practice, and bread is baked. I got the dishes (with the exception of the loaf pans, which are still hot) done in the cool hours of the morning, and did yoga before it got warm enough for the cat hair in the carpet to stick to my skin. This afternoon, in anticipation of Thursday’s heat wave, we shall install the ac units, and set up Pretty Pretty Princess Land*. \o/

In other news, I made the fancy yoga mat bag for Zoe! Look! Look!

Zoe had been biking to yoga class with her mat stuffed into her backpack, and it wasn’t working out for her – it bonked her in the back of the head, it got in the way when she looked over her shoulder, and was generally a nuisance. She wanted a big wide comfy strap so she could wear it messenger bag style and have it sit tight and not wobble. Also, the bag needed to be wide enough to accommodate her ittty bitty laptop for visits to the library and sundry other writing expeditions, as well as having a non-rounded bottom so said lappy doesn’t bounce around in the bottom.

So we did it up – I set her up with a pretty lotus pattern on jade green, on strong cotton (still tough, but half as heavy as canvas), and figured out an envelope bottom that still looked neat after stitching. I made the strap sturdy, and about 4′ wide. Last night I sewed the strap to her measurements, and voilá!

Happy client is happy** =D

Stuff I learned on the project:***
– How to change the foot on the Elna†, and how to get it to make a buttonhole \o/
– The bottom of the bag, no matter how tempting to sew up fast, really needs to get closed up after the strap is put on. There’s really only so much room around the sewing machine foot.
– Fancy is not always better – sometimes it just shows off where your stitches have gone askew (lol whoops).
– Even something as simple as a bag is waaaay easier to piece together when one makes a pattern first. For reals: freehanding something like this means that the fabric gets smaller every time a change is made, and that the stitch ripper is my bestest friend.
– I make a super pretty bag!

So, yeh – I’m going to do more of these, I think, now that I have a solid concept of how to put them together. I may start making sure that I do a fabric hunk with each dye bath from here out, and start stocking the material to do these (the mat bag and the handbag).  Exciting!

***

*Pretty Pretty Princess Land is what I like to call our apartment when the air conditioning is on. Because I feel like a pretty pretty princess instead of a sweaty sweaty Cinderella who wishes that puking would actually do something for the heat-induced nausea. Throwing up does not, in fact, make it stop; it just restarts the cycle. Good dog, I freaking hate this season. Seriously, I am not built for this shit. I shall try to keep complaining to a minimum from here out.
**And adorable!
***I’m trying to make sure that stuff I learn has a place on the list of things that indicate success in my endeavors.
†My mom upgraded her machine, and was kind enough to gift me with this machine – I LOVE it.