When good sewing turns bad...

You know when you see something and you think, "Hey, that looks great!" And then comes the famous line, "I COULD MAKE ONE OF THOSE MYSELF".

And that is what I thought when I had seen a few different pencil rolls posted in peoples blogs. Especially the one that Pink Chalk Studio made. I fell in love. All those colours. If I was a little person, I would love to be taking out and putting back my pencils into something so organized, yet so pretty. Or if I was a boy, so cool.

So it was decided. Beth loves to draw. Always has and I hope, always will. What a perfect birthday gift for her. But I will make my pencil roll very functional. It will have an oilcloth outer, so as it is easy to keep clean and durable. And that, dear friends, was my first fatal mistake.

I am a compulsive iron-as-you-sew person. Each time I do a seam, an important one, I have to iron it. And why tack or use pins to hold things in place when you can just iron them? Ironing has magical holding properties. So, when I was putting together the front panel to the back oilcloth panel, I thought it couldn't hurt just to press this in place so the edges sit flat? The iron was on low, there was no where the iron could directly touch the oilcloth. Wrong. Those little pieces around the edges, just overlapping a little. One touch of the iron and hey presto! You have holes in your pencil roll. When I did this, the really sad thing was that I thought to myself, "no, this is OK, I can fix this". But then reality set in and I knew that holes in oilcloth are really not fixable. End of pencil roll number one.

The pencil roll is quilted. Here is a question for anyone who has ever machine quilted a quilt. Could you imagine trying to sew a quilt with a plastic back? No, I didn't think so. SO WHAT ON EARTH WAS I THINKING? Pencil roll number two was then thrown with a good deal of force into the rubbish bin. I should have kept it to show you, because it is really amazing how un-square you can get a piece of fabric quilted to a piece of plastic. Oilcloth doesn't have much give when it comes to being manipulated around a machine.

So, onwards and upwards to pencil roll number three. No more oilcloth. Just all cotton with cotton quilt batting used inside. So that means that when the bottom pocket is folded up, I was sewing through 4 pieces of cotton and 2 pieces of quilt batting. Can you see where this is headed? The walking foot and the size 16 needle did a valiant job, and pencil roll number three was actually completed. But with a lovely wave in the middle. Not sure how this happened. I guess a combination of extra bulk and very tight tensioning. But I finished it. Because it was taunting me. "Come on! I dare you to stick with this. You think you can sew this easy-peasy pencil roll, but really, you can't". I could hear it saying to me. Or was that just me being delirious because now it was really, really late at night.

So pencil roll number three is finished when it started. Can I really give this to somebody? Even though it is only my own daughter? I don't mean "only" my own daughter, but what I mean is that can I give it even though it may never leave the house? I wasn't one bit happy with it. I kept unrolling it and looking. Did I have any pride at all? So, I did what you do when you reach rock bottom. You ask your husband. "Hamish, do you think this looks OK?" Quick glance from Hamish. "Um, yeah, is it supposed to have that wave thing in the middle?".

So pencil roll number four was born.

This time I went back and I did something I don't normally do. I read the instructions. Oh, you use flannel as the inner. Not quilt batting. Oh.

And something else I did that I have never done before. I pinned it before I sewed all those little pencil pockets. And do you know what? It held like a charm. Much better than the magical iron.

And since successful version number 4, I have also made successful versions number 5 and 6. Both for boys. As thank you's for the Mum's of the boys who let me go through their fabric scraps and steal some to make the backing strips for the pencils. I didn't get a chance to take a photo of number 5, but here is number 6. Quite GI Joe and man-ly I thought.

So now my grand thoughts (or should that be grandiose dreams?) turn back to my pie in the sky shop, where I am going to make these rolls for packs of 10-12 pencils, not 24. More economical. And 10-12 is a good size for littlies who are just starting to draw. Alice was loving colouring with Beth's pencil's on the weekend and was surprisingly good at putting the pencils back where they came from.

Moral of the story:

"If at first you don't succeed, try, try, swear, stay up really, really late, cry and then try again."

I enjoyed reading Alison's post today about unsuccessful sewing and I hope that this contributes to that general discussion. Perhaps for some people looking from the outside in, when all you see are pretty pictures about something that someone has just whipped up, it can appear to be fairly unreal. Please rest assured, there are no such fantasies being lived out at Mummy Jo's.

And how could I end today's post without showing you a shot of the glorious late Winter sunshine we are having here in Melbourne today. It will be freezing cold and raining again soon, but here, breathe it in and enjoy.