The bag-sewing drama

New sleeping bag bag.

Following up on this post last weekend about sewing bags for camping. I finally finished this relatively simple job last night.

At least it should have been a relatively simple job. Just two draw-string bags.

But I encountered several problems.

After sewing one and a half seams of the purple sleeping-bag bag my sewing machine pedal stopped working! We completed the seam by manually manipulating the sewing machine, then gave that up as a bad idea. So I asked a friend if I could borrow hers.

She'd been given her machine by a friend who was leaving Japan (common story of acquisition amongst missionaries). But she'd not tried out the machine since she'd received it. I don't think it's been serviced in a while. It clunked! And, rather than working, it broke threads and a needle. I threaded and rethreaded. I even unscrewed some bits to see if there was anything out of place, but nothing seemed to work.

In the meantime I realised that the circle I'd cut out for the bottom was too big, so I had several goes at trimming it, pinning it, re-trimming, re-pinning, until I got it all right.

Then the second machine finally sewed one seam (the final seam of the purple bag).

I then changed projects and changed threads. The machine wouldn't sew anything else for me!

New tent bag

So I vented my frustration on Facebook. And another friend offered her machine, which I picked up by bike yesterday before lunch (she was surprised, but I never even considered taking my car one km down the road, obviously I'm becoming somewhat Japanese).

This machine was shiny, new and electronic, but I'd forgotten to ask for the manual. So I had to figure out a new machine, especially the thread tension. That took a while.

But then, it sewed! And I was powering through the tent bag yesterday.

Then I realised that we wanted to plunder the old bag for extra straps and an handle. So I had to unpick that from the old bag, then figure out how to sew it onto the new bag.

Finally I got that sorted and sewn on (although the thread tension was still weird, so it isn't pretty on the inside).

I quickly sewed the draw-string casing at the top and headed for the final task: sew the bottom onto the bag. This time I discovered that I'd given the wrong circumference to one of my mathematical sons to figure out the diameter of the circle. It was too small! Choice time: cut out another circle or taper the end of the bag to the right size. I chose the second (PS if I could go back, I'd choose the first). I tapered, then pinned, then re-tapered, then re-pinned and did that one last time when it finally fit. And the machine sewed!

Because I was nearly at the end of the project I skimped on how much thread I put on the bobbin and paid for that: having to rethread it several times throughout the project. But finally, at 10pm last night I finished. I insisted that we put the cord in and then the tent into the bag to prove that I had actually achieved my goal.

In conclusion:
I'm happy with how it looks and the fact that they work. But I wouldn't get an award for efficiency or neat sewing. It took way too long! But it's done and we have two new bags to go camping with next weekend!

I'm also happy that I have a community around me who I can ask for help. It's what friends and neighbours do, isn't it? Borrowing sewing machines! I love it that God's given us so many friends (even if their sewing machines don't always work).

Today's Creative Burst

We're getting ready for our annual end of November camping trip. Not much to do, except ponder which of our favourite camping recipes we want to eat (we have a collection now), and make some bags. Yes, all the camping over the summer has done-in a couple of our bags, namely one of sleeping bag bags, and the bag that the tent lives in. Important bags! 

It's been on my to do list since August, but, frankly, I haven't had time. I've been working hard on editing ever since we got back from our Hokkaido Camping Trip and then once school started we jumped into cross-country every Saturday. My creative free-time was tied up in making sure we had snacks for lunch-boxes and afternoon teas.

On Thursday I passed a significant point in editing for our Winter issue, so I decided to take some time to go shopping at my favourite craft shop for material on Friday afternoon. Unfortunately I came down with a nasty headache (that included chills and a bit of nausea). So instead, I lay on the bed from one o-clock till the boys came home.

Thankfully today my head was fine again and I squeezed in a visit to the shop. Found some suitable material quickly (thankfully colour and pattern doesn't really matter in this case, I'm dreadful at picking material to make clothes).

Nope, these aren't pencils. They are chopsticks. You
use the other end to eat with. We now have one blue
pair and one green pair.

I also enjoyed browsing quietly. It is a visually appealing shop, a combination of crafting materials and cute homeware products. I found a pair of charming chopsticks for our middle son. Now each boy has their own pair (again). They'd outgrown the cutesy chopsticks that Japan abounds in and new ones were desired.

Here are some other things I found . . . but didn't buy.

I can't figure out if these are to be worn
inside or outside of your trousers. Or perhaps
they are "room clothes" as Japanese
people tend to call them: clothes
that are suitable for "inside the house",
but not to be worn outside.

Um, yes. The "shorts" version of the above.
Confusingly titled "Over pants".

Almond Bars

I got home at two and have been baking ever since. I baked this new recipe and it's turned out fabulously! German Almond Bar. Very easy, tasty, and has the thumbs up from our most picky sweets-eater. Ticks all the boxes for me.

German Almond Bars
Knead together:
300g flour
150g chopped almonds
100g sugar
200g margarine
1 egg
vanilla
Roll out 0.5-1cm thick.
Cut into longish pieces.
Bake at 190⁰C until firm (recipe says 12-15 minutes, but I had it in there about twice that amount of time, admittedly in a slow oven).

At the request of the boys I also made some Chocolate Biscuits that require biscuit cutters. Mostly they specified that they wanted the Lego shaped biscuits (see here). I sighed, these take a long time to make, mostly because of the rolling out and cutting process. Cute, when you have little ones, but tiresome when you're making enough to feed hungry teen/pre-teen boys.

In the foreground is the "adult's" pizza.
It had homemade tomato sauce, with
chicken, capsicum, pineapple,
and mushrooms.
Delicious!

Then I moved straight on to making Pizza Dough. Commercial delivery pizzas are just too expensive here, so we never order them at home. Instead we make our own pizzas. We used to use our bread maker for the dough, but appetites have outstripped the bread makers' capacity and so I've been trying to make it myself. I'm still not totally happy with the result, so I'll keep trying. It's a team effort, saved for a Saturday night after a quiet day. I make the dough and David does the rest. Here's tonight's effort. It didn't rise enough, though. Either it needs to rest longer or it needs more yeast, or perhaps it needs both?

I wanted to get started on cutting out the material for the bags this afternoon, and maybe I would have if I'd been able to buy them yesterday. However I plainly ran out of time. Perhaps tonight, if David decides to continue working on his 3,000 word assignment for his Masters.

I'm feeling relaxed, but weary after this creative day. While I type this, my boys are wrestling in the next room, prior to going to bed. I think I'd better pull the plug on it before it gets out of control, and send them upstairs for devotion time.

I beat the stress with creativity

I recovered from my adventure last Thursday and Friday pretty well. As you may know, I'm not a great traveller. It wears me out, even when I'm travelling on my own and know where I'm going.

Anyway, probably the main reason I recovered well was that it backed onto a quiet weekend. And on Saturday I had a "creative" day. Look at all I did. It didn't wear me out at all, it energised me!

Sneaking a look at the chocolate chip cookies in the
cupboard. Got to look quickly, or they'll all be gone!

Love these! Snickerdoodles. The name gets an award to start with. But I'd forgotten about these particular type of biscuits until someone baked them for the Thrift Shop workers a couple of weeks ago and it took me right back to childhood. When I came home, I went searching in my recipes, and lo and behold, I have my mum's recipe. So I made these. They taste and smell wonderful! Thanks Mum.

Snickerdoodles—coated in cinnamon and sugar.

This was also a triumph for dinner. For the entire time we've lived in Japan we've made home-made pizzas using a yeast base mixed in our bread maker. Unfortunately our family is out-growing the breadmaker. Meaning, the amount of dough it can produce is only barely enough to feed us for one round of pizza. (Reason we make our own: bought pizzas are ridiculously expensive. The only other time we have pizza at home is generally Costco pizza.)

So, inspired by my friend Rhoda, I decided to try making a larger amount of pizza dough from scratch. It really isn't too hard and certainly the 10 minutes of hard kneading could be quite therapeutic.

My middle son helped with the toppings. He loved working
in the kitchen with me and I enjoyed his company. Bonus!

And my non-baking achievement: sleeping bag covers. Both these sleeping bags were bought second-hand at Thrift Shop a year or two ago. Neither had covers, only plastic bags that were rapidly dying. So, I bought some material and made covers. Simple!

Perhaps the covers cost me more than the bags, though!

The bonus was the cord on the blue bag. The cord was recycled from the plastic bag that had carried the sleeping bag before. I just love the colour contrast with the blue.

Confession: I didn't finish the second one till Sunday.

I love creating, especially very practical things that don't require a lot of fuss. The weekend was the perfect foil to the stress of the week preceding it.

A wet day in which I baked, sewed and answered the phone

Today was most suitable to a "home day". Cold and miserable outside, being inside was perfect. 

I started the day with a long list of things that needed to be done (by us both). Unfortunately last night I developed an achy knee. No idea why, but it was achy enough to make it difficult to go to sleep last night. And achy enough to make the vacuuming and cleaning part of my list fairly unattractive. (Mind you it doesn't take much of an excuse for me to forgo cleaning!) But it did make me a little regretful that when I'd had a healthy body last week I spent a lot of time sitting down (but I was working hard, I did a lot of editing and other computer work this week). Ironic that now I'd planned to do some cleaning, my knee was playing up.

After a late breakfast my husband set off for the hardware store for some much needed bits and pieces (including a gas canister for our up-coming camping trip) and I sat down to finish off one of the track pants (US=sweatpants, nothing at all to do with being required at school, by the way). All I had to do was hem the pants and tidy up the waist-hem. It took me a long time, however, because I kept getting phone calls. 

My eldest son had gone to a birthday party. Sounds easy, doesn't it? Particularly as he could get himself there independently on the train. But there there was a problem, in fact there turned out to be a few problems. They were to all meet at one station. But 45 minutes after the appointed time, one boy hadn't arrived. Obviously these boys aren't all that "connected" because though many of them had mobile phones (US=cell phone), no one seemed to have this boy's number! I didn't either, but I did have his mum's number, I guess that I why I got the call about their dilemma. 

Well then it got really complicated. Especially as our son often didn't answer his phone when we called him. Not sure why, maybe because the background noise covered up the phone sound? Maybe he was having such a good time with his friends that he didn't hear. Anyway, it turned out that the other boy had forgotten about the party (so glad that happens to other people). It took a while to hook the boys up, though! 

Then I got another phone call about an hour later. The boy they'd been waiting for had arrived at the station and there was no one there. He'd rung his mum (who was working at the church, they are missionaries) who'd run her other son at home who'd rung me, at least I think that is how it went! It turns out the guys had gone to the house of the birthday boy to play Twister and had been so embroiled in a 45 minute round of Twister that no one had answered their phones. Oh dear. 

Our son isn't home yet (4.33pm), and I haven't heard from him. I hope they all had a good time in the end (it was supposed to be an outdoor party at an amusement park, but given the weather they had to find other things to do).

I did eventually get the pants sewn. Here my youngest son modelling them. This is a flattering view. Less flattering is with the legs separated, but I won't show you that. He's happy with it, especially with the pockets!

From the left, clockwise. Melting Moments, Cherry Oat Slice and Jam Drops with Monster Eye Biscuits.

After lunch I took painkillers, and then baked. Our house was desperately in need of some morning and afternoon tea snacks. I love it when the cupboard is full like this:

But I guess now I should get back to my list of things to do. I have a choice of packing some things for our camping trip or doing some more sewing on the second pair of pants.

An outing to fix the sewing disaster

Today I tried to fix the sewing disaster by going to a different, bigger shop in a nearby city (eight minutes by train) to get the one remaining metre of black knit material that I needed to make the tracksuit pants (US=?sweat pants) for my eldest son. Of course they didn't have exactly the same material, in fact I was surprised at how little of this kind of material they actually had in any colour and how expensive it was. 

After I bought some material close to the material I already had, I wandered around the seven storey department store. I located the kids clothing and found I could have bought a very nice pair of tracksuit pants for each of my sons at half the price it's cost me to make the pants. So that's it. I'll finish these three pairs off and I'm not going to try it again. Much easier, less stressful, and to top it all off, much cheaper to buy them from the shop!

All three pants that I'll eventually get finished will likely end up as pyjamas anyway. Lacking a good pattern they've ended up too baggy in the crotch area, but they'll make comfy PJs . . . with fancy pockets, no less!

In order to feel as though I hadn't wasted a day on fixing this mistake, I included a couple other things while I was out traipsing around. I finally found some plastic cutlery for our camping trip next week. Our silverware was too heavy to put in our hanging cupboard under the awning of the tent. But you wouldn't believe how difficult it is to find plastic cutlery in Japan. Disposable spoons and forks . . . oh, and chopsticks, of course. But not knives!

I found another small Christmas present for the boys, ate some lunch and headed back to the train for the trip home. On the way home I'd planned to stop at our old station and drop in on a friend at her shop. She's usually very busy, so I was surprised when she had time to go for coffee across the road. After we caught up I walked down the road to the hairdresser for a trim, which included a shampoo which was delightfully relaxing. And then I caught a train home again, feeling satisfied that my outing hadn't just corrected a mistake, but had achieved something positive too!

Wrinkles in my creative sewing

Creating is all very relaxing if it goes well, but I've "got a wrinkle" in my current creating. I wrote back here about sewing some long pants for my boys. But I keep running into problems and it's getting annoying. Most of the problems are my mistakes, so I'm annoyed at myself. 

For starters the pattern I'm using is for small children, so I've had to add length and width – not too much of a problem, but not as easy as just tracing a pattern, pinning and cutting out. It takes me a while to get my head around the spatial issues with sewing; it really is my chief problem (and with packing boxes too). This all added the issue of how much material I should buy, which has turned into a major problem, as you'll see.

Then the boys requested pockets, which weren't on the pattern. I thought I was doing well when I found this blog by an amazing Indonesian lady who lives in Japan. I love the name of her blog: VeryPurplePerson. She makes her own clothes and blogs about them very well. Here I found a helpful tutorial about putting side-pockets into pants/trousers (whatever you like to call them). 

All very good, except that the pattern doesn't include a waistband and you have to make your own pattern. No worries, I added some length for the inbuilt waistband. But it turned out I didn't add enough. The pocket openings are too small to fit their hands into. So I've had to do some (and yet to do some) serious modification. In the case of one pair, I will have to add an extra bit to the waist and in the case of another, will have to add a bit to the top of the pocket lining. All very frustrating.

But the biggest frustration is my miscalculation on how much material I would need. I got it right – but only if the material was 1.20m wide. As it turns out the material is only 0.9m wide. So I went back to get more material for the third pair, but I didn't get enough. I figured that out as soon as I laid it out for cutting. And dashed back for the third time the next day for more. Unfortunately I encountered every sewer's worst nightmare: they'd run out of the material I was using. The lady who'd served me the day before kindly explained that they had some 20cm sections I could buy if I wanted. (I could just imagine the back of my 12 y.o.'s pants made up of a patchwork of 20cm sections of material!) Then she said they'd reordered it and it should come in about a week . . . IF the manufacturer was still making that colour. Arggghhhh!

(Mind you I was pretty happy that I'd managed all of this in Japanese!)

Today, nine days later, I dashed back to the store in the hopes that it would be there. But no, it isn't. This shop attendant could give me any information I didn't already know.

So I'm left with two alternatives. I wait another week and drive back again (getting annoyed at going to this shop, however, it is not too far away, but means going across railway tracks and heaps of traffic lights, though I guess I could also ride). Or I can take a sample and catch a train a few stations to a different shop and hope for the best. This is just taking too much time and money for my liking, if only it were simpler. I really don't like it when things take up more time that I'd like them too. 

So, a creating project that is turning bad on me. Maybe I should have a go at overcoming some of the pocket issues tonight and maybe then I'll feel a bit better about the project. It is so easy to give up on something like this when you hit a snag.

My Creating Day

Reporting back on how my "quiet" day is going.

I've managed to stay on-track. I did some baking. I stepped out of my comfort zone a little and tried a couple of new recipes. 

Here we have Gingernuts (left) and Melting Moments (right). (I just discovered that Melting Moments is also an Icecream brand, obviously not in Australia, maybe the US?) I've had mixed success. The Gingernuts are pretty tasty and weren't very hard. One of the things I occasionally miss from Australia is store-bought Gingernut biscuits. These aren't quite the same, but not too bad. Some of them have a too-brown bottom. Victim of our non fan-forced oven and a distracted cook.

The Melting Moments are pretty bad in my opinion (but my husband begs to differ). I used an Australian Women's Weekly recipe. Their standards are high. For starters the biscuits are supposed to look like this photo, piped out of an icing bag. But my icing bag doesn't come with anything that will produce a star that big. Plus I hate icing bags, they are messy to use and difficult to clean afterwards. 

The chocolate mixture you are to dip in uses an ingredient I didn't have, solid shortening. I substituted Olive Oil, but didn't think carefully about it. What it needed was an oil-base that is solid at air temperature. Result? Chocolate that isn't set at room temperature! And it's lumpy because I stuffed up the melting-of-the-chocolate.

The filling between the biscuits is also too soft. Probably should have used butter rather than margarine. Hence I don't feel like they are a great success. The jury's out as to the opinion of the boys. The biscuits really aren't lunch-box material, but they'll do for after school snacks.

Next time I might use this recipe, that says you only have to flatten balls of the mixture with a fork and you don't have to dip it in chocolate! Sounds good.

This is the other recipe I made. An old stalwart, Coconut Loaf. I acquired this recipe when I did some cooking in Primary School. And I know why they chose the recipe, it is simple and fail proof. This has no butter or eggs. Only flour, raising agent, coconut, sugar and milk. It always works and is always tasty. I've frozen one of these for an event next Monday.

After lunch I visited my favourite craft shop for the materials to make three pairs of long pants for my boys. It is such a soothing shop. Not over-the-top like some large barn-sized craft shops I've been in in Australia. 

 I shopped at a leisurely pace and found some heavy knit black material that will make fine pants. My choice has been confirmed by a unanimous vote in favour of the material by all the boys. I'm looking forward to making these.

So, the only thing I missed was a nap. Creating is restful for me. And I'm feeling pretty relaxed, so that is good. My sewing table is ready to set-up for the days to come and I have some tracing paper to make the patterns for the pants. The snack-pantry is full and I can head into the rest of my "quiet" week with a bit more in my energy bank. A good day all round!