First post

Well, here it is. The first post.

I'm at work and am meant to be doing cell-counts in photoshop right now, but it's just so damn boring. It's funny that whenever you tell someone that you work in stem cell research, they go 'oh wow, that's SO interesting - you must love your job!'. Usually I don't have the heart to tell them that it's not quite as exciting as it sounds.

So anyway, back to more crafty stuff.

I was reading Nikki Mallalieu's blog today and remembered I'd signed up for a blog account a few weeks ago but hadn't done anything about it..... and - voila!

This whole crafty thing of mine started about a year ago when I had an idea (which has since fallen to the wayside) and started to play with Adobe Illustrator. This re-ignited my arty-crafty spark that's been dormant for a while and I got all excited. I'd been feeling for a while that my job in science wasn't really fulfulling my creative needs. My friend Jess introduced me to Etsy and then I suddenly wanted to open an Etsy shop. I'm not quite sure what led me to want to make bags, but I vaguely remember one day realising that I had a real thing for fabrics and I figured that I quite liked handbags too and that surely they couldn't be that hard to make (haha). So I opened an Etsy account, designed a banner for my shop and then started working towards the goal.

I enrolled in Nikki's 'better bags & purses' class at the start of the year. I probably should have enrolled in the 'bags for beginners' course, but at that stage I had 5 months till the class started and I figured I had plenty of time to get up to speed by then. I should have known myself better. When I started the class, all I'd ever sewn was an apron in Yr7, a few pillow-slips, and I'd had a crack at an Amy Butler bag pattern. I didn't even know what topstitching was. As a result, I was a wee bit nervous when I started the class that I'd be out of my depth. Anyway, I needn't have worried - I started off with an easy bag and ended up finishing off an intermediate one by the end of the course. Sweet!

Since then I've been madly collecting fabric, coming up with some ideas, and setting up a little sewing studio in our study. I've realised that I really must buy an Elna press since it took me at least half an hour to iron on all my interfacing on the weekend. God it was tedious.

I did a cute little laptop sleeve on the weekend. All went reasonably smoothly until (at about midnight) I got to the final step of sewing in the lining. I obviously wasn't thinking clearly, because I sewed the lining in the wrong way round (argh!). At that point I gave up and went to bed. I haven't gotten around to unpicking it yet.

I think tomorrow I'll post some photos of the studio set-up, and a few of the things I've collected just to break up the wordiness of this blog a bit. Stay tuned.