My run yesterday was really quite dire. A very slow 2.5(ish)km and then forced to walk the rest of the way home because I had a pretty awful stitch on my right side.

Ah well.

Will have a crack again either this afternoon or tomorrow (hopefully I’ll drag myself out before this alleged blizzard).

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I did manage to action all of my three days of items (save for the personal sewing ones)!! YAY!

Late yesterday afternoon I baked bikkies – which were nowhere near the exceptional standard of Bessie’s, but quite tasty nonetheless. The problem is that I keep eating them. This is why we cannot have snacks in ThePalace(OfLove) – thank TheUniverse for 5:2.

And I must remember to take future dry-cleaning locally it is much cheaper than in the CBD (though admittedly difficult to get to mid-week) and they did a stellar job of a cast-off coat from Joan which Bessie has nabbed for herself.

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I have yet to make a single quilt block, but I have mapped out all of the measurements – so, progress!

i am clearly a great loss to the quilting and/or design profession!

This afternoon/evening I must drag out the iron, ruler and scissors, cue up a couple of podcasts and get to cutting out those border strips.

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In mini-project news, sadly, the pink hat did not take at all well to blocking:

Yikes! There is clearly no saving this as a hat, but I may unravel the crown, knit another pattern repeat and make it into a neckwarmer-type thing. The yarn is butter-soft, quite warm and to be honest I can’t think of anything else to do with it – it has been sitting in the stash for at least 4 years.

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In other min-project news, before Joan left for her Amazing Adventure, she offloaded a bunch of stuff on us (like the aforementioned coat). One of these was the beach bag to the left:

This takes our navy and white beach bag collection to three. None of which we paid for (the other two were give-aways with magazines many years ago) and none of which are used as beach bags (one is my knitting bag and the other stores spare jumpers and caps in the back of panzo).

One of my mending tasks was to replace the bottom of the Joan bag which was all crumpled inside and intruded on the available space. I unpicked a side-seam of the lining, pulled the base out and replaced it with plastic from the cover of an unwanted A3 sketch book.

Punched holes in the corner, then attached the holes to the corners of the bottom of the bag. Cunning, yes?

Sadly, not so cunning as you’d think – the very sharp plastic corners poked out the edges and posed quite the scratching risk. Unfortunately I discovered this after I’d sewn up the linking. So I got even more cunning:

I folded the corners over very slightly and held them in place with clips. The clips will of course be removed, but it seems to have done the trick.

Yes, I probably could have bought a new bag – but hey, frugality! And problem-solving! And snatching very small victories from the jaws of defeat.