back to your regularly scheduled blogging ... almost

Yes m'dears, the Ravelympics is now officially over. At last count I scored 4 gold medals.
Not that medaling was the point of 'competing'
not at all
it was all about conning myself into finally finishing up some very L-O-N-G term UFOs.

Some of those guys had been living quite comfortably under the coffee table for so long that I should have been charging them rent.

Anyway before we completely dispense with the Ravelympics, I did finish Riley's Jumper in time but no photos yet.

and no one was game to make a stab at yesterday's quote which was from 'The Goodies', specifically Graham Garden's Post Office rant in the Radio Goodies episode, but I unintentionally misquoted [ mea culpa ] It should have been " back- sliding revisionary paper hyenas." Sorry about that.
Anyway, the entire rant is here - quote 54, second on the page


and in a complete change from the ever so slightly knitcentric coverage of the past 17 days, I give you:
the bag I've [almost] just finished.


Okay, so there may be just a hint of some potentially yarn related activity in its shape ... it's not inconceivable that there is a possible future woolly connection
however
... soldering on:
A few weeks ago, Zoe at Purl's Palace asked me to have a play with this new Shrink Sheet stuff.


It feels a bit like the lining of a cosmetics bag ... sort of nylon-y plastic-y.
The idea is to sew it to fabric, with or without wadding [ batting ] in between, and then to shrink it by holding a steam iron just above the surface.
Lacking any further instructions or project ideas, I sewed a series of roughly parallel waving lines using that funny hook shaped quilting attachment which comes with every sewing machine, that one that quilters never use.
Anyway, next step was the steaming.
It took a bit of practice to get the temperature and distance right but it all crinkled up in a most satisfactory way and the effect is ... umm ... interesting.


I didn't have a pattern in mind, so I pretty much just made the biggest bag that I could get out of the 'fabric' produced from a fat quarter each of three Japanese prints, some needle punched poly wadding and the FQ sized piece of shrink sheet.
Ms Tara was consulted about handles on a recent visit and indicated a preference for these:


Last week's trip to Spotlight yielded the required open ended zipper for what I had in mind
and really all I have left to do is a little bit of hand sewing on the lining of the zipper strip and to catch the handles so they don't slip out.
To be honest I'm not 100% thrilled with the job I did on the zipper [ too lazy to ferret out the zip attachment ] but otherwise I think it turned out okay