Cozy

Friends, I like to keep things neat. I really do! The only problem is that neatness relies on having a lot of extra space, and I do not have always have that. Take, for example, my bedroom:

That's Audrey in the corner, being shy. Hi Audrey!

What you see here is a lot of stuff that really ought to be in a closet somewhere: boxes of old junk, trunks full of costumes, clothes and drawings and notebooks piled up on the floor, and even my bed, ideally. As you might imagine, that means there's really not room for a viable sewing space here. That means I had to start occupying a portion of our apartment's common space, and while I love being out in the open with my work, I hate claiming as my own a space that should belong to everyone. My roommates are kind enough to allow me to work on the dining-room table (probably only because I bribe them with pajamas), but I'd like to keep the space I take up as tidy as possible.

Thus, the sewing machine cozy, today's one-day sewing project! Diana Rupp says that one ought to keep one's machine covered to prevent dust build-up, and I made a promise to myself to heed her words and maintain this fancy new piece of machinery. For a while, this was my sewing machine cozy:

Get down from that table, bedsheet. You do not belong on the table, you are a bedsheet.

Ew! As you can see, this is not a friendly way to occupy a communal space. It is ugly and sprawly. So I set about making a new one from oilcloth. Finally putting my old math skills to work, I even measured my machine and adapted the Sew Everything Workshop pattern to fit its somewhat different proportions (note to self: teach kids how to add and subtract fractions by giving them a sewing project.) The whole process went relatively smoothly, and was a lot of fun! I really enjoyed sewing bias tape around the edge of the whole thing, and I can foresee wanting to affix bias tape to a lot of things in the future.

The one area that caused me some perplexity was in sewing the top of the thing on. According to the pattern, I sewed all four sides together and then was supposed to "Stitch around all four sides of the top edge, pivoting at corners." That sounded all well and good until I actually got to a corner:

Pivot who in the what now?

When it came time to pivot, I found that I had a whole bunch of fabric under there that didn't really want to go anywhere, and frankly I'm still not sure what I was supposed to do with it. I managed to fold it under and through and kind of out of the way, awkwardly, but that resulted in a few God-awful messes:

So... yeah, still not really sure what was supposed to happen there. Anyway, I trimmed and hacked my way out of those little disasters and ended up with a reasonably good-looking stitch around the top, although I'm pretty sure a few good tugs at the corners might sour things up a bit.

Please be gentle!

In the end, I managed to craft a rather neat little rectangular prism, and my space is looking a lot cleaner these days.

Hooray rectangles! (To the right you can see my new cutting mat. No more cardboard for me!)