The winter term ended last Friday with the graduation ceremony. I served as the entertainment program, or rather, my speech on "Doctor Hat & Featherboa" was the entertainment program. I talked about being a university lecturer and romance author, and about doing research for historical romances. The lecture hall the graduation ceremony was held in had been outfitted with new technical stuff, and as a result the pictures I showed the audience during my talk (like the pic of the pineapple folly below - isn't that folly just wonderfully absurd?) were ginormously big and looked simply awesome. So all in all, it was a very successful afternoon. :)
To celebrate the end of the term, I spent Saturday smooching with my sewing machine and put together this sunshiny birthday bag as a present for a friend, who gave a party on Sunday. (All right, I admit it: I hadn't expected that it would take me the whole day to sew this rather simple little bag. But it did and it was great fun all the same.)
I learnt lots of new things when sewing this bag - not just how to sew a bag! I learnt how to make button loops ...
... how to make yo-yos ...
... how to sew letters and keep the fabric from puckering ...
... how to use one of the decorative stitches of my machine in order to create an edge with lots of little curves ...
... how to make fabric-covered buttons.
And as you can see, the Kitteh was eager to help.
I love how the yellow lining looks against the dark denim.
And here's the finished birthday bag, filled with goodies from Britain:
Twinings' vanilla tea and Whittard's Hot White Chocolate. Yum.
All nicely cut and laid out on the floor of the mini-library. Front looks good, but ...
But don't worry, if you choose a relatively large binding, nobody will notice that you've messed up with the back of the quilt! :)
And the back:
And the cute label that was included in the Love U ABC panel:
And what do you do with the selvage? You keep it and use it as a ribbon around the folded quilt.
