Sorry no cure

Hello,

What did you do over the weekend? Me? I made 6 reversible drawstring pouches.

I've been desperately trying to increase my stock as I feel rather nervous about Christmas approaching. Yes, you heard it right. Christmas is coming in about 3 months and I hadn't been vigilant about keeping my stock at a decent level. If I don't start making stuff to add to my stock now, I will feel very pathetic in December. Ideally I would like to have 100 items on hand by December but that's an impossible figure to achieve. I don't have the energy. Like over the weekend, I was aiming for 10 drawstring pouches but 6 was all I could manage. I realise that when I make anything in batches, I feel drained more easily. Still I have to try as hard as I can to increase my stock.

This time around, I went a little crazy with power over the mix and match choices. I'm pretty happy with the end result.

Don't the pouches look like little puppies just chilling? Let me introduce them, starting from green polka dot, clock-wise - Jackie, Tito, Jermaine, Marlon, Janet and last but not least, Michael.

Last week in Singapore, Wildlife Reserves Singapore (WRS) caused an uproar with a unpopular decision.

Its CEO, cancelled a popular 6-year old "Halloween Horrors" event at the Night Safari
- 2 weeks before it was launched
- after selling 1000 tickets
- after a group of final year Polytechnic had spent 7 months working on it as their gradeable project
- after spending $1 million


The CEO said sorry. Halloween had nothing to do with conservation. Then she remembered the President just attended a mid-Autumn festival held at the zoo. And we all know the mooncake festival has nothing to do with conservation. So now, the spin is - events need to have an Asian focus and be family-centric.

The CEO said sorry. No one told her the students' work would be graded.

The CEO clarified that there were no religious reasons behind the cancellation but she did indeed say 
"a lot of money spent on an infrastructure (Haunted House) of devil worship". In addition she added that there were "controversies about the 31 October festival, where some U.S. schools even ban Halloween events."

I only know Halloween from TV and movies. As far as I can tell, it's a harmless tradition which is meant to be fun. I don't associate devil worship with a Halloween haunted house. Plus, we live in Singapore where 1 month out of every year, businesses and individuals deligently go about spending huge sums of money to stage events and burn paper products to "feed" the hungry ghosts. And I'm saying it's an accepted practice. If you can live with "feeding" the hungry ghosts, how can you be offended by a haunted house?

And I'm always unimpressed when anyone says, the US this or the US that. It sounds more like the person ran out of anything substantial to back up her decision.

This brings to mind an exchange between me and a customer when I was out selling my bags. A customer admired one of my pouches but expressed reservations about the animal print I had used. I asked her what her concerns were. Her reply? She was afraid the animal had a spirit in it.

What!? I assured her the animal print is just a print. And there were no spirits in my bags. I wasn't even keen on her buying the pouch as I honestly didn't want to be drawn into any spiritual debates. When I make a bag, I only care if it looks cool or not cool. She did buy the pouch eventually although I can't imagine why with all the reservations. I guess that's how awesome my bags are.

You can never have too much storage space

Hello friends and strangers,

A few days ago I had a real big scare. I tried to upload a photo to my blog and was informed gleefully by Blogger that I had run out of space. How is that possible? Me run out of space in blogland? But there's endless space in the net. Right? Right?

Oh dear folks. I've been so ignorant. Apparently I'm only allocated 1GB of free space to keep my images and stuff. What!? 1 GB? Still, 1 GB is a lot of space. I can't believe I've used it all. What on earth have I been uploading? And just to be clear, you get 1 GB per google account.

I started to panic over the thought of losing my blog. I mean I love my blog. No, really, really love. Like in love. It's my baby. First thing I do in the morning, I check that it's still breathing. Last thing I do at night, I check that it's still breathing.

Now you see the awful fear creeping all over me? Me hubs suggested I delete some unwanted images from picasa which stores my images. Okay, hold your horses. Before you gallop off to merrily delete, just know that deleting the images from picasa will delete them from your blog. So you could easily end up with a blog with no images! There's no UNDO so be careful.

Deleting the images from picasa involves checking each post and getting rid of duplicates and unwanted images. Sounds easy? It's an impossible task. Picasa doesn't tell you which images are linked to which post. After 5 minutes, I gave up. I decided giving google US$5/year for an additional 20GB of space is totally worth it. Yes, Google sells space too. I bet you thought they just sell searches.

Today I received notification my extra space has come in and to my utter delight, I have 27 GB which means an additonal 7 GB! How did that happen? Wow, now I have all these space, I'm no longer feeling like I have to be nervous about uploading many images.

Coincidentally, I wanted to write a post about how I store my sewing supplies. For the past 2 weeks, I had been trying to tidy up my sewing supplies. It started with me moving a chest of drawers from my sewing table to the floor. Just 1 move and I ended up spending the whole day moving stuff from the drawers to elsewhere. You understand I'm not de-cluttering because I "need" the stuff.

This was the elsewhere some of my stuff had to go to. I re-discovered this DIY stacked boxes which I bought from Ikea 12 years ago.

Here are my frequently used sewing machine needles and sewing needles. The ones I rarely use are kept in some other boxes.

I have a lot of wooden rings for my one-ring wonder bags. On the right are my ink.

Despite a limited storage space in my home, I have the inability to junk some of my stuff especially when I've had them for years and never used them. These handy needle? I was attracted by the name. Thought they would come in handy. Turned out I couldn't find any use for them. But I keep hanging on to them thinking one day, they would come in handy. Do you own these as well?

I personally feel this is one of my best ideas for storage. See I have floating sewing machine needles which have not been used enough times to be thrown away. I used to just chuck them aside and each time I needed to use them, I had to squint just to see the size of the needles. What a waste of time! I just stick white batting to the box and the numbers represent the sizes. See how HANDY it is?

This mooncake box is now home to my bobbins. I like to create little compartments.

My sewing machine thread used to be in 1 giant shoe box but it got too unmanageable. I had other storage methods for my sewing machine thread in the past but they all failed. This current method works as I can find the colour I want easily. They stack up too so it saves on space. What I would really like is to store the bobbin with the corresponding top thread. I tried it once using sticks and styrofoam. It lasted until the styrofoam gave way.

My embroidery thread is a complete utter mess. I wound them in cardboard and put them in the little cubicles. The cookie container keeps the unopened thread.

These 2 mooncake boxes are home to my zippers. I'm afraid to say there's no better way to store zippers than using a rubber band to tie them by sizes. The ones in the blue box are my continuous zippers which I buy by the yard. If you think I have a lot of zippers, I do use them up pretty fast.

These 2 recently acquired mooncake boxes have been put to good use. The pink one is for my velcro. See how useful the compartments are? I'm not a velcro person. They stick. I prefer other closure methods. But they're good to have around because you don't want to run out to the shops everytime you need something. The deep red box has no compartments but I've made my own. These are good for my sewing notions. Notice the heart key? I wonder why I kept it?

This hat box is perfect for my rope and string. I keep straps on the cover of the hat box. I have no idea why I own so much rope and strings.

I used to buy a lot of these $2 boxes but the novelty has worn off. Also, I really dislike the "liver spots" which appear on the inside. This one keeps my elastic. For someone who doesn't use elastic, I sure own a lot. Mostly inherited stuff and a couple of impulse buys.

These are at best 20% of my sewing supplies. I'm quite a hoarder and not very tidy. If you have any ideas for storage to help keep me sane, do let me know.

Wow, this post is image heavy again. Looks like I'm already squandering my 27GB. But this time, I made sure to delete the uploaded images I don't use! See you soon. Have a great weekend.

iPhone zip pouch ePattern is here

Hi friends,

Do you suffer from zipperphobia? Symptoms include cursing, irritation, UnFinishedObjects and poor finishing. When I produced my iPhone zip pouch ePattern, I had in mind folks with zipperphobia and yes, I have the cure. Even if you don't fear the zipper, this little ePattern will suit you. I do the thinking for you. You don't have to crack your brains to figure this one out.

That's right folks. My iPhone zip pouch ePattern is finally out. And as always, I'm pimping it.

I had planned to launch the ePattern by August but it seems I'm still pretty fussy when it comes to photos and little details. I hope that by my third ePattern, I would have become more efficient.

Of course this zip pouch has all its raw seams hidden.

Each zip pouch takes an hour at most for beginners. Once you get the hang of it, you could easily whip them out at half the time. The best bit? You only need a small amount of fabric - a great way to get rid of your remnants.

A big thanks to my testers. They did all the hard work! Do me a big favour and go to my Etsy shop and heart this ePattern or buy it! Thank you. Muah! See you in a couple of days.

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