Why do you need three sewing machines?

I was very excited to get a brand, shiny new sewing machine for Christmas last year. Whenever I told any of my friends about this (which was often as I was very excited) the general response was "Why, you've already got one?"

To this I'd say "I know, but this one does different things to my other ones."

The response was then usually "Well why can't they make one that does everything?"

Which is a good question, although when you look at the differences in my sewing machines, straight away, there are obvious differences which would make combining them into one very difficult.

So the main point of this post really, is to explain to my friends, and anyone else who is interested, why I need to have 3 sewing machines, and what I can make with them.

So my first sewing machine...bought by my lovely parents for Christmas just after I had started my degree in Fashion Design. We went on a very exciting trip to a sewing machine shop in Bedminster in Bristol, and because my machine was 6 months old, it was amazingly good value, and in pretty much brand new condition.

Then in my third year of uni, after much fighting for my turn on the uni overlockers, my new house mate, the lovely Louise said that her Nan had an almost brand new overlocker that she couldn't use any more and wanted it to go to a good home...which it most certainly has done!

So then when my parents offered to buy me a sewing machine for Christmas, I was desperate for a coverstitch machine, and it seemed only logical to go for Janome as I've been so happy with my other 2 machines, and plus it's the same one we had at uni so at least I'd had some practice at threading it.

Machine one has 1 needle and 1 underneath thread.

Machine two has 2 needles, 2 underneath threads and a cutting knife to cut the fabric before it finishes it.

Machine three has 3 needles and 1 underneath thread, although it can also have 2 needles and 1 underneath thread or 1 needle and 1 underneath thread.

So you can see why it would be very difficult to combine them into one machine.

Sorry if that was all incredibly boring...hopefully here is the more exciting part, what I've made with them. I've been ridiculously busy since I came back after Christmas and hasn't had a chance to properly use my new sewing machine, so on Monday I made sure I sat down and made a pretty dress.

So Machine one - my standard sewing machine did these bits...

Machine two - my overlocker did these bits...

Machine three - my shiny new coverstitch machine did these bits...

So there you go, I hope that's not too boring for my first post, and it now explains to all my friends why I have and need 3 sewing machines. 

Dreams

I regularly have very strange and very vivid dreams which make me wonder...what on earth goes on inside my head at night?

Last night was no exception....

"I received an invitation to my friends fish funeral (not so random as a friend had woken me up my texting me on Sunday to say her fish had died and she was burying it), and so I went over to her house. After the funeral, she said she needed to do some Reiki on me (again, not unusual yet as she does Reiki) and so I lay down and fell asleep.

I woke up and saw that there were 3 or 4 tiny bees buzzing around my head and bashing into my face. I then touched my face and discovered one of my moles had gone, near my eye, and these tiny bees, about half the size of a grain of rice, were being 'born' from my face. I was pretty terrified, and kept trying to run away but as they were coming out of my face, it was pretty hard to get away from them.

They kept bumping into me and stinging me, but not really stinging, more like being hit with a teasel brush or something like that, a momentary prick of pain and then nothing. Eventually, they stopped coming out of my face and I was so relieved...but then the friend who had been doing the Reiki appeared and said that it wasn't over.

Apparently I still had loads of bee eggs in my head which needed to be removed, or they would just keep growing and in a few weeks more would emerge. So I had to lie down, and after some careful medical style preparations, she extracted an icing piping bag, complete with serrated metal nozzle, from my ear, which was full of bee eggs.

It was surprisingly not painful and a very satisfying feeling, like when you remove a massive lump of earwax. But it still wasn't over. She then proceeded to remove an orange Sainsburys carrier bag, again full of eggs from my ear."

Luckily I woke up at this point, and there were no bees, eggs or carrier bags in sight, but it really made me wonder what goes on in my head at night. I started studying Psychology at A Level as I really wanted to study dreams and their meanings as I have such regular vivid ones, but I gave up after one year, without any dream study as it was too hard.

If anyone actually reads this, and has some Psychological knowledge, I'd be incredibly interested to know what this all means!

This Time Last Year

I love having little reminisces about what I was up to this time last year. I walk 3 miles to work and 3 miles from work each day and so this means lots of time to dream abut my recent and not so recent travels and then also for a bit of free association.

So, this time last year, I was coming to the end of my big Travelling Trip (it gets capitals because it was important). I travelled from Egypt to South Africa overland, went island hopping in the South Pacific, and then all over South America, with a short hop to Panama.

As I flew home from Rio, I spent my last week in Brazil. I went to Iguazu Falls which was beautiful and incredibly spell binding, and I attracted many butterflies to come and sit on me and met a vampire turtle.

I then headed to Rio and ended up staying in a hostel between Ipanema and Copacabana beaches so spent a lot of time there lazing and swimming, and also learning how to make Caipirinhas in the hostel.

I climbed Sugar Loaf mountain and went up to see the statue of Christ..oh and bought 10 pairs of Havianas.

Now when I'm sitting at work...and it's raining....I wish I was back in the bustle and sunshine!

Button Replacement Surgery

A lot of my school friends decided to study medicine and scarily enough have now qualified and are working in various hospitals. Whenever we are all together, there is a lot of medical speak going on, most of which I don't understand. However, some of it will sound really interesting and so I'll ask them what they are talking about.

Usually I get a very patronising answer, something along the lines of 'It's like sewing but with fewer buttons'. Or something similar. They usually get a 'I am not amused' face in return.

Anyway, in similarly complicated and dangerous surgery style, I have recently performed Button Replacement Surgery on a Dress. As I said before in one of my older posts, I do love a bit of Primark shopping. Especially when it's near the end of the month and my bank account is looking sad.

I recently bought this Dress which I love but I thought the buttons made it look a little bit cheap. Hence the Button Replacement Surgery.

(It's got little people sitting on a beach printed on it! Love it!)

Now I do like a bit of button collecting, and have topped up my Grandma's button tin as I used the ones in there, or went to markets or charity shops and found more, and so I now have a reasonable sized collection.

These are the buttons which came on the dress. When I bought it and tried it on, I thought these buttons were plasticy and cheap. Now that I've taken them off, they actually look quite nice and are made of metal and actually pretty good quality! Now they just need to be found a more suitable home...

These were my first try. I think the print of the dress makes it look quite vintage, and the full skirt makes it quite 50's style, so I thought these suitably retro looking buttons might work? I asked my housemates, but they were pretty useless, just saying that they all looked nice.

After a few more options (above) I settled on just having 3 buttons, instead of the original 5, and went for these peachy coloured ones to compliment the peach beach strip in the dress. Beautiful I think. Although if I get bored in the future, or if the buttons reject the dress, I can always perform more complex surgery and change them for some different buttons.

Mooncup

A friend of mine mentioned a few years ago that she was thinking of buying a mooncup. My initial reaction was 'Eurghhhh!!! That's so gross', and then that was it really. She didn't buy one and there was no more said about it.

I also didn't think much more about it until I was packing to go travelling, and had to pack a ridiculous number of tampons to take with me as I wasn't sure if I'd be able to buy them anywhere whilst travelling through Africa.

When I got back to Kenya, I spent a few days helping out at Mission in Action baby orphanage (http://www.missioninaction.com.au/), but went back to visit the Walk Centre (http://www.thewalkchildrenschurch.org.uk/), where I'd worked before. The kids here all live on the local rubbish dump and both the children and their parents will forage amongst the rubbish to find anything they can eat, wear or sell. Whilst being shown around the rubbish dump to be shown the new rooves on some of the childrens houses, I noticed a massive amount of sanitary towels which just didn't seem to be decomposing at all.

I did a bit of research and couldn't find an exact answer on how long they take to decompose, but I did find out that disposable nappies take 200 to 500 years to decompose and some of the plastic used may never even disappear. That's a ridiculously long time. The plastic in them is also made from crude oil and harmful pollutants which go directly into the earth and are really bad for the environment. In comparison, it only take 6 months to one year for a tampon to completely bio-degrade. Apparently 90% of the sanitary products we used are flushed and end up floating around in the sea until they eventually bio-degrade, if they can.

Again, I didn't think much about this until I was in Rio at the end of my travels last year. As must be the case in many other places around the world where there is a large city situated right on the coastline, a lot of rubbish ends up in the sea. And when there is a stunning, pristine beach, the last thing you want is to be fishing tampons out of your hair.

Thankfully, this didn't happen to me, but I did see a lot of waste including tampons floating around in the sea and heard the horror stories of other people having to pick used tampons out of their hair. That's definitely more disgusting than the thought of a mooncup.

As soon as I got back from travelling then, I decided that this was one way that I could reduce the amount I throw away and so I bought a mooncup. I didn't actually use it for the first month as I will admit that I was pretty scared by it. Mainly that it is quite big. But then I took the plunge and now I can honestly say that I am hooked and will never go back to tampons or sanitary towels again.

Apart from a minor (well pretty major) incident where I forgot about my mooncup whilst sterilising it (it has its own saucepan which I keep in my room - don't worry) and so melted a hole in it and had to buy a new one, I will have it for as long as I need it and there will be no waste each month. Perfect!

Also, as I have very light periods, I used to get quite uncomfortable when having to change a tampon and it was not used enough, and pulling out a fairly dry tampon also increases your risk of contracting TSS. The mooncup is perfect as it is soft, smooth silicone and you really can't feel it at all when it's in. I have spoken to some of my friends about this who are still unsure but I really do urge everyone to convert to a mooncup. You really won't regret it!

Tumble Dryers

After watching Amelie last night, I was thinking about things I like and don't like on my walk to work this morning. And I definitely don't like tumble dryers.

We had one growing up, but it was rarely used. Only for bedding and towels if it was pouring so we couldn't hang them outside. I know it's nice in the winter to dry everything quickly, so that especially in damp student housing, you don't have smelly clothes hanging around taking about a week to dry, but nothing beats sun dried clothes. One of my favourite things in the world is when I can get into a freshly made bed, and the sheets are all crisp from the sunshine and just smell of outside.

So the main reason that I don't like tumble dryers is that they are bad for your clothes. As a self confessed Squirrel, I hate to part with my clothes and literally wear them to death. I have items which I was wearing 5 years ago which I still wear now and I am sure that some have them have lasted so much longer and still look fine to wear now because I don't tumble dry them.

Tumble dryers work by passing warm or hot air through the machine as it rotates, which helps to evaporate moisture from the clothes. So the main actions are heat and agitation. One of the methods of felting is to apply heat and agitation to the fibres. This causes them to shrink and fuse together and so this is essentially what happens to our clothes in the tumble dryer. Holes are more likely to appear as the fibres fuse together, and then are stretched as they are worn. Bad. I definitely don't want my clothes to shrink!

Tumble dryers also cause clothes to lose their softness as fibres are lost from the surface of the fabric. Again, not good.

The other reason why I don't like tumble dryers, is that they are really bad for the environment. And expensive. The average home clothes dryer has a carbon footprint of approximately 2 kilograms (4.4 pounds) of CO₂ per load of laundry dried. A carbon footprint is "the total set of greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions caused by an organization, event, product or person." To compare, the carbon footprint of the train to Woking and back would be just over 4kg. The train to Edinburgh and back for one passenger would be 24kg (so 6 tumble dryer loads). A return flight to Edinburgh would be 193k (so about 48 loads).

In comparison to this, the carbon footprint of a tumble dryer seems fairly low. But in my flat for example, there are probably 4 tumble dryer loads a week (not me!!). This is carbon footprint of 416kg per year which could easily be avoided!

Hopefully we haven't already missed Summer and we will get some sunshine over the next few months so that I can dry my clothes outside in lovely sunshine!

Bridesmaids Dresses & Other Wedding Ingredients

I have been very busy recently making three bridesmaids dresses for a friends wedding. Here are a few photos of the making process and the finished items.

I used my normal sewing machine for most of the sewing and overlocked all of the seams. I then had to hand stitch the hem.

Oh and I also made three ties and three cravattes. See what you think....

Recycling

I am very big on recycling. When I moved into my flat, one of the first things I did was to apply for a recycling bin. Although we live in Brent, whose slogan is 'Creating a cleaner, greener Brent', they said no, because we live in a flat and so there's nowhere to put it. I emailed back a few times to say we had an empty shop underneath so on recycling days I could leave it in the shop doorway which is off the pavement, but got no reply. How rude.


In Bristol, recycling has been a big thing for a while, and we even have brown bins for food waste only. The idea is to reduce your waste so that the main bin only needs collecting once a fortnight. I think we were pretty special to have 3 bins, but then saw this article today on the BBC news website about some areas having 9 bins!! That just seems scary and like it would put people off.

None of my housemates ever seem quite as keen as me to recycle. I think they like the idea of it as long as they don't actually have to do anything. When we lived in Portsmouth, they gave us green wheelie bins and everything recyclable went in here, apart from glass as that could get a bit messy. So we collected up all the glass in a separate tub and every so often would take it to the bottle bank. We did this so regularly that one of my housemates was genuinely surprised when at the end of the year she discovered that the bin men didn't actually take glass! She hadn't realised that we'd been doing it all along.

My housemates now in London are also equally happy to put things in plastic bags on the back of the kitchen door...but less happy to walk down the road to the recycling bins. I've tried to see what happens if I don't take them...but it just means that your can't really open the kitchen door any more and so it's just easiest if I go.

When I was younger, me and my sister used to fight over who got to smash the glass bottles when we went recycling with Mum. Maybe that's why I enjoy it so much, because it's almost a game to me. I grew up feeling really chuffed when I got to smash more bottles than Chloe. 

On Sunday, one of my housemates said 'Is there even any point in recycling anyway as most of it ends up in landfills in China?'. Whilst it is true that I had heard that this had happened in the past, I just don't physically think that I can throw a glass jar or a tin can in the normal bin.

So I decided to investigate....

According to recyclenow.com, a lot of our recycled waste is processed here in the UK and reused to make new items. 

Information collected for Defra by the Environment Agency on packaging waste shows how much material is exported and how much is recycled in the UK:

Material	Reprocessed in the UK	Reprocessed Abroad
Paper	49%	51%
Glass	81%	19%
Aluminium	66%	34%
Plastic	33%	67%
Wood	100%	0%

The CPI figures, which include newsprint, indicate a balance of about 47% domestic reprocessing and 53% export.

So even though a lot of our waste is sent abroad to be processed, for example to China, this is still better than throwing it into a landfill site, and China has a big need for raw materials such as plastic as it does not have any of its own oil reserves. Also, transportation costs are extremely cheap, as they are already coming to the UK with goods to export, and so would otherwise be returning partially empty. 

So that makes me feel slightly happier...and hopefully might encourage other people too! 

Vegetarians

A lot of people seem to think I am a vegetarian. When I was at school my boyfriends Mum was so convinced that she kindly bought me some vegetarian cookbooks to take to uni with me. Maybe I look like a vegetarian, if there is such a look, though most likely, it is because I have a slight phobia of processed meat and so don't really eat any meat that often.

I am known though, sometimes, to have a bit of a rant about vegetarians. Whilst I think it's very admirable to be a vegetarian and certainly much better for the environment, I get very annoyed by vegetarians who aren't really. Most vegetarians I know eat fish.

The definition of a vegetarian is: "Noun: A person who does not eat meat, and sometimes other animal products, esp. for moral, religious, or health reasons."

The definition of meat is: "Noun:The flesh of an animal as food."

The definition of an animal is: "Noun: A living organism that feeds on organic matter, typically having specialized sense organs and nervous system and able to respond rapidly to stimuli."

Therefore, they are not vegetarians if they eat fish. Luckily, my closest "vegetarian" friend has accepted my rants about this and calls herself a ovolactopescatarian, although probably only to me. I call her pesky, but that doesn't have much to do with her eating habits.

Similarly, it also annoys me when vegetarians eat sweets containing gelatin, especially when they're my Haribo. I will only accept that if they admit that they are not really vegetarians.

One of the 'most' read BBC news articles today was 'The Unusual Uses for Body Parts'. When I initially read the heading I wondered if it was something to do with the boy in China who sold his kidney to buy an ipad but no, just some other things to do with a cow once you've had your tasty steak!

I never realised that Bone China was actually made from bones!! I know, I know, it is in the name but I thought that was because bone china looks slightly translucent and fragile - like bones. I didn't realise that it actually had bone in it!!

We've been discussing this at work today and it turns out that I am not alone and most people did not realise this either. One of the directors did though as a while ago Boden sold some cups and mugs. For these to be sent to America, the warehouse had a list of ingredients, for the customs declarations and this included cow bones. Apparently, this shocked some of our Hindu warehouse staff, who had never put the link together. As Hindu's consider cows to be sacred animals, it's not really the done thing to drink your tea out of one of their legs.

So should vegetarians drink out of bone china cups? And eating of bone china plates? Essentially, it's like licking a cow. I wonder if vegetarians are allowed to lick cows?

Scary Salad & Other Germs

Everyone's afraid to eat salad at the moment. And that is reasonable enough, after all, quite a few people have died!

I first heard that something was going on on Tuesday at work when the Metro had a suitably ridiculous sounding headline about salad killing. I was slightly concerned when I read the article and discovered that there was a risk of catching E.coli if you'd eaten any Spanish salad...with particular emphasis on cucumbers. Now I happen to love cucumbers and had in fact eaten about 3/4 of a Spanish cucumber on Monday. As you do.

I told my manager at work this and he seemed to think this was really weird. I don't agree. Now if I'd eaten an entire lettuce in one day..that would be more worrying as that's a lot of lettuce. But when you're munching cucumber sticks as your lunch because your neice has stolen all of the more exciting food from your plate, and theres yummy humous, it's very easy to get through a lot of cucumber.

Anyway, I told my boss this and he said 'Oh you'll be fine as long as you washed it'. Now I'm entirely un-germ-phobic so don't really think about washing my fruit and veg that much, but I'm pretty sure that just water alone would not get rid of E.coli. Surely some sort of Dettol or peeling the fruit would be more effective?

I had this discussion with some of my colleagues at work today and we all slightly shamefully admitted that we never wash our fruit and vegetables. Even though I think, when picking out the 'best' vegetables at the supermarket 'I wonder how many other people have touched this (insert vegetable name)' I still rarely wash my fruit and vegetables before eating them.

I grew up with the teaching that 'germs are good for you' and I do seriously believe that because I ate a bit of soil here and there when I was little, and definitely enjoyed the odd lick of a pebble and taste of sand, that I'm nice and healthy now because I'm immune to lots of germs.

So hopefully I will survive my excessive unwashed cucumber eating...we'll see how it goes!