Guess How the Weekend Was . . .

What was the weekend like?  Busy, of course.

Event Schedule

You may notice that Anime Midwest is back on the schedule in the sidebar. I checked my e-mail Saturday morning and discovered that e-mail saying "We have more space this year, and your space has now been approved". I'm not sure if that means they expanded their dealer space, or if by being not-accepted previously we'd actually been wait-listed. 

I checked with Ron and Xap, and since nothing had changed since our decision to try to get into Anime Midwest, I accepted. Which meant spending a significant chunk of change that I was originally earmarked for a new press, so we really need to do well at ACen so we can pay ourselves back and get the press. 

I probably should remove Geek.Kon from the sidebar. I haven't heard back from them, and there are a number of other vendors listed on the website, so the inference is that we weren't accepted. I would have appreciated e-mail saying that, but non-answer=no was kind of implied somewhere that I don't have handy to quote. 

Making All the Things

Last week Wednesday (home with an upset tummy) I did finish sewing up the last of the bottles in the afternoon. In the morning I actually worked on the computer, installing a new set of fonts I bought a while back, updating my list of fonts, and doing some MuseCon publications. 

The leather I ordered for belt loops arrived last week, and Saturday morning, while Ron was off schlepping things, I reduced it to little pieces. I forgot to get a "before" picture, but it was in two pieces, totalling about 12 square feet - so two pieces about 2' by 3'.  It was reduced down to this:

Across the top we have wrong-size belt loops (27 pairs plus an extra), belt loops (42 pairs), large sporran straps (17), and a double-height stack of small sporran straps (40).
In the middle is a pile of not-scrap - pieces that I saved for molding the sockets for small bottles, and a couple pieces that will be cut down into reinforcements for soft pouch bottoms. And I stole one piece for a soft-ish pouch front. The bottom is the actual scrap. Pretty efficient I'd say.

Why do I have two types of belt loops?  Because I screwed up. Belt loops are supposed to be 1-1/8" x 5-1/2", but in the process of cutting strips, I cut some only 1" wide. 1" is too narrow for lacing onto a pouch, but fortunately I can use them for pouches where they're riveted/machine-sewn on. And I've already used about half of them. 

The sporran straps hold a pair of small dees on the back of a pouch, on either side of the belt loops, so you can use the pouch as a sporran. They're kind of tied in with the belt loops with rivets, too. I've gone through a bunch of the small ones already, and had some large ones, which I use fewer of anyway, which is why there's such a difference in how many I made.


I'd done all that so I'd have belt loops and the straps for belt satchels and little soft tabbed pouches, which I was planning to start work on. But I diverted into cutting out more pouch parts - I cut out backs for the hard pouch fronts we had molded, and a few more soft-ish pouches, mostly from red and blue. I know I just cut a bunch of red and black soft-ish pouches out last week, but this time I was cutting backs for hard pouches out of the red, and one for a soft-ish pouch style I need more of overall and didn't cut from red last week.

I did get to sewing. I worked on the 6 belt satchels and 10 little tabbed pouches I'd cut out a week or so ago, plus 2 leather satchels I've had for quite a while. The process for all those is:

• Mark locations for latches, belt loops, etc.
• Put on front parts of closures
• Sew on belt loops (with rivets and sporran loops as appropriate)
• Hem pockets
• Pin fronts and gussets together (I say "pin", but I actually use binder clips)
• Sew fronts and gussets together (trim as necessary afterwards)
• Hem front/gusset sets
• Sew dee holders on satchels 
• Pin gussets to backs
• Sew gussets to backs
• Sew binding to flaps (two passes of sewing, for nice rolled binding).

I did most of the sewing yesterday. I got everything up through pinning the front/gussets to the backs. At which point I was asking myself what idiot decided it was a good idea to work on 18 things at once.

Oh, right, that was me.  That was late afternoon, at which point I decided to be done with anything that required brains, and just worked on lacing pouches together.

But now that I'm well on my way on those, they'll be easier to finish off in smaller bits of time. 

Meanwhile, Ron cleaned out the beehives, and started printing our new business card coasters. Robin dyed hard pouch fronts and a couple soft-ish pouch fronts, and then Ron waxed the hard pouch fronts. 
  
At some point Friday or Saturday I got the three Barbie-purple pouches ready to lace. I was going to start lacing one of them last night, but they really wanted purple lace. I couldn't find any smooth lace at a price I was willing to pay, but I did find some suede lace that's supposed to be sturdy, in "royal purple". I ordered a roll of that and royal blue to try. 

Enough Things!

Last night I decided that I need to stop cutting out pouches, unless/until I get caught up before ACen. The only exception is small drawstring bags, which I've been planning to make (and go fast), and if I decide to cut out a back for one hard pouch front that got molded last night (because it was already cut) - I have a red back cut out, it depends if I want two red and black, or decide to do some other color. 

No, More New Things!

Except that yesterday while I was working on satchels, etc., I thought that for anime cons, what would be a good idea to make would be the kind of briefcase-ish bag that seems to be, at least in anime, the default for Japanese students of high school-ish age. 

Fortunately, a while back our Etsy shop was favorited by a seller on Etsy who has patterns for just that sort of thing, and you can use his patterns to make things for sale. So I got a briefcase pattern, and another pattern for a belt bag that I'd looked at before and that Ron liked, too. I don't expect to have any for ACen, but now Anime Midwest is a possibility.