Capricon Weekend

Even though Otter Necessities wasn't in the Capricon Dealers' Room, it was a busy long weekend.


Thursday night and Friday morning I worked on 5 soft pouches that I'd cut out previously (ages previously), getting them marked, lacing holes punched, and latches installed. Two had separate flaps, which made them more challenging to get ready, but by the time Robin and I left Friday morning I had all five with me and ready to lace, along with a little squarish pouch I'd already started work on.


Friday I hung out in the Cafe, did some Cafe-related work, and worked on pouches. Due to a SNAFU with dinner I didn't leave the hotel until 8:30 or so, without dinner. We were out of eggs to add to Eowyn's dinner, so I stopped at Wendy's and got a bunch of plain grilled chicken sandwiches and burgers. The dogs were quite content to share with me for dinner.


Saturday morning, instead of digging in the big yellow road case for a stitched paperback cover as an example of one of the class projects for the sewing class at MuseCon, I cut one out and got it ready to sew together, as well as a keychain (I couldn't find the example keychain I made last year - not terribly surprising). I also grabbed all the tools that would make up the sewing kit that students can order, and one of the jewelry display cases we'd gotten from Ron's sister to keep people from hurting themselves on the awl.


More hanging out in the Cafe, plus at the MuseCon sales table. Sewed up the book cover and the keychain, then back to lacing. Helped set up the MuseCon party, and eventually went home, stopping for more sandwiches for the dogs (had pizza during party setup myself). During setup for the party Ron called from the Cafe and asked how much one of the pouches I'd finished was. It went home with a friend of ours. :)


Over the weekend I finished off the little squarish soft pouch, 3 of the 5 larger soft pouches, a book cover, the keychain (not that it was a big deal), and did work on the last two larger soft pouches. Sunday (and yesterday) I did no lacing, I was pooped.


Yesterday was kind of a rest day.


After sleeping in we went shopping for Otter Necessities. We got a small UPS to run the iPad at events so Ron can do more of the record-keeping (he's currently modified my sales spreadsheet for at-event use), and ramps for trailer use. At lunch I came up with a couple pouch/pocket ideas. I hoped to get started on one of them in the afternoon, but was interrupted by a dirty dishes, then flailing around with TurboCad, Illustrator, and laptop-desktop synchronization. Perhaps tonight.


Not that I was terribly awake anyway. Early to bed last night. Good thing I decided to do Maidens instead of Capricon - there were three other people with leather goods, although none with primarily belts and pouches. We even bought from one of them - although corsets, not leather. And several admired Robin's steampunk-ish pockets I'd made him for his birthday.


Sunday morning we dropped off the dark green, navy, and black whole hides off with Alt Kilt to have made up for Ron. And I did succeed in not touching the money I'd set aside from Maidens to pay for it.


I typed up almost all of this yesterday on the iPad as part of testing how long the UPS would power it, but ran into a problem when I tried to post - all the paragraph breaks were lost, and when I tried to edit blogger gave me a blank window. Fortunately, I was able to revert to draft and not lose the text.


Same problem today, so I published the one-ginormous-paragraph post, copied, reverted to draft, went into edit mode (and got no text yet another time), pasted and actually edited.  Grumble.


Stopping tonight for end pieces to make ramps to get from the side porch to the ground. The folding metal ramps we got yesterday are too short to work on the porch. We considered returning them and just getting two sets of metal end pieces and 2-bys to make wooden ramps, but the metal ones fold up to a nice compact size, and won't require any measures to prevent warpage.