Wheels for Days

Roller derby is played on all kinds of floors. We skate on a wooden floor that has qualities that shift with the weather. What this means is that we tend to skate on different wheels in the different seasons. Harder wheels (ranges 90+) allow for more speed and slide and less grip, softer wheels have more grip but may feel slower at times (78-88). I’m currently skating on 92 (summer, so the floor has grip of its own), but in winter I skate on a mix of 84 and 88. If we play on a soft sport court floor elsewhere, we go up in wheel hardness, last weekend, I skated on 98. What this means is that I have accumulated an almost uncomfortably large amount of wheels.

I used to store all my wheels in ziplock bags and tried to stack those, but they always rolled everywhere. So a little while ago, I went on the hunt for patterns for wheel bags. In the end I resorted to an adapted version of a zippered box pouch. There wasn’t a ‘right size’ pattern online that I could quickly find, so I resorted to making a scale version from paper to determine how it worked exactly.

After the scaled version was completed, I drew it out in the right measurements, added seam allowance and got on with it. The considerations where the the bottom should be flat for the bag to stand on, there should be enough zipper to allow the two stacks of wheels to enter and exit the bag, it should not be so large that the wheels slide around and it needed a carry strap. I cut out the first iteration and sewed it together. My wheels are also different sizes, I have one set of 38 x 59 mm (S), one set of 38 x 65 mm (L) and 3.5 sets of 38 x 62 mm (M).

The first bag (black mushrooms) was too large for the medium wheels, it needed about a cm in width reduction, but the large wheels fit in fine. For the second iteration (yellow mushrooms) I removed a cm along the width sides but I made a mistake in making the bottom smaller, so that one has an additional pleat. It again didn’t fit the M wheels, but the S wheels fit in fine. Next attempt, I reduced the width by .5 cm and made the correct adjustment on the bottom. This version fit the M wheels, so I cut out another and found that I didn’t have the right length zipper anymore. So I shortened the height by 8 cm on my paper pattern (which was a little too much in hindsight) for the half set and cut it out. I did have a zipper long enough for that one, so it was sewn together quickly. At night, I went to the sewing supplied shop and got more zippers – luckily it was the one night a week where the sewing shop was open until 21:00.

All of these bags are made from waterproof tablecloth fabric. The first and second fabric have also been used for the EDC, the pineapple fabric was already in the hoard for pouches, but I never got around to it. All pouches have a carry strap from a bit of fabric left over from some part of pouch making. I specifically gave the pineapple pouches different coloured zippers and carry straps to be able to differentiate the wheels inside with a single look. I will also add labels to the outside. For some non-deliberate reason, all my harder wheels (88+) are black. All the softer wheels (84-) are green. Happy coincidence? Anyway, my wheel pouches are now nicely stacked two high in the closet with less chance of them falling over and rolling everywhere. So far, this project feels successful.

Unsmellers

As you may be aware by now, I play roller derby. Roller derby comes with quite a lot of gear: helmet, mouth-guard, wrist-guards, elbow pads, knee pads and skates. It also comes with sweat. Sweat means that all that gear starts to smell funky quite quickly. Now, I’d gotten some pouches filled with something to soak up sweat to put in my skates since they were the worst offenders. This was actually super effective, however, I managed to lose one after the last game we played. This meant that only one skate would get dry again. I wanted to buy more but they were sold out, so I decided to see if I could figure out how they work.

I opened up the seam and it looked like matte crystals with a few purple ones in them (on the left). I figured they might be part of de-humidifiers, so I bought one. Turns out that was filled with some form of flaky stuff that was not exactly the same. I still wanted to try, so I grabbed the off-cuts of my plaid and made some little bags. Popped the stuff in and put them in the skates. However, these things reacted differently to what I’d hoped in that they got very wet, and hard and just weird. So I googled a little more and determined that the contents might actually be silica gel. Apparently, some cat litter is made of silica gel, so I got some of that and made some more pouches from the plaid leftovers. I also took out the stuff from the first iteration, washed them, and filled them with the cat litter (on the right).

There will be another derby practice tomorrow, so we’ll see if they work after I’ve sweated up my gear again. Fingers crossed!

Shrooms on the EDC

Some people have a pocket knife that they drag around everywhere, some people have a pen and a notebook, I have a whole pouch of stuff I transfer from bag to bag to make sure I have everything I might possibly need on a day to day basis. We call this the Every-Day-Carry. Mine’s been living in a pouch made from a weird kind of rain-coat-ish fabric that was never pretty but fairly functional. However, that pouch was completely flat with a zipper at the top, as such, fitting stuff in was a little hard at times. It needed a revamp.

Enter the tablecloth-type fabric sale which had some fantastic white on black mushrooms for sale. I got myself .5 meters and set to work creating a block zip pouch. I chose to do one 10 x 10 x 28 cm, since my original pouch was 28 cm. After finishing it, it turned out it was too big. So I made another one that was 8 x 8 x 28 cm. Perfect size! Left is the large one, middle the medium one and right the original one.

Next, I set out to create a little pouch for my dice. This was based on the Pyramid Pouch, mainly because I thought those looked cool and could hold some dice. The dice pouch now lives inside the larger box pouch that comes with me. I chose to do a red zipper because I had one on hand and I thought it looked cool.

After the success with the black pouches, I went back to the shop and got half a meter of the same fabric, but now in an ochre yellow. I was going to go on holiday for a few days and I wanted to have a nicer looking toiletries bag. So that is why the ochre came to be. It’s a little shorter than my original, since the longest thing in the toiletries bag would be my toothbrush. And saving space is always good.

Lastly, I made a tiny coin pouch based on some half-moon type thing (here) and attached a longish loop to it so that it could be fished out of my bag easily. My wallet does not have space for coins since it is cards only, but I wanted to have a place to put coins if I happened to pay in cash.

All in all, I had a good few hours of pouch making and am now set to create a cover for my new miniature scooter thing. It’s foldable to allow carrying, which is useful. However, if the wheels are dirty, my pants become dirty also and I want to prevent that from happening. Hopefully I’ll manage in a short enough time for it to be of use.

Gear Baaahg

I used to have all kinds of useful things floating around willy-nilly in my bag. It would take hours to find the pen, or the nail clippers or the charger for my phone in the depths of my bag. Then one day, I put all those little things in a zippered bag. I did not learn from this experience, since I have been having the same problem in my sports bag. For derby, I have a number of tools, pens and whistles floating around that I could never find when I needed them.

Then I got the luminous idea to make a bag for that gear. I still had some of the sheep fabric left from which I cut the black sheep. So I pinterested around the place and found this tutorial for a zippered pouch from Peggy Sew. My printer doesn’t work, so I measured the dimensions from the screen and drew it out. Two bits of fabric and a zipper, a bit of sewing and done!

It even has a handle so I can quickly pull it out of my gear bag.

After finishing the sheep one, I also made another one, a little smaller, for things like plasters and painkillers. This one is in green, and doesn’t have a bottom seam and was a quick fix. We will see if it holds up.

Tooth-ish

I brought the big Toothless to work in the days after I’d finished it. I felt it unfair to keep his glory all to myself. So people told me he was awesome and adorable, which was nice. One person completely missed a meter long dragon on my desk until another colleague asked why he had not commented on it yet, which was funny. Another colleague said that he wanted one too, and since it was his birthday soon, I’d better go home and start working on it. Well, it was too involved to do that, so I refused, however, I did suggest another option, a dragon (heavily) inspired by this one.

The deadline was today, and I had failed to start until about 11 o’clock at night on Saturday… I used this pattern and cut my pieces from the same fleece blankets as the original Toothless. I took some felt in green, black and white for the eyes, a zipper, thread, scissors, pins and needles and put it all in a ziplock bag. Why? Because I had plans to go to Amsterdam on Sunday to watch two roller derby games. I figured the train would be the perfect place to hand sew the Tooth-ish head together. The train certainly gave me enough time, it took from 8:15 to 12:15 to get to the place I needed to go, with some nice chatting with a grandma for about half of it.

The roller derby games were super awesome, extremely exiting and both games down to seconds left on the period clock and the necessity to do another final jam. We were on the edge of our seats. The Amsterdam B-team lost with 1 point against the Namur B-team, while the Amsterdam A-team won with 8 points against the Namur A-team (10 points scored in that last jam!). It’s so nice to see derby in action from the sidelines instead of the screen. I was very happy I went.

I finished all the sewing in the train/at the game and at home I used iron-on hem tape to affix the eyes. I put some candy in it and wrapped it up. The reaction was nice, so I’m happy! Let’s hope the new owner also likes it! Toothless to rule the world! – So why is this one called Tooth-ish? Because when you open him up, he’s got teeth!

Pouches and Globes

Yes, pouches and globes are an odd combination. In this case they do not even remotely belong together, apart from the fact that they were made in (approximately) the same month. The pouch is boring, the globe maybe less? So read on below the pouch pics if you want to know about a home assembled globe.

I made an additional little pouch for those necessities that you want in your bag at all times, but you’d rather have together than floating around separately. This involved cutting a square, serging the edges where the zipper would go, sewing in said zipper and serging the remaining edges. This was a 15 minute project at best, but it saved my sanity. This is the, super sexy of course, since I used a scrap of my Mondriaan fabric, result:

So, on to the cool stuff. Globes. I love them, especially old yellow ones. I don’t own any really old ones, or really any fancy ones, but I plan on having a nice wooden library room with a book-case with a ladder and my (to be assembled) collection of yellow globes. This is of course a long-term plan. My current collection is a sky globe that turns in all directions, a yellow normal globe which also turns in many directions, a magnetic puzzle globe, a glass etched little globe ball an a globe key chain. It’s not much but I like it. I have, however, managed to add some additional elements. Two new/old paper globes.

The other day I discovered this website, which houses a collection of paper automata and more. It also had the makings of several globes which you can assemble and construct at home. My first attempt was difficult since I didn’t have the right glue, so it’s wonky. This is it from three angles:

 

Today, I tried again, using a stickier glue. However, it still gaps where the hemispheres are stuck together, I will find a solution soon. The bottom right picture is the entire collection, hanging left is my most recent ball, while the first attempt is at the right. I will make more paper ones, once I figure out how to make them look nicer and find the right paper and glue (Paper Pino also has bigger versions!! E.g. here, here and here).

I shall collect more!

Gifts – 3

The last series of gifts was for four friends who celebrated their birthdays and moving house. I only knew two of the four, but I thought it was not very nice not to fix presents for all four. So I decided to make a series of zippered animal pouches. I’d seen this blogpost when it first came out, and was immediately in love. I decided to do a cat face pouch. That left me with 3 more animals (since I wanted different ones). I pinterested and found this one. Two down, two to go. I thought some more, googled a bit and thought ‘I want a rabbit’! So that was number three. Lastly I figured I wanted a frog, since frogs are awesome and I still had a green bedsheet that could be used.

I first sketched what I wanted and then used paint to draw all my designs. Yes, I know that paint isn’t the fancy tool to use for this sort of thing, but I happen to love paint and know how to work with it, so that’s what I did.

 Click this image for a bigger version

After I drew all of them, I went upstairs to find all the scraps I could. I managed to eke out all my design in those scraps (and the green sheet I’d already allocated to the frog). I’m going to post a tutorial of how I made the frog tomorrow. Even if you guys don’t find it interesting at all, I want to practice with tutorials and it’s my blog so I can do what I want, right?

Anyway, I proceeded to put together a frog, a cat with fish, a whale and a rabbit with carrot in one evening and one morning. It didn’t take me as much time as I thought it would, so that was nice. Here they are:

 

This is the whale, made of a couple of scraps of Mondriaan-esque fabric. The scraps were not large enough to accommodate the whole whale, so his back is pieced. His tail is stuffed, because it fell down and just looked sad. All the pouches have a red back lining (only back) to hide most of the seams and to give an impression of an open mouth when they are opened. I also added loops so they can hang somewhere.

 

Second was the rabbit. Since it is a rabbit, it required a carrot of course, and big front teeth. I also added a nose to this one. The orange and green was scraps from the scraps of the cat.

This is the cat. The cat has a fish and is made from scraps of my frog dress. Which is why there is a frog and and leg on the front and back respectively. I actually really like this one, it’s my favourite.

 

This is the frog (I forgot to take a picture of the back, but it’s identical to the front but without the zipper and eyes). The frog you’ll see more of in the next post. His birth was fully documented. The closed fronts of all the pouches are seen to the right.

They are a fairly colourful bunch together, and I like them all. Tomorrow the frogorial.

Pouch

I made a pouch for the Larp thing I’m going too. I now have two pouches and am still working on the complete outfit. I have the base of the skirt done, I have a shirt to wear with it. Now just the pockets and the over’coat’.

However, this is the pouch:

 

Closed and open. I hope it will be useful. It was a nice and simple project involving some leather, a pencil, a hole maker, needle + thread and a push pin (for making the thread holes). Real easy and real satisfying.

 

Productivity!

Friday at quarter past eleven, my vacation started. And so did a productive streak that continued until a couple of hours ago. The second semester of university finished on Friday after handing in the last assignment. I decided I wanted to make something. I found a free t shirt pattern on ‘3 Hours Past the Edge of the World’ and decided I wanted to sew a knit for the first time. There was this piece of light be knitted stuff (very see through) in my stash, and since I did not care much for it, I figured I could use it to test the pattern.

Here is the result:

Changes for next time? Yes, add length, find a less see through fabric, tighten it a bunch and cut the neckband in one piece (this is recommended, but I has scrap pieces that just fit the front and the back).  I felt the sleeves were also to wide, but I also had a wrong fabric for the pattern I think. Ah well, it was good practice, and I enjoyed myself. Although I doubt I’ll wear it often as it is so short.

So I printed and taped the pattern together, cut the fabric and sewed the left shoulder seam on Friday, and finished the shirt on Saturday, which I was pretty excited about. The productivity streak continued. I designed a pouch for my mp3-player to replace the enormous not fitting one I made before the holiday in France. Then I put it together using scraps from a coat project. It looks a bit weird but I think it should do the trick.

Here it is:

 

Lastly I decided to tackle my box of UFPs, I have this long black almost floor length dress (because I didn’t have enough fabric it’s about a cm of the floor without shoes), with a gray bust bit, that has never been finished. I ripped out the zipper, because it was too small, and am trying to get it to fit me better, which is difficult with the zipper being on my back and me not actually being able to see it. So I’ve left that be for now.  It will be tackled soon (I hope). (I tried to take a picture, but it was just wrinkles:)

The weird white looking bit on the right is the attachment of the gray fabric. I’m debating attaching long gray ties to make a bow in the back.. once I figure out how to get it to zip up nicely of course.  The quest continues for the perfect back.

Long Time No See

Yes I know, I’ve not been here for a while. I have no excuses. Well one, my sewing machine broke in December (which is quite the problem), so no sewing related things. I have made some things since the last time I’ve posted. A mp3-player pouch, it’s awful, ugly and crude but I needed one soon and my machine had just broke, and it works, so that’s fine. I’ll update it when I’ve gotten my machine fixed.

I’ve started a skirt that just needs hemming and buttonholes, (it’s almost all done by hand since my machine broke..), however, this was the beginning of January, and I’ve since done nothing to the skirt.

I did make a present for a friend, which was a pouch, this time with a flame embroidery. The pouch from all sides:

   

 

The last picture might look weird to you.. white things with dots and stripes on them? They are a couple of pebbles I got from our front garden. I painted dots and stripes on them and put them in the pouch with an instruction leaflet. When playing you can use them as runes or play games with them like Pigs. It is not very useful, but I thought it was fun. He seemed to like it, so I’m happy. I’m going to attempt to write more here, to make me do other things than watch television.