Have passport, will travel

I have my passport back! I can travel again!

I'm not sure I mentioned before, but I've been without my passport for a few weeks. I feel sort of lost without my passport. It needed to be renewed before the summer and I figured that I may as well do it now whilst I don't have to go anywhere. Cue form filling and new photographs, simple so far.

A little while after I posted everything off, I got a letter from the passport office saying they had tried to phone me and hadn't got a reply. This is hardly suprising given the hours I work, so I called them back. I thought they were going to query the photograph, as I bore more than a passing resemblance to Wednesday Addams ten years ago and they don't allow dark and brooding semi-profile shots with long hair draped over your face anymore. It was actually wierder than that - they wanted a copy of my degree certificate as they wanted to put it on the observations page. I was a bit surprised at this and slightly concerned it would be the fastest way to ensure I got cavity searched everytime I travel. I declined politely and managed to convince them it wasn't necessary as I wouldn't be much help if someone collapsed on the plane anyway as the extent of my medical training is a first aid at work certificate. Anyway, I have it back now - thankfully without any indication of what I do plastered all over the back page. It never even crossed my mind they'd collect that sort of data and makes me wonder what else they have on me. I hate being quizzed at airports - "Oh, I work with viruses now, but before then I worked in a lab designing drugs" is probably not an advisable way to present yourself. It's not as exciting as it sounds. I work with a virus that gives cows the squirts and before then I was making sugars that would get stuck to that bug you find in cat poo.

Still, as it's new and shiny I figured it would be nice to make a cover for it to stop it getting covered in backpack sticky, fluff, sand and diet coke like my last one.

Since the sewing machine and I are getting on alright at the moment, fabric is the way forward. I have this fabric. I've had it ages. It came out the remnant bin in a charity store in Oxford city centre originally. I thought it was one length, but when I got it home I realised that it was actually several small bits stapled together and because of that it's been in my fabric bag ever since. I think someone had been trying to make cushion covers, then got disturbed.



If I cut out a strip roughly twice the length of my passport I can sew it into a book shape with two open ends.



If I then turn it inside out, it will hide the seams.



...checking to see if it will fit...



...and finish off with a few very old buttons. I love these buttons :)



I just hope it stops it getting as messy as my last one!

It's that bag again...

The sewing machine and I don't talk about the last tote bag incident. We sort of skirt round the issue, laugh nervously then change the subject. There was much thread snapping, much cursing and I still have a half-finished (read: totally destroyed) unevenly stiched mess of inverted seams in my fabric bag. I am going to leave it there as a warning - a bit like the shrunken heads displayed outside scary tribal villages in old movies.

A couple of weeks ago I was out in the styx renewing my first aid certificate at the local St John's ambulance centre, a process which happens every three years. In my lunch hour, I came across a wonderful haberdashery store and pulled a good few metres of really thick cotton out of the remnant bins. Like most haberdashery stores, remnants can't be cut - but unlike most haberdashery stores these remnants were between three and seven metres long, really pretty good quality fabric and amazingly good value.

Like most crafters, I horde fabric. I can't sew for toffee, but I have bags of the stuff. I just get it out every now and again and play with it.



This was one of the larger bits I acquired. It's 6.5 metres in length, bright and stripy. They guy in the store said only a special sort of person buys fabric like that. I'm going to take it as a compliment.



As usual I'm just winging it. It's not too bad with this fabric though, because it's stripy, so easy to cut straight. I'm going to start by cutting a strip of fabric about 80 cm wide and 90 cm long - then folding it in half length ways so the pattern is on the inside. Then I'm going to run the sewing machine down both sides so I get a 35 cm ish by 90 cm tube with two seams.



If I then turn my tube inside out and fold it in on itself, I end up with something that looks like a lined tube but with the side seams hidden. I can pull the bottom of the tube through the top and sew through one layer closing one end of the tube.



Then I can sew the base in place on the inside. This leave me with three hidden seams and the one you can see is at the bottom of the bag on the inside. If I was going to line it - you wouldn't even see that one, but as it's already two layers thick and it's really heavy cotton, I'm going to leave it. It is - suprisingly - a fairly tidy seam, so I'm not even going to tack a ribbon over it. It's hard to show all this, it's a bit like fabric origami.



It's a little taller than I want it - so I'm going to tuck the top over and sew it in place once I've done the handles. If I was going to line it - I'd stitch the lining underneath this strip. It also allows me the opportunity to stitch an inner pocket in place if I want to at a later date.



Handles next - one strip folded at the edges then folded again. I've stitched down both sides to make it even.



I can attach these by running the sewing machine over the ends.



A few buttons to finish off and that's it.



I must admit I really enjoyed making this, the machine behaved perfectly, with no snapping or breaking. So this might be the truce I was looking for :)

I am your conduit

My day job is a conversation stopper. People ask me what I do, I tell them I'm a scientist, they press for more information, I revert to geek and they glaze over and start dribbling out of the corner of their mouths. You have no idea how many dates I've lost because of this. It's sad. People back away from me when I talk about work. I don't fit in the real world any more.

The worse thing is is that as much as I love my job, I don't exactly fit with the real geeks either. I read things other than JACS, my idea of a meal is not something that comes in a foil tray, I wash my clothes, I wear jewellery and I have an A-level in Sociology. I don't find jokes about Linux particularly funny and I do not have a binary clock on my desk. Geek is my second language but I've been here so long, I sometimes feel I've lost my ability to speak in my mother tongue.

I knew things had got bad when I got the sewing machine out to solve a work problem.

This is my problem.



It's an NMR tube - a fine and quite expensive thin walled glass tube with a little plasic lid. It's got some deuterated chloroform in the bottom of it, plus the stuff I made in the lab yesterday. The issue is that these tubes are fragile and expensive and I have to take them to another room to do my measurements. Because of the way this place works, anything that goes outside of the lab has to be in a secondary container to protect against spillages. These things rattle around and are generally a pain to transport. It's not that it's unsafe (she says, looking at the scars on her hands), I just don't want to lose what's inside. It took me three weeks to make that, you can't even see it and I'm storing it in a glass tube a couple of microns thick. It's the chemical equivalent of taking a rare birds egg to a student party and expecting it not to end up as a tequila sunrise.

Anyway. I bought this fabric in IKEA last year. I don't know why. I like fabric.



I have a lot of fabric even though I can't sew. I think in my head I'd love to be able to sew when in fact I'm cack-handed and impatient. I hate ironing, I don't do straight lines and me and the sewing machine - well - we called an armed truce after the tote bag incident but we still view each other with a mild distrust. Accuracy is the casualty of speed when I sew. That and my fingers. I also have this fabric for some reason, which probably used to be a curtain and appears to have corn printed on it. It doesn't win any points for design unless I'm taking up making up cushion covers for a trailer park in the deep south, but its one saving grace is that it's plain on the reverse.



I have a picture in my head. I'm glad you can't see it because later on when it all goes pear-shaped I can claim it's how I wanted it to look. My mum always tells me I should measure twice and cut once. I found I can by-pass this rule by buying a larger bit of fabric and drawing round something. My NMR tubes are seven inches tall - it just has to be a bit taller than that.



A lesson that I learnt through trial and error is that oil pastels, conte crayons, overhead projector pens and/or permanent markers are not suitable substitutes for tailor's chalk. Really no. They also go straight through the fabric and onto the tablecloth. Which to be fair will probably end up stitched to this anyway, so what the hell. Eventually - two bits of fabric much bigger than I need in order to compensate for the inevitable screw-ups.



Let me introduce my sewing machine. We don't get on even though we've been together many years. We're like a married couple that tolerate each other, but only just. It also appears to have red thread in it, which confuses me given the last thing I remember making was blue dress for a fancy dress party. So now we have the bobbin arguement. I'd just like to say, at this point, that I am *really* pleased you have no audio feed.



Cutting down the fabric gradually gives me two rough squares, a wide strip and a narrow strip. I'm hemming the strips - well, actually I appear to be punching a small set of neat holes in the fabric for fun at the moment, but it'll hem in a bit.



Arrange, sew, hem...



...then add the mother of all pop-studs by hand.



I'm also adding an itty bitty bag because sometimes I need to swap the lids, so having somewhere to put them will save me shoving them in my pockets then having to fish the damn things out of the washing machine.



And I'm done :)





*sigh* I guess I could have said it was a jewellery roll.