A friend talked me into applying to do this trade fair a few months ago. And whilst I know that it's just an attempt to take me down with her, I fell for it and agreed. Because, you know, it was months away.
Only it's not months away now, it's next week. Did you hear that Karen??? It's NEXT WEEK!
Which is why I've been a little distracted whilst I frantically try and find the time to prepare all my samples for it. As well as redesigning my business cards and designing the display. Oh and looking after the craziest one year old ever!
Jim's been helping though and I have an extra couple of days this week to work, but it's still going to be a close one.
And it's not made any easier by the fact that Sew Hip still have all my samples (some of which I've been intending to use), from as far back as Issue One, even though I keep asking for them back. Hmmm.
So most of my time at the moment is spent working on samples, but I am still trying to fit in the odd bit of fun sewing. And apparently covering your ironing board counts as fun sewing. In this house at least.
I had been wanting to recover my ironing board for a long time, but it's one of those jobs that has always been pretty low down on the list of priorities as well as being a job that I've assumed would be complicated or fiddly. But now that I'm staring at the thing whenever I'm sat at my sewing table, it's suddenly leapt right up that list of priorities.
I used a great tutorial that I found here and had the whole thing finished within an hour or so. In fact the longest part was trying to decide which fabric to use to cover the board.
I literally sat and stared at my choices for hours before deciding on the blue striped linen, finally realising that I needed to use something quite plain, so that it didn't take up even more visual space than it already was.
Once I had chosen the fabric, I cut the existing channel off of the original cover (as per the tutorial), leaving about a inch allowance and then lay the bare board down on the linen and cut around it again leaving a seam allowance, but this time I left about 5 inches all the way around.
Then I sewed the original channel to the linen, finished the edges and hey presto! Easy and quick.
And it looks so much better that I'm kicking myself for not doing it sooner.