Ah, my bialetti. Sweet little pot of darkest brown liquid joy. I think I can do anything as long as I have coffee. Back in the summer my friend gave me an old Krups espresso machine and it became something of a morning ritual to heat up the milk, fill up the tank and have lovely espresso punched out into a cup in mere seconds. Then it broke and so did my heart. I’ve had to use the stove top pot ever since but it’s not quite the same, nor, crucially, as fast.

But it doesn’t matter so much when it’s Sunday. I cranked myself out of bed this morning and set to with my cutting implements until i had this lovely pile of stuff. Fabric and interlinings ahoy, enough for three Tinas. (That’s the name of the bag I’m making, and also my friend, and yes the two are connected. Her mum is Finnish and chose the name Tina because apparently in Finland it’s a very classy name, but she says that she hadn’t realised that in England it’s a name only given to ‘barmaids and dogs’. Not a classification I would have made but Tina’s mum is very decided about it. I’ve digressed.)

Strangely, although I hate the cutting out, I love the ironing part, and I detest ironing at all other times. It was when I realised that you can do an awful lot of your sewing with the iron and make things sooo much easier for yourself with some sharp creases that it began to become pleasurable, so today I took a good couple of hours over it. Nothing to do with the fact that I had put Northanger Abbey on the TV while I did it. No, nothing to do with that.

Which leads us to this. Which is a wip. And it’s been so long since this place had a wip you must have decided that I did not intend to have one ever again. But there it is. Shell complete, tab complete, clippy line complete, pocket almost there. I decided to stop at this point because I was tired and if I try to put it together when I’m tired the seam ripper becomes my best friend, and that would have been altogether too much for a Sunday evening. So it’s to bed with me and back to this in the morning. Nice to have the old girl humming along at last.