Project DS/Project 52 - Week 30

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Well the theory last weekend was to get a big chunk of work done on the Doublestar kite - all went well on Saturday when I got stuck into hemming, I now have only 23 pieces out of 140 left to hem,which means I managed to hem 37 pieces this time.  Sunday was set aside for assembly on the theory that assembly would need two people (twice the brain power to try and work out how to do it!), whereas hemming I can finish in the evening on my own.

Whilst doing the little bit of assembly we had already achieved, I had discovered the hard way that the sewing machine wasn’t keen on the double sided tape we had used to hold everything together until sewing time.   I seem to remember a bit of a metallic crunch and since then things haven’t quite been right with the machine - missed stitches, tangles etc.  I spent hours on Sunday fighting to get the thing to sew the bit we had finally worked out how to tape (should have written notes on what we did the first time!) - managing to sew three out of five pieces before giving up and asking for assistance to find out what was wrong with the machine. 

Thats where things took a turn for the worst and all work on the kite was temporarily halted.  A new sewing machine was ordered on the internet!

….and as if by magic - my new machine turned up today, we’ve been playing about with it tonight (although we are both a bit unsure about Stephen playing with it too much given what happened when he touched the last one!).  I think I have decided that the automatic needle threader gadget is probably slower than actually threading by hand, but otherwise its looking good, and work will resume shortly!

Project 52 photo - a broken sewing machine!

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Project 52 - Week 29

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Photo from the weekend at Shoreham - I was holding the camera right above Tom and couldn’t see the screen so was really impressed with this one!

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Shoreham

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Its been ages since I’ve been down to Shoreham to visit family (last time was Christmas) and as I don’t go down there as often as I’d like to, I jumped at the chance of combining a visit to the Smart garage in Guildford to finally get the promised cruise control fitted to the car with a stay at my brother’s place and a weekend of madness with two very energetic little boys and their parents!

The cruise control fitting left me wandering around Guildford for about 3 hours, killing time, in which I discovered, firstly, that a lot of the shops are well out of my price range, secondly that Starbucks make a very nice White Mocha coffee (yum!), thirdly, and unfortunately far too late, that Guildford has a branch of Oxfam dedicated to books/videos DVDs (great for killing time!), and lastly that I would be grateful of the cruise control after spending three hours walking around the town with a dodgy foot!  I got the call and returned to the garage, and was left sitting in the showroom while my car was collected from the workshop - ignore the phone they said, as if I would be tempted to answer it!  At least I got some time to start reading the book I bought from Oxfam, almost a disappointment when my car arrived back.  Car done, it was time to head down to Shoreham.

For once my timing was perfect, I arrived at Shoreham just in time for lunch, and my ego was plumped up just a bit when I heard two young boys shouting for Auntie Christine to come sit next to them - its nice to be in demand!

The rest of the weekend was hectic and quite noisy, being woken up in the morning with a rubber centipede dangling over your face is an interesting experience, but then I guess thats what you get for buying young boys rubber centipedes in the first place!  One of the best bits of the weekend was the weather on Saturday being good enough to go sit for quite some time on the breakwater rocks on Shoreham beach while the boys played, and soak up the piece and quiet of the beach at this time of year.  Very pretty it was too, although as I was taking photos almost directly into the sun and couldn’t view the screen very well it seems I took all the landscape photos a bit crooked!

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