I Made A Thing

 and I'm really pleased with it. 

Honestly, I know  it's nothing  to write home about, it's just a small needle case made from the free kit that came on the front of a cross stitch magazine. A competent sewer could have knocked it off in an afternoon. 

But there's the thing. I'm not even a half way competent sewer. Partly this is because my mother trained as a teacher of Domestic Science, (later known as Home Ec., later given some fancy name when the government decreed that everyone had to study a 'technology' qualification.)  Basically, cooking, sewing and household management. You'd think this would mean that I was a super whizz at all those things but I'm not, because however patient my mother was with her school pupils, she was not particularly patient when teaching her children and she also demanded as near to perfection as you could get, with the result that it always seemed that however well you sewed anything, when she looked at it, it was never good enough. The other reason is that  we moved house when I was twelve; at my old school the very old-fashioned teacher believed in learning to sew everything by hand before letting her pupils loose on a machine that shockingly made sewing easier, and at the new school learning to use a sewing machine was the first thing that was mastered when the girls arrived fresh form their junior schools. As a result I was never taught to use a sewing machine, sewing lessons became absolute nightmares and I dropped Domestic Science at the very first opportunity. 

So that's why I can't/don't sew. That said, although the needle case is wonky, it is at least not put together with raw edges encased in bright green blanket stitch which is what the instructions in the magazine would have had me do. Since I hemmed the edges of the lining it's a bit too small, and despite all my efforts the edges aren't quite straight, In fact it's a bit lopsided every which way. But, I Don't Care. It's sewing and I did it. It's pretty and it's useful and with all its faults, I love it.