Institches: Nov/Dec Project - FIYAH!

When Kelli and I decided to call the Nov/Dec project, "Dealer's Choice", I knew exactly what I was going to make.

See, Bubba has been taking his shirts to the dry cleany lately because he, like me, detests ironing in a very enthusiastic manner. To the point where, rather than hanging up shirts out of the dryer (or in my case any clothing at all), the shirts just get left in the dryer to be "warmed up" when one needs to wear them. And while this is an effective method for keeping the major wrinkles out of clothes, it does mean that you're always getting dressed in the kitchen, your collars are doomed to be all crinkled up in an annoying way and your wife (me) gets all bitchy she goes again to throw wet clothes in the dryer and she is met with the same pile of semi-warm, semi-wrinkled man shirts.

I will spare you the details, but there have been some dramatic "discussions" in our house about the logistics of two people separately laundering clothes and how this can be accomplished when the:

A. Dryer is acting as a warming closet.
B. The weekend is only two days long.

Anyhoo, Bubba took it upon himself to devise a much more effective means of achieving wrinkle-free shirts - he packs them up and takes them to the dry cleany to be cleaned and pressed and returned on hangers which can be hung in our closet so getting dressed doesn't have to include "ducking behind the dryer when the neighbor opens their window".

Frankly, I applaud this effort. On a few levels, actually, because I can never get my crap together long enough to gather dry cleanables on any regular schedule even though I have a dry cleaning service at work and even though I have plenty of crap that could use a good press.

Ah well, this is why so many of my clothes come from Target. Land of the machine wash/dry.

So, when I saw him wadding up his shirts and throwing them in the back of the truck, my mind immediately went to the Oversized Laundry Bag pattern in InStitches. What better way to say, "Hey man, thanks for being smarter than me and doing what I should have been doing all along!" than to give him a proper sack in which to carry his dry cleany shirts?

And bless him for giving me a big enthusiastic thumbs up when I suggested it.

I was reassured of the "fun" status of this project when I asked Bubba what kind of fabric he had in mind and he said, "Dunno - how about astronauts or Peppy Le Pew or KC Chiefs or or or...something like that."

I believe it was at this point that I started to drool.

I knew that I was going to get to go to the fabric store and pick out the most fucked up looking patterns that I normally look at and go, "Who would ever buy this and WHAT would they even do with it and how come I have to buy something with pleasing colors and shapes when I could have skeleton pirates and flames??"

Well, I didn't know about the pirates or flames at that point, but I knew I wasn't going to have to be all why don't they have a blue that matches this blue and where do they keep the baby fabric and for gawd's sake where do they keep the damn 10 oz. canvas in this shithole and what not.

Sadly, I did have to do some hunting for 10 oz canvas (btw: no canvas I saw came with a weight in ounces so I just used some I had at home, whatever), but there was very little color matching going on and the only baby fabric I got had pink giraffes on it and is very rad, so everything worked out.

Then I went home and sewed and sewed with the scary ass fabric while watching the 49ers lose (LOSERS) and the Raiders win (LOSERS) and in the end I had a very sweet and awesome Oversized Laundry Bag to present to The Mister who couldn't have looked more pleased. I even customized the bag for his specific use by excluding the bottom portion of the bag to keep the size in check for the Just Shirts type of laundry he'd be handling.

The real beauty came when he stuffed it full of shirts and threw it in the truck. Just like my vision! Except now with pirates! And he also said "yarrrr", I'm sure of it. And I said "Avast ye maitees!" for no particular reason except I'd been staring at pirates all afternoon and could.not.help.myself.

Tell me, are eye-patches still in style? Just you know, because...