A New Project, Nerves and an Excellent Weekend.

After many months of meaning to, but never quite getting around to it, I finally attempted a sewing project, in an attempt to break the stranglehold baking has on the therapeutic fun-things-to-do-that-double-as-gifts-for-people space in my life. Rochelle had mentioned an apron she had seen on her adventures in Australia and seeing as it was her birthday, I figured it was a good excuse to give it a try. I am most definitely hideously out of practice, and the finished product was nowhere near as polished as I would have liked it to be, but I definitely had fun making it, and I was confident enough to mess with the pattern a bit and to draw my own designs to appliqué on. 

All in all, I'd class the experiment a success, enough of one that I'm contemplating investing in a sewing machine of my own, so that I can play about more, as a large amount of my frustrations came from not knowing the machine I was sewing with, something that would be fairly quickly remedied, I imagine.

I did, however, completely forget to take any photos, at all, of the finished product, despite promising Izy that I would, given that she's been encouraging me to do this for ages. Oops.

In other news, I have a job interview on Wednesday. NERVOUS. It was supposed to be tomorrow, but it's been delayed, which is rather handy, because I have a horrid head cold and  can now stay at home in bed tomorrow and wallow. It's stupid to be nervous, because I know that I would be good at the job and I know that I generally present well in interviews, but still, I cannot help it.

Despite the aforementioned sickness, I had a most excellent weekend. Saturday was a general day-of-pottering about and then catching up with Rob and Rochelle in the evening (including eating delicious bento box goodness, zomg). Sunday was all about MOTAT. We discovered that MOTAT had a tea exhibition on about the history of tea in New Zealand and that they also served high tea on the third Sunday of the month so we decided it would be worth a day exploring around. High tea combined with cool old technology? Hell yes! A good excuse to be comically overdressed and get to play with cool stuff. Aside from a very brief visit there last year, I hadn't been to MOTAT in years, and neither had any of the other 8 people in our group. 

It turned out to be a fantastic day's expedition. We got to play with remote controlled tanks. We saw steam engines and vintage cars and old aeroplanes and miniature railways. They had the printing presses running so we got to see how they worked, too. We saw tanks. We saw a working forge in the Victorian village. We had a tea etiquette lesson from a fabulous old lady in a green velvet dress, lace bonnet and satin gloves, who took a shine to us and broke the rules so that we could have high tea in the vintage tea room. We had a tram ride (and didn't pay $10 for the privilege, unlike the Wynyard Quarter). At the end of the day, when we had to leave, we all felt like we could have spent several more hours exploring. It's definitely worth going, especially on a day when they have lots of the extras, like the tanks and trains, running. $14 well spent. I shall be going back for another visit, to see the things I missed, soon.