Still Not Knitting

So for my second fancy napkin, I decided to up the ante to "Varsity" level. This meant doing a double rolled hem with mitered corners and topstitching. I'm told it takes less thread and looks much, much neater overall.
It's pretty simple too, minus all the pressing. You fold the hem over a certain amount, press, repeat. Then you miter your freaking corners, which is not as easy as it sounds, then sew it down. Like so:

Oh so neat and tidy!

The thing about mitering double rolled corners though: I think this lady's instructions are stupid and make no sense.

She says do all the rolling and pressing as instructed. Then open it up and draw a line diagonally with the center at the 2nd pressed line. Fold the first pressed line in. Well, in that case you can't see the freaking line you just drew as a guide. I folded it back as instructed, lined it up as best I could, sewed it, clipped it, folded it back as instructed, stitched all along it. And you know what?

Bleh.

It looked like garbage. I'm willing to put some of it down to user error, but I want to clearly state that the whole process seems flawed. What is the point of a guideline you can't see to guide you?
So I scrapped all of that and started playing with other ways to miter these corners that might give me a better result.

Meh.

Not bad!

I think with that last one I nixed the first fold over before mitering and just turned the whole corner in? I've already forgotten, but I have six more napkins to practice with, anyway!

But at this point I had to take a hard stop from making napkins and move on to the next project: Picnic Placemats. 

Does that sound a little silly and useless to you? It did to me. But then I realized it could A) be a knitting needle holder and B) could be modified into something else I needed. 

My brother-in-law requested nice drawing pens for his birthday, and I was happy to oblige. However they came in a plastic baggy that was disintegrating by the time Amazon got it to my door. I needed a better solution. Why not a modified 'placemat' with channel stitching for the pens? 

But the pens are narrow and this pattern looks big and bulky with wide binding. What if I tried to modify it more to be more like my professionally made knitting needle holder without having to bind edges and it might make the profile smoother and more user-friendly...

Nope. My mother and unofficial sewing mentor said nope. She said do it the way they tell you to first and THEN you can get cocky and think you can make all these adjustments without preplanning and minimal skills. 

I hate it when she's right :)

I had already cut out the materials for a by-the-book 'placemat', so I wouldn't be wasting materials. 

So I basted, turned over the pocket, and got started on how to miter 3 inch binding. The first one went about as well as you'd expect. The second however...

See the lining up of all the horizontal bits? That's what's supposed to happen. 

So I bound my fuzzily cut out binding strips to the base fabric without much incident and a minimal to moderate amount of fudging the corners. 

Huh. I think I pivoted too soon?

This is the back or wrong side of the binding. Not as big a fan of how this looks. 

This bit looks pretty good though. 

I also was not a huge fan of the way you bound the folded-over bottom edge. I didn't think it looked that neat and definitely took a lot of fudging.

Meh.

But I also realized that I don't think you see a lot of properly bound edges on fabric things much anymore. We all seem to like double rolled hems instead.
 Anyway, I finished up that sucker by learning how to stitch the ditch, which is apparently the fancy way to bind things and do waistbands on work trousers. Amongst all the other ways to do waistbands, I guess? As my first time stitching the ditch (which means to stitch over a previously stitched line on one side of the fabric to catch fabric in the back side without having another line of stitching on the front) and having poorly cut materials, I missed the back edge of the binding frequently and had to do more fudging. There's only so much fudging you can do before you pull the binding all out of whack and it gets funny diagonal wrinkles. I don't have pictures of that, of course.
So, there was my 'placemat', all bound and pocket-ed up.

Huh.

 Overall, not bad.
By this point I was again at the 'screw this, I need to get going and I want this done' point in my day. So I quickly decided on 8 pockets, divided up the width, and merrily did channel stitching to create pockets within the pocket.

See, that's how it's done. 

And you know what? It looks pretty good. 

And you know what else? It is absolute rubbish as a knitting needle keeper. ABSOLUTE. RUBBISH. It is not to scale, the pockets are either too wide or too deep or too shallow. Everything keeps slip-sliding around and it is driving me bonkers. Bah humbug.