Chertsey Catchup

After my panic creating at the end of last week, my hot water bottle cosy wasn't needed as the evening class was cancelled.  However the afternoon ladies have decided to host their own class when I'm away in January - and they want to make hot water bottle cosies, so they have the lesson all planned for them.

This month the afternoon ladies were making Pinch purses.  I didn't get any photos of the ones they started to make (and will hopefully finish at home) but I can show you my sample.

They pinch open thanks to the donated (thank you Brian) and disassembled metal tape measure.  I used instructions from various websites and bloggers (thank you Kathy) and the resulting instruction sheet can be down loaded here

I don't know about museums near to you, but Chertsey Museum works closely with local schools and provides artifacts for schools to use in history lessons.  Schools can hire a box of stuff (my school has used the WW2 boxes) or can provide a member of staff with artifacts for a particular period.  One of the periods used to be Tudor, which was fine, but the curriculum changed a few years ago, and out went the Tudors and in came the Vikings!

There wasn't *a lot* of Viking history in Chertsey (although they do have a 10th century viking sword found locally) and certainly not anything robust enough to be taken on school trips, but the museum has done what it can to be able to help schools deliver lessons on this subject, and one of the things it has bought is a replica Viking shield

This long ramble leads to "Benta, could you just . . . make a bag for our shield to be carried around in?"

I found a website where I could translate "viking shield" to Viking runes, and with its help embroidered this on one side of a padded bag

And this on the other

For the lining?  I couldn't resist using some of my precious favourite Michael Miller viking fabric

Perfect!