If this was my lunch bag I'd fill it with gratitude and sadness

Thank you very, very much for the dress advice yesterday. I'm so grateful that even if I don't have people to physically go shopping with, I have plenty of cyber-helpers! It's funny how much the panel was split, so I still haven't decided. I'm leaning towards picking a fight with Steven and not going.

So the first thing I would put in the new lunch bag is gratitude. Because this is a gift, I changed the design quite a bit from my half-a** late night version for Jamie. I used 99.8% of my brain cells figuring out the construction, and if you had given me an MRI when I got to dealing with the zipper and the two separate shell and lining bags it would have look like this:


I've concluded that you need a bigger brain than mine to figure out how to do this bit with more ease than I did. Obviously, I did manage to do it. But I'm sure there's a much easier way.

I know I said I might do a tute for this, but I don't think I will.

• Reason 1: It was a seriously time-consuming project with the Thinsulate, zipper, boxing out etc. For me, buying one in the shop makes more economic sense than sewing one over a day.
• Reason 2: I'm sure that there's an easier way to do this so I don't feel right having a tute explaining how to do something in a convoluted way.

I'm feeling pretty sad. It was a bad day to find out that there's a snarky thread on a sewing forum about one of my other tutes. When I first wanted to teach myself to sew just after Maia was born, I bought some proper sewing books and commercial patterns for baby clothes to get me started. It was so intimidating how technical everything was and I struggled through the commercial patterns to find that the garments were by and large, well, large. It was only through Craftster and the people I found on the sewing boards that I discovered that it was okay to construct things differently, that you could experiment with drafting your own patterns based on your own children, that there were thousands of other 'non-technical' sewers willing to share how they did things. That if you stopped obsessing about what you're 'supposed to do', you could find what worked for you and the sense of achievement you gained would give you the passion to continue trying, continue making, continue learning. I guess I'm in a tricky position. I've never pretended that I'm a technically-trained sewer or pattern drafter, but perhaps that's a mantle I've automatically adopted by sharing (and yes, selling) tutorials. What do you think, should you only share / sell things if they're technically correct? Or is the message that 'there are different ways to do things and this is one that's worked for me' valid enough to be shared?

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