bend and snap

“hey Rach,” started the message, “are you interested in pilates?”. I confessed that I’d done it a million years ago – weekly reformer classes in 2019, and into zoom classes as lockdowns swept around the world and through the best of intentions. Once the world resurfaced, my exercise mojo failed to follow, and I’d never really gotten back into it. I could give myriad excuses; my friend who was my pilates teacher closed up shop, I wasn’t a member of a gym, we’re in a pandemic and who wants to share a room with sweaty puffing people possibly laden with the plague…the reality is the most pressing reason was that I am, by nature, more closely related to the sloth than the cheetah.

Until now, that is. If there’s one thing I love more than rotting on the couch in the sun, it’s hanging with friends and trying something new. So once the idea was planted, I was all in. Let’s go to water pilates, I said, may as well give it a crack.

That was six weeks ago. We’ve been going every Monday, at our local pool that’s recently had a major upgrade and expansion. The pool is heated, and the room has a full wall of windows with a fabulous view out over the park and a large Chinese elm; a tree under which I spent many a school swimming carnival dodging sunburn with the friend who’d convinced me physical exertion was an ideal way to start my Mondays. The first few weeks, we giggled our way through the class as we tried not to float away mid exercise, until our teacher introduced weights. They worked a treat, and the following week when I was in the big smoke, I hit up Kmart and got us a set each.

Of course, I couldn’t just chuck the weights in my bag. They might get lost. They might get tangled up with my towel and end up in the washing machine. They didn’t have a logical storage spot in the house and I didn’t want to lose one or the other as they got shuffled from bench to desk to drawer and back again.

Enter – the bag

After quite a bit of hunting, I managed to find the mesh left over from batch-sewing the Flora Supply Case for quilt camp 2019. I knew it would be the perfect thing for a bag for my weights, small and lightweight and zero dramas shoving the weights in there post-class without having to bother leaving them to dry. I picked through my fabric stash, and there was a very conveniently sized offset from my ottoman covering adventures that was just the right width.

I pressed under the ends, and stitched them in place with a cute cross-stitch-inspired stitch (I think maybe stitch 67 on my Janome Memorycraft?), and then pressed the long edges. I stitched one side normally along the pressed fold, and then used the same fancy stitch to top stitch it in place. Then it was just a matter of French-seaming the mesh on two sides with a narrow zig-zag, and threading through some fabulous metallic pink cord I found in my stash that I don’t even know where it came from (maybe from my nan or great-aunt when they were downsizing in my direction?) but was the exactly perfect shade to tone in with my fabric & thread.

The bag works a treat; I probably could have made it slightly shorter, but cutting this piece off squared off the main piece, so I’d rather the bag a bit longer and zero waste. It also means I don’t need to pay too much attention to getting them back in the bag “right” – they’ll still fit even if they go in end first.

Today is all about the end of term – uni holidays are coming up fast so we’re trying to wrap up school this week. EOFY has me chained to the computer massaging budgets, adjusting payments, running reports. I’ve a couple of unwell kiddos so in between all of that I’ve been on nurse duty. I was hoping to get some more of my WITL album done, or even just a sock cast off, but I’m thinking crafting time is going to be on the back burner for the next couple of days. Maybe tonight I can get everyone to bed early to rest up and I can settle in with a few episodes of a show and my knitting at least? We’ll see. Happy Monday friends!