Sewed a grocery shopping bag to give away as a birthday present. It has a very subtle machine-embroidered letter “k” that I now see is nearly invisible in the photo, despite being quite large.

I expected this project to take about an hour, but it took almost exactly twice as long. I even did some estimating – and was still way off.

Measure, cut, sew edges, sew edges once more for an enclosed seam, pin top hem, sew top hem, measure handles, cut handles, sew handles, attach handles. 10 steps, say 5 minutes each, that’s 50 minutes, round up to an hour.

The zigzag embroidered letter was a last-minute afterthought, but that wasn’t the thing that made the whole project take so much longer than expected. No, it was totally ordinary work that I had simply not accounted for – some of which I might have expected if I had planned more carefully, and some that came out of nowhere.

Ironing the fabric (and setting up the ironing board, and waiting for the iron to heat up, etc etc). Piecing together one of the faces of the bag out of two separate pieces because the fabric scraps I had were too oddly shaped. Folding the top hem, twice, in a stiff fabric. Measuring for the placement of the handles. Fighting with the sewing machine when sewing over the place where the handles attach to the body of the bag and there are like seven layers of fabric to punch through. Refilling the bottom bobbin when it ran out of thread. Fighting with the machine again when it made crazy tangles after I replaced the bobbin, because the top thread had gotten out of one of the hooks it needs to run through, without me noticing.

Estimating is hard. It’s a good thing I was in no hurry. The birthday in question isn’t until Sunday – oodles of time left! – so this didn’t matter at all. And the end result looks pretty nice, even though it’s not very photogenic.