The Crazy Things I Sew for My Husband aka Unexpected Man Sewing

My May challenge intentions were a new business shirt for Nerdy Husband. He has a favourite shirt that is on it’s last legs, complete with French cuffs and all those other fiddly details you find on expensive men’s shirt.

Being unable to find a suitable replacement, and having no luck shirt shopping in general, he requested that I clone it.

Many times.

I began by making a rub off using the pin-through-all-the-seams-to-make-holes-in-paper-then-trace technique.

You can look that up, it exists…probably not by that name 😉

Anywho, I made a boo boo and need to revisit some measurements and with my Put a Bird on It challenge garment still needing to be hemmed I put it down for a few days. Cue last weekend and NH had a new (and much easier and quicker) sewing request, one that is more in keeping with his usual “my wife could do that” thoughts.

One of NH’s hobbies is home brew. This is quite normal. We are Wellingtonians and Wellington is New Zealand’s capital of Craft Beer.

So here’s something a bit different for you! A grain bag, custom sized to fit his brew kettle.

I could go into the whole brew-in-a-bag method and talk about beer clarity and all that but I’ll save that for my own blog. Instead I’ll just show you some pictures of the sewing process.

It’s made from nylon, just like the grain bags you can buy from brew shops.

Harriet thought this was fantastic stuff!

These “rtw” grain bags tend to be a basic sack folded at the bottom with stitched side seams. NH’s brew kettle is quite large so I made this bag in the duffel style to eliminate nasty corners where you can end up with dry grain lumps.

Dry grain lumps are bad because if the grain isn’t wet then you miss out on all its sugary goodness and sugar = alcohol.

The side and bottom seams are triple stitched for strength and further reinforced with binding made from “trace and toile”.

I have more photos and my intention is to write a full tutorial. The last crazy sewing request, the “bike thong”, was very popular and attracted a lot of interest outside my usual audience!

I am a bit concerned about the weight of the wet grain on the bottom seam and it is yet to be tested. I’ll wait for it to pass before writing it up and I have enough fabric left for versions 2 and 3 😉

And that’s it 😉