Moving along in the Pannier-Along

I've had a few missteps in my pannier project. I mentioned the linen yardage issue in my last post. The next problem involved the twill tape. JoAnn's actually has some really nice twill tape by the yard in stock right now in several colors. It's 100% cotton, which was hard to find for awhile. It must be popular for something, because they nearly always seem to be out of whatever size or color I get my heart set on.

I wanted a natural color for my panniers, but changed to white because the spool of natural didn't have quite enough for my project.  When I bought the white tape, I bought 1" wide, worried about making a wide enough channel for the cane. As soon as I went to bed that night, I knew I'd bought too wide.

I snipped off a piece of the cane and went back to JoAnn's a few days later, only to find that they now had plenty of natural in the 1/2" width, but no white anywhere on the shelf. Grrrrr. Fortunately, I managed to get excellent help from the woman at the counter. She eventually emerged from the stockroom with a whole spool of exactly what I needed.

The final twill tape issue involves the materials list. It calls for 4 yards of tape, but the project makes 6 rows of 26" channels. I'll wait while you do the math. Fortunately, I always buy extra twill tape, but I worry about my friend who was mail ordering her supplies. Double grrrr.

My final concern had to do with the stitch to use. The photographs for both the pocket slit hem and for caning channels both clearly show a running stitch. I tend to use a hem (whip) stitch for hems, and for my stays, I used a backstitch for the caning channels. Still, since the caning isn't going to be required to mash down my double Ds, I figured a running stitch would be fine. I did go with a hem stitch for the hem, figuring it wasn't called a "hem stitch" for nothin'.

Still, I think I'm back on track, and forging ahead.