First, the two bags:

My first sewing project ever, a Jordy bag made out of t-shirt material:


Next, another of the same pattern, but with much funkier material (found cheap at The Clothing Show) and two less mistakes:


Yep. Sewing is the new addiction. :)

Next, a small grammar lesson for you all, courtesy of pestering by Meredith and Joyce. Q. Which is correct: "there is an apple and two oranges on the table" or "there are an apple and two oranges on the table"? The first is correct, for the following reason:



Quite simply, the verb usually gains person (1st, 2nd, 3rd/none) and number (singular/plural in English, other languages also have dual) from the subject. Example: I am (1sg), she is(2sg), they are(3pl). However, "there" is a dummy subject and doesn't carry any person or number information, so the verb looks to the next element down to steal these attributes from. This leaves us with the phrase in the object position, "an apple and two oranges". Now, this phrase is complex in a way that is explained in the diagram above, in that "and two oranges" can be chopped off of the sentence and it still makes grammatical sense ("There is an apple on the table."). "An apple" is the head of the phrase, and "two oranges" are adjoined to it with use of the "and". Adjuncts are always easily gotten rid of, and if getting rid of them makes for bad grammar then they're either not really adjuncts or your grammar was bad in the first place. ("On the table" is another adjunct, and thus I'm not addressing it here.) Anyways, the verb looks to "an apple" for number and person, and settles on 3sg. If the phrase were flipped, it would look to "two oranges" for this information, see that it is 3pl, and the sentence would be "There are two oranges and an apple on the table."

Have I mentioned that I'm thinking of not becoming a Linguistics prof? It's a pity that I like explaining such tedious things so much.