Archive for the 'projects' Category

Cutty, cutty

Published on 26/04/2013 by Mary in Paper piecing and projects. 5 Comments

Whoops I made this right at the beginning of the month and never got round to sharing with you.

The And Sew On BOM was this gorgeous block:

Titled: Snip it Real Good / Not for paper

I chose the pale purple solid for the handles to mimic my much loved Janome scissors that have served me so well over the years. As with most paper piecing it was fiddly but worth it!

Thanks Kristy for another great block. If you want it for free you’d better be quick, hop on over to Craftsy to download it before the end of the month.

Aeroplane Bag – finished!!

Published on 24/04/2013 by Mary in A Lovely Year of Finishes and projects. 12 Comments

My challenge to myself for this month was to get the pieces cut for the Aeroplane Bag. Life in this house was going to be chaotic and I really had no idea if sewing was going to be an option. I am fast discovering it is sewing that keeps me sane!

The children were on school holidays for 2 weeks, it was cold and wet for most of that time and we were without hot water and central heating for a week so things have been a little tough. Fortunately we have some wonderful friends, neighbours and family who have cooked for us and allowed us to use their facilities!

Anyway I found time to sew in the evenings and was surprised at how quick the bag came together:

Please excuse the not so great photo’s, my usual photographer was busy with plumbing pipes and knocking bricks out of the fire place! I didn’t have the time or patience to make the bag sit properly, there is a small boy just out of shot fiddling with a banana and woodlice so I had to be quick!

I used the interfacings etc that were suggested in the pattern so that I had an idea of the stiffness of the finished bag ready for next time. It has a great feel to it, sturdy but not too bulky.

The fabric has been in my stash for a while, I’m pretty sure it came from M is for Make a couple of years ago, I saw it used on someones blog used for a messenger style bag and loved it and hunted it down! It’s Trefle for Kokka other than that I don’t have any details.

I really wanted to use the trains on the track that run along the fabric on the straps but that section of fabric was not quite wide enough, so I cut what I wanted to use and stitched it onto solid purple straps, adding to the strength of the handles:

For the lining I used Alphabetty from Lucie Summers Summersville line, along with a couple of the other prints for the pockets:

I sort of made this with the thought in mind of my eldest daughter using it to take away with her on her first residential school trip in July – we shall see whether or not I can bear to let her! (And yes I am already thinking about making another)

Linking up with:

KCW – #fail

Published on 23/04/2013 by Mary in clothing, KCWC and projects. 7 Comments

On Sunday my eldest daughter chose some fabrics from my stash that she wanted me to make some shorts with.

I’ve used this pattern a number of times before, it goes up to age 8 but I didn’t have the pattern printed in this size so printed it off, cut out the paper pieces, stuck them together and on Sunday night cut out the pieces from fabric.

Yesterday I had a child free morning so got sewing, it all came together as I expected it to and then it was time for preschool pick up and no more sewing was done until after their bedtime.

I started to become confused when attaching the waistband to the shorts. I discovered that it was too big, you can see from the photo below the stitch line on the right with a SA of 1/4″ but I need to make the piece smaller and you can see the stitch line on the left which I had to use to make the waistband fit.

At that point I pulled out the pattern piece for the waistband (which I hadn’t reprinted) and checked that I had cut it right and yes I had.

But I had suspicions that the shorts didn’t look big enough for age 8 so I pulled out all the pattern pieces. And it was then that I realised that my printer must have scaled the pattern. The piece on the left is the original piece that I used at age 6 a few years ago. The piece on the right I thought was age 8 but as you can see it is significantly smaller than the piece on the left:

So major meltdown happened here, I was so cross, gutted and annoyed. A mistake I know but I should have checked.

This morning I confessed all to Bethan and she said ‘don’t worry mum I forgive you’!! Leah is almost 6 and she didn’t turn her nose up at them so I’ll get them finished today and hope they fit her:

They just need elastic and ties in the waistband and hemming. The pockets were cut from the original pattern at ‘real’ age 8 so are a little big for the shorts but I’m NOT unpicking.

Oh and the slightly better news is that I probably do have enough fabric of both prints to make the correct size shorts for Bethan!

Have you had any sewing disasters this week? Please help me to feel better (Moira shared hers yesterday).

Do I need another bag?

Published on 03/04/2013 by Mary in A Lovely Year of Finishes and projects. 10 Comments

You may have seen recently that the talented Sara has brought out 9 new bag patterns, all available in her pattern shop .

I just happen to be a reader of Katy’s blog and last week she had a giveaway of readers choice of pattern, would you believe it I was one of the three lucky winners to win 3 patterns?

Thanks Katy and Sara for these lovely looking patterns with which I hope to make lovely looking bags! Katy did mention that she might just host a bag sew along, she’s a bit of a clever lady so if you’re interested in bag making it will certainly be worth a look.

So the patterns I picked? the Aeroplane bag, Dot Dot Dash bag and Petrillo bag:

My goal for the month of April is to get all the pieces cut for the Aeroplane bag. First of all I need to work out how the interfacing used translates into what I’ve already got or what I can easily get my hands on. The Spring Quilt Festival is on this weekend and I may be able to get some supplies from there. I’ve just ordered those bits from The Cotton Patch and I can pick up from their stand on Saturday and save the postage cost – hurrah.

Bearing in mind that the children are on holiday from school for the next 2 weeks and there is limited workspace in our house at present I think that this is a manageable goal especially as I have no idea about what fabric I might use for it!

Linking up with:

3 is the magic number

Published on 13/02/2013 by Mary in Patchwork and projects. 25 Comments

Or so it might seem. You may well have seen a number of pouches popping up on sewing blogs all with 3 zips. Yes, 3, well if you can put one in you can probably put in 3! This is all thanks to Debbie’s tutorial that she posted last summer, she recently organised a zip along and having had the tutorial pinned for months I thought I’d give it a go.

I pulled out the text charms from the Addicted to Text charm swap I took part in last year and made a block loosely based on the Oh Fransson! tutorial. I then quilted it onto some thinnish batting:

I didn’t have any zips in that were the right size (9″) or colour so I made a very quick trip to the fabric shop and bought all the zips the were the right size and colour:

You might detect that the block looks quite big, well my plan was to make not one but two pouches, as I didn’t think it wouldn’t take much longer. You might also notice there are 5 zips in the picture – that was just to confuse things.

A couple of things I discovered along the way were that I found as I sewed the pouches I could easily have used 8″ zips rather than 9″ as specified in the tutorial, I cut off approx 2″ once the zip tabs were on. I also think that the zip tab pieces would have been big enough at 1.5″ x 2.5″ (rather than 2.5″ x 3″) – you can tell that I am tight with fabric and don’t like cutting off ‘big’ pieces to discard them!

I found the finishing stages of the tutorial slightly unusual and tricky to work with and after doing one that way I devised a way that suited me, no, I didn’t photograph it and it’s tricky to put into words – sorry. Hadley boxed the bottom of hers and because she had a directional print need to do it slightly different, check out her post on it if you want some more guidance.

There are subtle differences between my two pouches:

Can you spot them?

There are a number of tricks, tips and advice in the flickr group so if you fancy having a go it’s worth having a read of those first.

The linings? Would you like a peek?

I used various text prints from Michele D’Amores Wordplay collection that I bought recently:

I’m pretty pleased with how these turned out. Thanks very much to Debbie for the tutorial and the inspiration to make one (or two) myself. I’m not sure I’ll ever be able to make just a one zip pouch again!

So do I need 2 pouches almost identical? No it’s guaranteed to confuse me so I’ll be giving one away at some point, would you like one?

And while on the subject of giveaways, come back tomorrow I’ve got one lined up for you…

Linking up for the month of February:

Colour your own lunch sack

Published on 05/02/2013 by Mary in Girls and projects. 9 Comments

All of our children have packed lunches for school/preschool. A couple of years ago I made Bethan a lunch bag which is still going strong but not looking quite so fresh.

Leah’s shop bough lunch bag has been looking quite grotty so I agreed to make her a new one.

I ordered some of Lu Summers Alphabetty laminate in coal from her etsy shop, planning to use it as it would be wipe clean and longer lasting than a shop bought one. I also bought a big pack of sharpies with the intention that Leah could colour in the fabric before I stitched it.

Then the hunt began for a pattern, Leah has more in her lunch bag than Bethan and the chief sandwich maker (aka Tobit) told me that the bag Bethan has would not be big enough for Leahs lunch. After a hunt around I came across a free downloadable pattern from Ellen Luckett Bakers book 1,2,3 Sew available here. It’s for a lunch sack, it’s roomy and less structured than Bethan’s.

I read through the pattern details and discovered that the laminate fabric was not going to work with the design – whoops. I was convinced that this bag would be better for Leah so ditched the laminate idea and pulled out the non laminate version of the same fabric! I cut the main panel pieces out and handed Leah the fabric pens and she coloured in some of the letters, she was just going to colour in the letters of her name but discovered that all the ‘e’s’ were off the fabric, hidden in the seam allowance or not proper ‘bubble writing’ (I blame the designer!).

In my stash I have a pack of insulbright which I used in Bethan’s lunch bag, the same stuff you can use for oven gloves etc. I used this instead of wadding and pulled a Kona orange out for the bag interior/top bit.

A few days later the bag was finished, a few weeks later the sun eventually shone and photo’s were taken:

Oh my she can be such a cutie.

I adapted the pattern, Ellen’s instructions are for a handle either side, I don’t know if her children carry their own bags to school but mine like to put them under the pushchair. That can’t last forever so I put an adjustable strap on this one, so she can wear it across the body, over the shoulder or if I’m feeling extra generous I can carry it in my hand with the strap short.

You can’t really see from the picture but there is a drawstring at the top of the orange inner bit which keeps everything contained. So far it’s holding up pretty well, she’s proud of it which also means any leftover fruit skins are put in a pot and then in her bag (school policy is that they bring home all empties so that we know what they have/haven’t eaten) rather than just chucked in to start decomposing onto the fabric. It can go through the wash which I’m not sure I would have done if using the laminate.

So now I just need to decide what to do with a metre of lovely laminate?

Linking up with:

This month I will make…

Published on 02/02/2013 by Mary in Patchwork and projects. 9 Comments

Last month I signed up to the Lovely Month of Finishes hosted by Melissa and Shanna, it motivated me to get a quilt finished:

This month with the imminent start of building work (did I say that last month too?) I’d love to challenge myself to get another quilt finished but think that would be foolish!

So I going for finishing a triple zip pouch as a more manageable goal. The outer fabric is ready as are the zips:

But no further progress has been made…I’m sure I can do it in a month!

Oh and I should mention that you can get 10% off in my Etsy shop with the code VALENTINE10 when you checkout.

January…

Published on 01/02/2013 by Mary in Paper piecing and projects. 8 Comments

I’ve had a productive month but I’ve not taken many photo’s – the usual story of gloomy days and very little light.

So rather than show you unfinished projects or gloomy pictures I thought I’d share my favourite finish of the month, you might have seen it already:

From the Pretty in Patchwork Holidays book. One of my few attempts at paper piecing and I’m pleased with how it turned out.

The building work has not yet started here but we are edging ever closer to it happening, so who knows what February might bring!

And just because I wouldn’t want you to miss out, today I’m sponsoring a giveaway of $30 credit to my etsy shop, if you want to be in with a chance head on over to Sewing Under the Rainbow.

Linking up with:

I have a plan

Published on 29/01/2013 by Mary in Patchwork and projects. 8 Comments

I have a plan but I also have a headache so this is all you get to see tonight:

I’m hoping the drugs work!

A head full

Published on 07/01/2013 by Mary in Babies, Patchwork, projects and Quilts. 8 Comments

I have a head full of things I want to sew and need to sew. Time is even more precious as we are having building work done on the house which will mean that for 8-10 weeks we will only be able to use the living room – yes that does mean no kitchen or dining room which in turn means no sewing space.

I am in denial right now. So much so that a tidy of the fabric stash happened yesterday!

Doesn’t it look wonderful? It was so bad that there is not a ‘before’ photo.

In the tidying I remembered that I did have at least one unfinished project:

I have 40 of these blocks that need to be made into a quilt. So my one aim for this month is to get it finished, not just the top but quilted and bound too – wish me luck.

As a motivator for me to get this done I’m linking up with:

And now to sew…