It's another WIP Wednesday!

Source: etsy.com via Amber on Pinterest

I did warn you all that there would be lots going on on my blog this week! I'm having such a lovely week, lots of sewing, lots of time with the kids and Himself...what's not to love!

As an aside, isn't this the most AMAZING April ever? I don't think I remember such warm balmy sunshine in April...ever!! The kids are loving being out in the garden all day, I'm loving being out with them, or in the kitchen with the windows and doors open sewing while listening to them off adventuring as only 3 and 4 year olds can. Is this only a Cork phenomenon or are other parts of Ireland getting it too? Hope it lasts. I might even BBQ this evening!

Ok, so down to business. Unsurpisingly, its been productive here in my little patch!

Completed this week:

Drum roll please.......I finished my Cosmo bag!!! Woohoo!! I almost can't believe that it has left my WIP basket (having accumulated some serious fluff along the way, that navy fabric shows up every strand of thread making it not as practical as I would have thought!) and become an actually-very-nice finished bag. What do you think? It's made with the Memento midnight fabric from Amy Butler's Love range. The green contrast and the lining fabric are from my local fabric shop, I was sorry I used that green in the end as it was slightly heavier than the other fabrics and made the final sewing on the handles quite tricky.

 I do love the bag but there is no way that I would rate it as an "easy" pattern as it is in the "Style Stitches" book. A lot of the construction is very straightforward, but the handles and the curved band at the top are really not beginner level sewing in my opinion, and definitely the edge stitching around the insides of the handles at the end was quite tricky and I poked myself with pins a gazillion times. If I had tackled this a few years ago as a beginner I would never have managed it and I would have totally lost my sewing confidence I think! I didn't have a quite big enough button for the closure, but I think its ok and I like the effect of using the Memento fabric instead of the green for it.

 

I only did the inside pocket on one side as I ran out of the lining fabric. This is a big, roomy bag and I added some very stiff, cardboard like interfacing to the bottom to strengthen it a little more. I think I'll be using this when I'm out and about, its got good weight and structure and is really very pretty :-)

I also finished this little tag comforter once I got to do the hand embroidery:

In Progress:

I now have 2 quilt tops awaiting quilting - my Dresden from Lily's Quilt QAL

 and my It's a Hoot/Walk in the Woods for my goddaughter.

I really want to quilt the Its a Hoot using free motion quilting so need to get in some more practice in the next couple of weeks before I try it. I was going to do the Dresden in the circular quilting Lynne used on the original QAL block, but now I might FMQ it for practice instead. Still thinking about this one.



Started:

Remember a couple of weeks ago I won a giveaway for about half a Sherbet Pips layer cake, courtesy of the lovely Kristie? Well, I have been trying to decide what to do with it for a while now and finally made up my mind this morning. My 3yr old daughter E is insanely jealous of the quilt I'm making for my goddaughter! She keeps asking for her own and loves the picture of this "The Burbs" quilt from Material Obsession

(which I plan on doing later in the year), but that would be a detailed and time consuming one to do if I was to do it really nicely and do all the hand quilting and E is not a lady to keep waiting! So I got thinking, and realised that the Sherbet Pips has 3 of E's favourite things - swings, scooters and - mostly importantly - dogs. I showed her the fabric and she absolutely loved it.

 

This morning I cut the layer cake squares into 5" charms and I intend doing a simple pinwheels design. I will need to cut some more white charm squares to balance the colours but now that I've made up my mind I'm itching to get started piecing!


Still Stalled...

The stupid curtains are the major item still in my basket awaiting attention. Now that I've gotten a lot of progress on other stuff I am determined that I will have made progress on them by next Wednesday.


As always I'm linking up with WIP Wednesday over at Freshly Pieced and some other great blogs!

Handmade gifts for big and small girls

 

My charming little niece turned one this weekend, a perfect excuse for a visit home to my parents & a fab afternoon in my sister's house celebrating with family! I've made quite a few little gifts for her in her first year as she's my goddaughter - so I wanted to continue the trend. But I've already made her 2 blankets and lots more so I didn't want to repeat anything I'd done before. I bought this lovely book last year and I've used it to make quite a few fleece monsters for my own kids.

So I took it out last week after entering the One Thing, One Week Challenge over at Amy's Creative Side and flicked through it for a little while and decided, with the help of the kids opinions, to make Dilly. I have gorgeous, high quality fleece that I use for my baby blankets and used this to make Dilly - and she's fabulously soft and will be lovely to hold. She's actually one of the simplest and fastest patterns to make in the book which was a bonus too as I had very little time last week with work demands.

 

I think she was a hit too with the little lady! I would definitely recommend this book - the patterns are very straightforward to make and very, very cute - plus, a little quirky, which I really like! My kids adore the monsters I've made for them - they bring them to bed every night and the fleece has held up very well.

I also made some bunting to decorate her room using some lovely fresh, colourful fabric:

 

As well as my niece's birthday presents, I had some little gifts I wanted to make for bigger girls - my own friends! So I ran up some pincushions in the last few weeks for them. After cutting all the strips and squares for my Its A Hoot quilt, I had lots of lovely scraps left over, many of them conveniently already in small strips. So I pulled out a small piece of coton batting and quilted the strips on as I went.

 

I just love the colour palette in these fabrics. I had some lovely bigger scraps left over and used one of them for the back:

 

 I also made this scrappy pincushion from some Amy Butler scraps I had. Like the first, its quilted onto a scrap of cotton batting in a very simple style, and the blue, orange, brown and cream colours work really nicely together.

 After our lovely weekend, we stopped off in Kildare Village outlet centre on the way back and I popped into the Cath Kidston outlet store and found this lovely sewing basket. I've been looking for a nice sewing box for a long time but so many of them are just hideously old-fashioned! I love the fabric print on this one and have already moved my sewing supplies from the horrible old functional "craft" box I had from a few years back to this pretty one - a perfect gift for me!!

p.s. - I just wish I had a garden like my mum's for taking photos in - I could have such wonderful backdrops!

Style Stitches Origami Bag



Let me preface this post by asking: who hates putting zip in bags/purses? Seriously? How many of you are jumping up and down waving your arms (well, in your mind at least?) Yep. Me too!

I've had a bit of a dubious relationship with zippered bags for a long time. Zips in skirts, fine, no problem. I found a super easy tute on doing zips in skirts last year and never looked back. But zips in bags just freak me out. They never turn properly for me and they always look messy and untidy.

Now, I know the answer to this is practice, practice, practice. But that assumes some level of craft-fail and I'm not good at craft-fail, it totally discourages me and I HATE making something and then not being able to use it. That's why I do buttons in all the bags I make!

So it was with a little trepidation that I  approached the Origami Bag pattern in the Amy Butler Style Stitches book this evening. One thing about the patterns in this book is that they have a lot of written instructions and not very many pictures and diagrams. When it comes to sewing, I'm totally visual (mostly because I have very poor spatial sense, just ask Himself about my parking!) and I was interested to see how I found the pattern as a result. But, I have to say, the pattern was really well put together (as I would have expected!) and anywhere that I really needed a diagram, there was one, which was great.

After faffing about with fabric for a while trying to decide which to use, and chasing the kids back up the stairs more than a few times, I finally settled on these:

Alexander Henry's Willow Wren, Girl Friday Cosmo Cricket and Ta Dot in Berry by Michael Miller.

I found the pattern fairly straightforward to make, there were a few little tricky bits in it around the zip ends when sewing up the seams but nothing too challenging. And I even managed to sew my zip reasonably respectably! Its by no means perfect but its functional (a big step forward!) and looks ok-ish, it could be a bit tidier and less bulky, but I'm planning on making a few more of these so hopefully I'll have it perfect by the time I get to the last one :-)

I really like this Willow Wren fabric, its super cute, I have a half yard and will definitely be ordering more of it! And the Ta Dot lining gives is a great lift on the inside. This little bag is a good size for sewing notions, threads etc. I'm going to make a few of them for my sewing box in this size and the next size up. I also want to do one for my handsewing kit.

All in all, I'm pretty pleased. It was nice to follow a pattern for something like this and not improvise as I went along which is my normal approach. Even better, my bag turned out not a million miles away from the shape of the photo in the book. I'm going back to tackle the Cosmo bag later in the week - more about that later in the week!

I'll be linking this up to Fabric Tuesday on Quiltstory and other great blogs -> check out the links on my sidebar!



Amy Butler's Style Stitches Bag Challenge!

One of my aims for this year is to get involved in some online sew-alongs and quilt-alongs. They seem like a great way to challenge myself to learn some new things, broaden my technical knowledge, get to know other bloggers and crafters and also to have some, hopefully lots, of fun! So I was really excited a couple of weeks ago when I saw a bag challenge over on JemJam, particularly because I had just bought the book the day before. So I entered there and then, bought my fabric and then did precisely nothing on it till tonight!

This challenge is to make all the bags from Amy Butler's Style Stitches book in 2011. Yes, every single one! All 17 of them. Eeeek!

Pretty challenging, not least because some of the bags look to be quite difficult technically, and Amy Butler's bags tend to be huge so I foresee a lot of money spent of fabric this year. (*sigh* I suppose if I have to I'll just force myself to go online and find some. No, I am not secretly doing a dance in my head. Really, I'm not. Really. OK, so I am!! I am going to start a new Pinterest board with fabric ideas for these bags. More anon....)

The first bag is the Cosmo bag above, which is listed as an easy make although I'm not sure, from reading the instructions if I would think it terribly easy! Although this might be because I realised (too late!) that the instructions in the book are not accompanied by pictures or diagrams for the most part. When I'm working with fabric and patterns I tend to be a very visual person so fingers crossed that I will be able to get my head around the written instructions. So possibly this will be just fine and striaghtforward to make, but I freaked out a little at the pages of instructions!

This is the fabric I am using:

The main fabric is "Memento" from the Amy Butler Love range and I adore it, the colour is deep purple blue with aqua, lime green, red, cerise and orange flowers. I have cut the main pieces tonight and happily have enough left over to make another small bag & other bits and pieces. The lime green solid is the contrast for the handles etc, and the small floral print is for the lining. This fabric is more lavender in hue than it looks in this pic (where it looks pink for some bizarre reason.) I'm hoping to get the remaining fabric and interfacing pieces cut tonight and then to start making up tomorrow for the deadline of the 31st January.

I also finally got around to getting my Pinterest account up and running this week. Have you heard of this site? It's my latest favourite thing! It is, in essence, a virtual pinboard where you can save pics, links, and all sorts of things. I have set up a few boards already - one for keeping track of the tutorials I love, or want to try. Another for my favourite fabrics. Also, an essential, an inspiration board. And an Owls board because, as you know, I love owls in my fabric and little softie owls (will have my own design coming soon!) So, a board for keeping track of my ideas for fabrics for the various bags makes perfect sense :-) I have a link on the sidebar so pop over and take a look at my boards! And join up, its great. I have had so much fun browsing through people's boards - and there is so much to explore, fashion, art, interiors, food, all sorts really.

Right, back to the cutting board here......