February Scrappy Finishes {Put Your Scraps to Work Challenge 2014}

So, did you have a good February? Did you make any progress in reducing your scrap basket and stash?

Mine was good :-) I probably worked more from my stash than my scrap basket but that's good too.

My properly scrappy finish was this lovely little Kindle cover for a friend of mine. I used the Whipstitch tutorial for the dimensions on this one as I'm pretty sure that the model my friend has is the same one, and I just changed up a couple of minor construction aspects to suit what I wanted to do - like the quilting and the closure.

My friend loved the scrappy look of the fabric basket I made last month, and the matchstick quilting on it so I went with a similar style here. I kept the front cover colours relatively cool and make this little birdhouse the main focus. The quilting shows up nicely - I used my absolute favourite Aurifil thread which is 2600, a light, silvery grey colour. It works great with so many fabrics and I love how it looks here.

I used a covered button and some ric rac for the closure and think it finishes it off nicely.

On the other side of the panel for the cover, I used some brighter colours - just to switch it up a bit. Love how bright and cheery this is, and there are some of my favourite prints in there.

For the interior fabric, I used a Lotta Jansdotter Echo print. This cover fits my Kindle very snugly, and mine is slightly larger than my friend's, so I hope it will be a good fit. 

 
 I can't wait to see what you've been working on! Link up below :-)

Crazy Home Mini quilt

Here it is, my crazy scrappy mini quilt!

When I had done my crazy blocks I got the idea for the centre block. I wanted to display this mini somewhere in the house and have a perfect spot in the hall. I thought it would be a nice "welcome" type quilt to display. I appliqued the letters on and pieced tiny 1 inch squares in each colour around them to tie the quilt together.


For the same reason I decided to use a natural cotton/linen rather than a white solid - the blocks are so colourful that I felt they would pop almost too much against the white for the place I want to hang it and I wanted the tones to be a little muted.


I quilted it in a free motion stippled pattern using a natural cotton thread. I used a poly batting which is a higher loft than my normal cotton batting, which gives it a little extra body.


The binding is a colorful dotty fabric that I spotted on Monday when I went to buy some more white solid fabric at my local shop - its a lightweight cotton and is perfect for binding.


Quilt Stats:

Name: Crazy Home Mini Quilt
Fabric: Scraps & cotton/linen sashing
Batting: Poly
Size: 29" x 29"
Quilting: FMQ using natural cotton thread
Pattern: The crazy block tutorial from Aneela Hoey's Crazy Scrappy QAL.



Another finish for my Summer Sewing list - I'll be posting the mid-summer check in linky on Saturday, so get your posts ready people! This is off to be hung in my hall to welcome us into the house. Its got so many of my favourite fabrics in it, scraps from lots of projects I've made, scraps I've received from friends in swaps - really, this little quilt has a lot of meaning for me.



I'm linking up to The Girl Creative:

as well as So You Think You're Crafty, Fantastic Friday at Iron Violet Designs, Feature Yourself Friday at Fingerprints on the Fridge.

Real life and mug rugs!

There has been very little crafting done in the FairyFace household this week. After finishing the PictureBox quilt I found myself somewhat mentally exhausted from big projects and decided to take a little break for a night or two. But then real life, in the form of my job, rudely interrupted my sewing plans for the week, and suddenly I found myself here this weekend with barely a stitch sewn! It's been truely, exhaustingly busy in work this week; I had a massive deadline to meet for Friday and it took a lot of hours and every last ounce of energy I had to get there. I was completely incapable of even doing some handsewing in the evenings when I got home.

I felt like I barely saw the kids or Himself all week too, so when I finally got home on Friday night, I spent a nice evening on the sofa enjoying my lovey hubbie's company and spent all day yesterday doing things with the kids. We went to Fitzgerald's park - a lovely big park with a great playground - in the city, and then I treated us to pizza in Milanos for lunch, the kids favourites. We have eaten out very very rarely in the last number of months, so it was a real treat. We then went and bought E her long promised big girl's bed, a real milestone! Its all made up today and ready for her first big sleep in it tonight.

All the time supervising colouring/drawing/painting this weekend gave me a little time to sketch out some designs for blankets and quilts, which are still very much work in progress but getting there. I also made some progress writing up my tute for the PictureBox quilt but its not finished yet unfortunately!

Seeing as I'm spending so much time in work these days (that's not looking set to change in the short term either) and I wanted a quick and easy little project to make me feel I'd achieved something, I took some inspiration from my friend Fi and made my first mug rug. I'm going to bring it in to work to brighten up my desk :-) I wanted to try out some free motion quilting, as I'm determined my next quilt will be quilted like this, so this was a perfect size project to get in some practice.

I cut some 3" strips of fabric, then piled them on top of each other (the alternate ones upside down) and ironed them together and cut them into a simple wedge shape, all at once. Once I had them sewn together, I trimmed it into a 7" square. I picked a totally different cupcake fabric for the back, to make it reversible, but actually I'm not sure I really like it now its done!

I got out the free motion foot and off I went. I found it a little tricky and the stitching is quite uneven but I got the hang of moving the fabric around to get the quilting line to flow, so next time I'll focus more on the stitches. I also decided to handsew the binding onto the back to finish (I normally machine sew my bindings) and discovered that I much prefer the look of a machine sewn binding to a "proper" hand-finished binding. Glad I figured that one out on a small project, rather than spending all that time doing a big quilt to discover it!!

Free motion quilters, I have a question: - do you set your stitch length to 0 and control your own stitch length or do you let the machine do its thing and set it to 4 or 6 or whatever? And do you have any tips for a beginner?

And - to all the other mammies out there who craft and look after a family and even hold down a job too - any tips for managing it all? Sometimes, it just gets overwhelming, doesn't it?

I'll be linking this up to Fabric Tuesday on Quiltstory, Stitchin' Weekend on That Girl, That Quilt and some other great blogs; check out the links on my sidebar!!

Scrappy pincushions!


I'm taking part in my very first Flickr swap at the moment and am really excited about it! (Thanks Fi for introducing me to the whole swap concept!) This one is for scrappy pincushions and I've been having lots of fun with it. They're so small that it takes very little fabric and time to make something pretty and I think I might have another addiction in the making!

I pulled out my 2 big scrap bags (note to self - find a way of organising them instead of just stuffing them randomly in bags!) and these were the first ones to grab my eye:

I had a little scrap of quilt batting left over from the quilts and decided to do some stripes - a little like a "quilt as you go" technique I've seen in some table runner tutorials. At the end, I went back and quilted over each stripe for effect.

It's backed with a scrap of Cath Kidston home dec weight fabric. I think it turned out very pretty - in fact I'm not sure I want to give it away!!


The posting date is another 10 days away, so I have a feeling I'll be making another couple before deciding which to send.

I also made this cute little mini-pinnie! I pieced some little squares and then trimmed off the corners to make it into a hexagon. Then I did a little (not very good) free motion quilting to practise as I really want to learn to do this.

Still, it looks ok if you don't examine the stitches too carefully :-) I sewed a back on it and now I have a tiny little hexie pincushion perfect for when I'm handsewing :-)