Beach huts picture

Coming from a seaside town, beach huts like these are a reality. I love this picture full of bold colours, both plain and striped. The original idea was just a row of 5 beach huts. I designed the beach hut first onto paper, then transferred it onto card - as card templates are much easier to draw round (and of course they last longer!). Deciding on the colours was quite a challenge. You can only use the actual material you have, so deciding on what would work and what wouldn't was quite a challenge but i enjoyed every minute of it!

Assembling the beach huts onto the white background material was easy as I used Thermoform (a bondaweb alternative - sew Sewing Insight page). However, i learnt a valuable lesson a few months ago...not to use free-motion embroidery when trying to re-create straight lines! Invariable they will be slightly wobbly and will just give the impression of someone who can't sew in a straight line! I also decided (and the jury is still out on this one!) to use different colours of cotton depending on what colour material i was sewing. Normally, I would have just sewn all of it in black but i felt that that would have created hard lines which are much less forgiving when you are trying to sew lines so close together, such as the apex of the huts.

When the huts were assembled and sewn....the picture still didn't look right to me. It lacked depth and form and didn't seem to look like it could stand on it's own as a picture. I thought about maybe putting some material at the bottom to represent sand but I thought it detracted from the huts. Then I thought about adding flags to give the impression of movement. I was going to put a flag on every beach hut but again that didn't seem right.. So I opted for two flags and as daft as it sounds, it took me a while to decide where to put them! I didn't want the picture to be too balanced in case it looked artificial!

With the two flags now in place, still the picture lacked something! Eventually, the idea of two seagulls came to mind. Again, it took a while to decide where to put them and at what angle and size but I like what they add to the picture. They give the picture a fluidity in a largely static picture. I then went against my norm and decided to sew the seagulls in grey cotton with free-motion embroidery technique. I think black seagulls would have been too bold.

In the end, i think the picture turned out fairly well but if i was to be critical? I wonder if next time, when I'm sewing around the white beach huts, maybe I'll not use white cotton, it doesn't stand out and maybe that's not such a good thing?

More keyring designs

Here's three more designs that I came up with. A bee, a mushroom and a mouse! Quite an ecclectic mix!

Am loving the mushroom design which was made all the more simple by the red and white spotty material for the top. The mouse was difficult to free-motion sew because the ears were tricky to get them equal. I also think my writing needs some more practice - it can be fairly wobbly - but then again, I guess that makes them all unique! Quite who would want a keyring with a mushroom on, or a bee for that matter, I don't know....but I had fun making them and that's what matters

Padded fabric covered notebooks

We had an idea to get some basic hardbacked notebooks and to turn them into something rather special. These are slip-on covers that we made for some A6 lined notebooks. We made five of them, all in different materials. We then used wadding to pad out the front and back to give a more luxurious feel. We didn't glue the wadding to the cover because we wanted the covers to be re-usable. The idea being that these fabric covers can be slipped off when the notebook is all used up and placed over another A6 notebook - this makes them versatile and long lasting.

We then made a label using a stamp and some fabric ink which reads MY NOTES. We then glued this label onto a co-ordinating rectangle of felt. For the more repetitive of the patterns we also added a handmade felt flower to decorate the front.

For the others (incl two cath kidston material covered books) a simple bow was added above the label. All the notebooks have a colour co-ordinated 4mm wide ribbon sewn in to use as a page marker. For a lovely special touch the end of each ribbon is sandwiched between two felt hearts. I know which one I'd choose - how about you?

The Sewing Room re-organised:

It took the two of us two hours completely re-jig the Sewing Room. It turns out, one of us is a squirrel and it's not me! To the question "where shall we put this?" was always "in this space just here". It made the Sewing Room look like the tardis off Dr Who! Amazingly now, we can get to the plug sockets without having to get on our knees and crawl under the desk! Genius! The re-organisation also means we both have a place to sit other than the floor! And we'll no longer have to throw things to each other either as we'll be sat within passing distance! The next stage is to get a big shelf put up above the main desk, so more of our sewing bits and bobs are within reaching distance. A shelf full of boxes is not only a very good use of space, it means we can indulge our passion for boxes.

We both get very excited when we discover boxes of all shapes, sizes and colours in places like Hobbycraft - sad we know! Any type of box - we can find a reason for buying it! You've heard of the term 'bag-lady'...well we're the box-ladies! How many of you out there can stand looking at an aisle of plastic boxes with lids and say words like 'wow' and 'isn't it cute'? We're not sure whether there is a medical name for it but we figure that being drawn towards boxes is not as bad as some of the other addictions out there!

Scissor holders

Six scissor holders later! The newly re-organised Sewing Room worked well today....no mid-air scissors to catch now! The actual sewing went well until.....a lapse of concentration took over! Before we knew it, we'd assembled and sewn the front and back pieces together wrongly! It's like when you're driving and you end up at your destination with no recollection of the drive at all! Been there, done that! Well it was the same with the sewing, such concentration to sew around the edges, then a puzzled look on my face when I realised that they'd been sewn together back-to-front....hmmm, how did that happen?!

So we have six complete sewing sets now. Although we like them all, we're really loving the red and white spotty ones - both funky and fresh. We hope you like them too.

The Sewing Room

We still need to sort the Study, now renamed the Sewing Room, out. So far it now contains the sewing machine on a small foldaway hobby table, a large desk with 3 drawers, filing cabinet, two shelving units and most importantly, the ironing board! Until recently the ironing board was rarely seen in operation at my house, me preferring the 'oh naturelle' look i.e. creased! But now it is up permanently with the iron poised, ready for action at a moments notice! We've found that ironing your work as you go, not only makes the seems easier to sew but it also gives a polished quality look to the final article. Investing the time ironing as you go is definitely worth the effort.
We had to change the light bulb in there as even with the light on, it was really dull. We've now put an energy efficient light bulb in with a much stronger lux and it has made a huge difference. Changing it was easy....it was the 'getting round to it' bit that took the time!

When I sit at the sewing machine, I can see straight down my garden. It's a lovely view especially as when the sun is shining I put my rabbit, Humphrey, out in his run on the lawn ,so I can watch him running about - or as is usually the case, watch him sprawled out sunbathing! We need to re-arrange the layout so that when my friend and I are in there together we can pass each other things with ease. At the moment, we end up throwing things to each other to save us having to get up and down every five seconds! A bit of a health and safety nightmare!

We also need some shelves putting up in there so we can store close to hand all the bits and bobs we're collecting! We can't have the shelves put up really until we've decided on what goes where! That needs application of commonsense, which as I've said before, I am completely devoid of! My dog, Shep, says he's quite happy to become a sewing widow for a few hours a day, as long he still has a place for his bed in the Sewing Room! He's like the princess and the pea though, he's got 3 beds in there, one on top of another! Oh to be a dog eh!

We now also have a radio in there too. We listen to WessexFM all the time, which is our local radio station and fortunately, we can still hear it over the noise of the sewing machine. I think all we need now is a drinks cabinet and we'll be in seventh heaven! Only kidding!

Pin cushions & cream tea!

We've been at it again! We made 6 pin cushions. Two in red and white spots with co-ordinating white with red spots ribbon. Two with Cath Kidston blue rosalie fabric and two in her white rosalie fabric. All the backs are solid red in colour which we added interfacing to to give them some stiffness and and a certain quality! These will eventually form part of a sewing kit, the other two items being a needle case and a scissors case.

We had a voucher for our local garden centre entitling us to a 'buy one get one free offer' on a cream tea. So off we trotted - it would have been rude not to! We sat there in the cafe and trooped out our pin cushions! Two scones each later, we set about turning our pin cushions the right way out and made the little bows too. We figured that other people got their laptops and notebooks out, so why couldn't we get our work out too! I know we're biased but I think our work looked infinitely more enjoyable! And as for the cream tea? Two scones, clotted cream and jam - not bad for a day at the office!

Needle holders

These are going to be part of our sewing sets. The original ones we made had little poppers on that we sewed on by hand. In a bid to save time and money we opted for sewing on little velcro tabs instead. To ensure the needle holders were fairly stiff we used iron-on interfacing on both the front and inside panels - we think this also adds to the final quality of the product too. We also got to use the new fiskars pinking shears (my birthday pressie!) to cut out the two felt rectangles for the inside. Whilst these are perfect for me & my big hands, my friend has much smaller fingers than me and she found them difficult to handle - literally! Having said that, they cut like a dream!

New logo

Isn't she cute? She's our very own crazy moo! She was sketched in pencil by my mum and then we digitally enhanced her, coloured in the flower, added the words and hey presto!

Keyrings for pets

Today I made another 8 keyrings but these are my new designs. The pawprints are for my friends with dogs and the carrot, yes you guessed it, is for someone with a rabbit called Oscar!