Den the penguin!

Here's a little somebody I want you to meet! He is another creation from the Misfits book and he's called Den the penguin. He is fully recycled! We managed to find a sale rail in a local charity shop and took great delight in finding t-shirts of various colours for around 50p each! Not sure what the lady at the til thought when we bought all different sizes of clothes saying things like "oooh, that green will do for the frog" and "oh brills it's a size 20, that's loads of blue material, that will do the moose, duck and the bunny!" We were really pleased with our few items and left the shop feeling like the cats that got the cream! We eagerly took our new stash home and set about cutting all the seams out, so the material is now in 'ready to use' pieces.

So Den is creature number 5...only 30 more to go!

More Christmas decs!

We've been making some Christmas tree decorations again. These too have our homemade Christmas spice in. The backs are plain red this time tho as we weren't sure what they'd look like if we made the backs stripey. 

Though these might look simple and in essence, they are, they take a little longer to sew and a little longer to cut out. The hardest being the gingerbread man. Lots of curves to sew and lots of curves to cut around with pinking shears! When it came to closing the gap of the now, stuffed gingerbread man, we were basically asking the sewing machine to sew at the foot of Mount Everest - quite how the machine coped with the up and down terrain we don't know! We did change the needle position to the left but still we were asking the sewing foot to practise mountaineering!

Butterfly for grandma!

Isn't she beautiful! I made this butterfly today as a room decoration for a friend of mine who is decorating a room in her house for her granddaughter to stay over in. She has decorated it with a butterfly theme, so when I saw this pattern on Sew, Mama, Sew (butterfly tutorial) website I just had to make her! It took me a while to co-ordinate the colour scheme of the butterfly from my small stash of materials but I love the finished result! I only hope grandma does too! My butterfly is for decoration only (not a toy), so I didn't use crinkly paper or a bell. Instead I used a framework of pipe cleaners in the wings, so that when it's hung from the ceiling beams the wings won't drop down around the body of the butterfly - genius if i may say so myself, though it was a little tricky doing this!

And I'm very pleased to announce that there was NO unpicking again today - steady on - this is becoming a bit of a habit!  Long may it last!

Oilcloth, one industrial injury and no unpicking!

Today we conquered our fears and tackled the dreaded oilcloth again and made some mini tote bags! You may remember that last time we sewed oilcloth, everything that could go wrong, did go wrong! (sewing-with-oilcloth) The new sewing machine (named Reggie!) however, made sewing the oilcloth this time around, an absolute delight. It didn't struggle once! All it required was an increase in stitch length, masking tape on the bottom of the foot and our cunning little sleeve slipped on the free-arm to prevent the oilcloth sticking - job done!  (preparation-for-oilcloth-lift-off)

When we cut the pieces out, we use a Stanley knife and a metal ruler. We've just changed the blade to a new one, after I wrecked the last blade cutting some roofing felt to fit the roof of my rabbit Humphrey's hutch! So with new blade onboard, off we chopped! Then suddenly I saw blood on my knuckle and thought, where's that come from? Turns out I'd caught it with the knife and I didn't even know it! Not quite our first industrial injury but it's definitely the first one that I didn't know how it happened! Once we'd assessed that we didn't need to go to A&E to get the wound stitched and that we'd checked we had all our fingers and thumbs still, off we went again!

When we made the handles, we used an army of paperclips and small bulldog clips to secure the two pieces together - it was a bit like Blue Peter revisited! It was fiddly at first but as the oilcloth sticks to itself you can utilise that fact. The other trick is to not reverse stitch at the beginning and the end. If you did that you would end up perforating the oilcloth too much and this would then mean that the seam would likely pull apart if any pressure was applied - not good for a bag! This was the first time that we've sewn things without having to unpick a single stitch! Yes really! Eureka!

We're now all out of oilcloth so we'll have to keep our eyes peeled for some more.

Elsie's friends! (Slug, Bat, Wolf)

I think I'm addicted! I only got the Misfits book yesterday and that's when I made Elsie (previous blog entry). So today I set about making her some friends from the same book. In case you're wondering what they are - they're a slug, a wolf and a bat! Only 31 more creatures to make!

I am learning all the time with this sewing lark. Making these I 've learnt that when sewing t-shirt material, make sure you sew with a longer stitch length. Also, don't sew too close to the edge, the t-shirt material with it's stretchy nature, just simply comes apart....especially when you put stuffing in under pressure! 

Elsie the elephant!

Today I received a book in the post from my mum and dad - Bobby Dazzler's Make Your Own Misfits by Fumie Kamijo and Rosie Short. It was a lovely surprise and when I opened it and flicked through the pages, I knew I was hooked! I had to make one right away but it was soooo difficult to choose which one! I decided on the one called Elsie the elephant. I then set about finding old clothes to set about with a pair of scissors! One grey sweatshirt and one patterned t-shirt material top later - chop, chop! It says to enlarge the pattern by 200%, which under normal circumstances would be easy....only trouble is my scanner is not set up with my laptop, so the only way to enlarge the pattern was the old fashioned way...pencil, ruler and a few pages of graph paper! Yes really! Lots of measurements later and much scratching of head, hey presto, re-sized templates at the ready!
There's something quite cathartic about chopping up a few tops that you never looked good in - revenge is sweet and all that! It seems Elsie took on her own unique style as I assembled her. Not only are the colours I made her in, different from her sister in the book but I also changed her ears and her mouth! I used the patterned material for the inside of her ears and then I gave her a bit of a cheeky smile! I also used ladder stitch to close all the gaps used for turning and not, overhand stitch as it says in the book, purely because I think it makes for a much neater finish.  

I absolutely love her and soon she will have some friends!

New rooster pic!

This is my first bit of free-motion sewing with my new sewing machine. It was really lovely to be able to put the feed dogs down so the embroidery hoop doesn't catch on the darning plate - which is what happened on my previous machine!  

I like the actual design but am afraid the marks out of ten that I gave it, was just 6/10. Some of the sewing is good but some of it is a bit wobbly! All the pieces are ironed into position with bondaweb first. The tail feathers and the legs/feet are done with two lines of sewing, whereas everything else, is just one. I think two lines of sewing are more forgiving, as any slight wobbliness can be covered up on the second time around. I'm liking the colours but think the next one I make, I think I might try my red material with the white spots on. Also, I will try and sew a lot slower and see if that helps the wobbliness!

Birthday pressies for Isla - Dog bandana and dog bed

Isla is a soon to be, 4yr old Irish Setter who belongs to my friend. Her birthday is coming up so we wanted to make her soem pressies, as you do!   Firstly, we made her a bandana out of pink camouflage material and plain pink. The bandana is fully reversible. The top folds over to show the two materials and when you tie it, it forms a pretty bow. The usual bandana that you buy in shops is just simple a triangle, quite often it's only a single piece of fabric. We think ours are very special as you basically get two bandana's in one. We even topstitched the whole bandana for that extra, quality touch. And doesn't she look beautiful in it! She's a pro where being photographed is concerned!

We managed to source some lovely pink fleece with hearts on and we thought it'd be just perfect for a dog bed for Isla - yes we know, she's very spoilt! The bed was very easy to make. It's simple two rectangles, sewn together on three sides - the open end of the bed is closed with, white plastic poppers - simples! We did use a wide zig-zag stitchto ensure that the edges wouldn't fray. We know Isla loves her bed and here is a picture of her on it!

Lavender hearts and Reggie!

It's official, it's died! My 9 month old cheap sewing machine from Lidl's has been declared, totally knackered! My friend came over and spent ages trying to see what the problem was. I felt a huge weight of relief, when the machine was declared de-funct.....which probably sounds odd when this now meant that I no longer possessed a working machine and would therefore, have to spend some money on a new one! But the fact my friend had the same problems as me...meant that the problem wasn't to do with my lack of sewing experience! Not this time anyway!

So with us now being down to one machine between the two of us, we set about making lavender hearts. We managed to buy 500g of lavender off the Internet quite cheaply and just in case you're wondering....that's about half a carrier bag! I think I was a bit rash buying it, as half that amount would still have been more than we'd need to keep us going for a long time!

We made little pouches out of wadding, which we filled with lavender - a mere teaspoon or two per heart! We then inserted the pouches together with polyester toy stuffing into the hearts. We used two shapes of hearts to see which we preferred - one rounded and one elongated one (a Scandinavian-type shaped heart). We then tried various methods to seal the hearts; hand sewn with ladder stitch, a double or a single line of stitching with the machine around the edges, zig-zag around the edges...

Here is a selection of them in this photo:

 

Since making these hearts, I'm proud to announce I have a new baby! Don't panic guys, it's not Christmas and I haven't changed my name to Mary! The new baby is a Janome sewing machine, model number RE1318. We did a lot of research and you can't buy a machine with the same functionality for cheaper. Point's of note? I now have a machine that you can drop the feed dogs on...so free-motion sewing will be easier as I don't have a ridge of the darning plate to navigate over! This machine even has a needle threader on it - invaluable for an ageing fossil with varifocals! The foot pedal is also very good....you can control the speed very easily and sewing slowly is a doddle. It's a very sturdy machine as it has a metal chassis underneath the plastic outer shell...though it only weighs 5.8kg so it's on a par with other machines. And of course, I have had a little play on it and even hugged it twice! (Yes really!) We've named him Reggie, no reason behind this except my friend suggested it and it kinda stuck - which is rather odd coz the machine definitely has womanly curves! I can't wait to have time to sit and sew with him....I think we're going to be very happy together!

Apron frustrations!

It seemed like a good idea at the time but now I am frustrated beyond belief! My nephew has a birthday soon and as he likes cooking things, I thought I'd whip myself into action and make him his very own apron. So yesterday I researched various types of apron - I never knew there was so many! Then I looked through my material stash to see what would do the job. I was being a little tight coz I didn't want to buy any material especially for the job! So I'd decided on bottle green curtain material. It doesn't look as awful as that sounds! The material I chose for the pocket was the fat quarter I bought to do the Tibetan Terrier notebook cover I made recently (see recent blog entry). Having decided they went quite well together and that the overall combination was 'manly' enough, off I went into sewing oblivion! I was happy making this at first and the thought of doing lots of straight line sewing, seemed appealing and made me smile! That was until I started sewing! Stop, start, jam, re-thread, start, jam, stop, re-thread, start, stop....you get the picture! It looked clearly like a 'tension' problem as the thread kept snapping. I changed the thread, putting it down to cheap cotton! Didn't make any difference. So I changed the tension on the top cotton to a lower figure: this had no impact. Even tried zero in an attempt to bamboozle the machine! Nope didn't work. I took the hook race cover etc out as well as the bobbin (as it kept balling-up too) and blew all the cotton-dust out of there - only effect was breathing it all in and sneezing like a good-un! Though this cleared my tubes, it had no effect on the sewing machine's performance (or mine!). If I re-threaded the machine 40x, this would probably not be exaggerating. Quite how I restrained myself from chucking the machine out of the window, I don't know! Well actually I do know. My desire to finish what I'd started was greater than the desire to smash it with a lump hammer and also, the whole time I was thinking "What am I doing incorrectly? It is only a machine. It is only doing what I tell it to do. This machine doesn't have a mind of it's own and so it can't be trying to get one back on me! It must be something I'm doing wrong but who knows what!" KEEP CALM was my mantra, BREATHE was what I had to remind myself to do! And no I'm not some new age hippy chick but rather a worn out, frustrated and ever so slightly, dotty chick!

Despite the onward struggle to sew anything at all, I soldiered on and was quite pleased with myself when I managed to work out that the waist straps and neck strap had to be sandwiched inside the two layers - yes this apron is fully lined! When I turned the apron the right side out, I realised that I'd managed to twist the neck strap even though I took great care in getting it not twisted! Out came the stitch unpicker AGAIN! All that was left to do was to stitch around the outside...but this proved even more frustrating as it was this stitching that is visible. So I'm afraid to say I gave up temporarily and have enlisted my friend's sewing machine to finish the job! Oh ye of little patience!

PS:  My friend's sewing machine sewed the outside edge with no problems with tension, needle size or any snags!  Hmmm, me wonders whether my little trusty machine from LIDL's can't keep up the pace?  Lets hope it ain't broke...or i will be broke, buying another!  More sewing planned for tomorrow, so time will tell!

Christmas decs with bells on!

Time is marching on and dare I say the words.....Christmas is coming! You may remember me saying the other day that we picked up a strip of material from Paulines Patchwork which had squares of little Christmas pictures on. We weren't at that time sure what we were going to do with them but we bought them anyway!

So we sat down on the sofa with them in front of us and pondered! We banded around idea's between us. We knew we wanted to turn them into Christmas tree decorations and the first discussion, was do we use a picture on the front and one on the reverse or just one on the front? One on the front only meant of course you could make twice as many! Me being a Northerner, this two for one appealed to me!

Then we thought about the backs....what to do? We could do plain red or plain green but we thought that was a bit boring! Then we had a eureka moment! Around the edge of the pictures was a larger square of co-ordinating patterned material. If we cut the surrounding square into strips, we could then use the strips, coupled with our plain material (cut into strips) and sew them together lengthwise, creating a striped effect - genius! Then if we turned them slightly, we could achieve a diagonal effect on the back too which made an interesting look.

Next ponder was over whether we should add bells? As you see from the previous blog entry this created great interest to my friend's cat Mojo! We decided that bells made them more Christmassy as did the addition of our homemade, Christmas spice! I wish I could say I liked the 'scent' but I'm afraid it just reminded me of mulled wine and I don't like that much either!  
 

 

The funniest things about making these? Mojo, who insisted on being in on the act! And me, who gleefully took the pinking shears to the edges of these creations and making an extra effort to remember to move the ribbons out of the way...and then looking in amazement when I managed to chop straight through the ribbon that held the bell on!!! How on earth did that happen? Followed by a whoopsie-daisy! And so as always, out came the stitch unpicker! Once, just once, it would be nice to not have to unpick anything!