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!