Apparently, the process of childbirth is so painful it leads many women to say 'never again' and yet, a year or two down the line they are pregnant with their next child. Well, you may be wondering why I'm talking about childbirth?!! Well, we've just made this bag and it was so painful....we declared 'never again'! How it's turned out half decent we don't know.
Essentially, you make a bag made out of the outer fabric and a bag out of the lining fabric. Then slot one inside the other, stitch around the edges and then turn the right way and top stitch - job done! Sounds simple.....if only! The major problems are, firstly, lack of experience, then rounded corners, then seam allowance accuracy!
The gusset has to be attached to both the front and back pieces. So in total, we had to sew four curves for the outer bag and four for the inner. I think I'd lost the plot at about....let me see....curve number one! The two pieces were pinned together really well but it was like handling an unruly porcupine with attitude! I must've stabbed myself a zillion times with the pins and was trying my best not to bleed onto the cream materials. Easing the curves together was difficult but even more difficult was trying to stick to a 1cm seam allowance. And there in lies the problem when you try and put one bag inside the other. If you're slightly out a few millimetres here and there, these add up and mean that the two don't fit. When you try to sew them together, the seams don't want to match and you end up with a little pucker here and there. At one point we were so bamboozled and after much scratching of heads, we decided the only medicine was a strong cafetiere coffee and chocolate!
And just in case you're wondering....here's the inside with it's very own matching pocket!
What do you get if you cross an owl with an elephant? You get these! Our very own ellie-twits!
Yes they are meant to be owls but I reckon the one on the left in particular, does a very good impression of trying to be an elephant! I think in life, we all have times where we wonder who we actually are. We hang around with our friends so much that there becomes less distinction between 'me' and 'you', as everything becomes 'us' and 'we'. Well, no prizes for guessing who these owls hang around with! Hence, the new generation of the aptly named: Ellie-twit misfits!
Two more creations from the Misfits book.
These fury friends use oddments that we found in Sew n So's bargain bucket. Sadly the oddments weren't large enough to follow the actual pattern. So I improvised! Only the front's of the heads are furry, the reverse is brown fleece. Also, I scaled down the overall size of the beaver, so I could get his head from the oddment of fur I had. The bears body is made from an old t-shirt and i just loved the print on it - it was far too lovely to not utilise it. It's even got some little diamante-like gems on it. We've called the bear Beatrice and the beaver, Buster! Oh such fun!
Twit-twoo! We appliqued these little owls onto material, then turned them into little padded keyrings. They were a little fiddly to say the least but not bad for a first attempt. The yellow cotton I used for the beak and the little feet is, we think, too light in colour. We also think the owls look better in the solid colours. As they are so small anyway, the pattern on the material, though small, seems to drown them!
You may remember a while ago, we made this peg bag with an overall blue theme. So we thought we'd make a red one and a pink one! Pure indulgence!
The clothes are zig-zagged on but the letters are sewn on using free-motion. The reason we didn't zig-zag the letters is because I thought the letters were too fiddly and that by zig-zagging them, they'd lose their definition. I can now confirm this wouldn't have been the case! After completing these peg bags we chopped out the letter 'E' and just had a go. It looked quite passable! But as you can see I used a tighter zig-zag (satin stitch) on this letter than I did on the clothes on the peg bags, and we think it looks much better. So I made sure I wrote down the settings on the sewing machine onto the actual template, so hopefully if we make another one I might have half a chance of getting the next one right!
These are our creations from two of our fresh materials from Pauline's Patchwork. The materials are so nice, we find it difficult to cut them up! But we were feeling brave and thought, what's the point of having such lovely material if you just keep it in a drawer!
To give you an idea of size, these purses take a 4 inch zip. All the material is interfaced. The insides of the purse are plain colours, in this case, solid pink and solid green. Beautiful as they are, we thought they were lacking something - hmmmmm? Then we came up with the idea of the ribbon zip pull, with added flower shaped button and two co-ordinating beads - just perfect!
We broke yet another needle! Sewing over the zip at each end is like trying to defy the laws of physics! Solid thin needle meets a solid wall of zip teeth....SNAP!
I haven't made a picture in ages, so I really chuffed when we sat down a few days ago to draw a picture of a branch with an owl sat on it! It's rather like play school to me! Pencil, paper and a very large eraser!
One thing I have learnt from previous excursions into the 'design a picture' lark is to make the picture to fit a certain size frame. If you don't give this any thought from the beginning, you end up with a picture that doesn't fit well into a standard frame. We've spent too many hours wandering around trying to find a frame or a mount to fit a square picture!
We drew the picture onto paper. Then we cut out the individual templates from vellum: we find vellum is thicker and stiffer than tracing paper, so it's much better for drawing round. Then we cut the pieces out of fabric that we've backed with (a cheaper version of) Bondaweb - remembering to reverse all the pieces so they'll be the right way round when you assemble the pieces on your background fabric with your iron!
To make the background fabric stiffer, before I assemble anything, I back it with interfacing. This also has the added benefit that if you do carry thread across the back, it won't be seen from the front. As some of the picture is free-motioned, the extra stiffness helps when you put the material into an embroidery hoop too.
The trails of the bee and the butterfly are hand stitched with two strands of dark grey cotton - they're not quite flowing enough!
Another point of note: If you're sewing in the wee small hours and you're reaching for a dark brown cotton? Make sure it's dark brown and not black! Luckily, I don't think the mistake makes too much odds on the branch; it almost makes it look like a shadow or even 3D! (It's amazing how we can reason our mistakes into something positive, especially if we don't feel up to unpicking it!)
