Makes 2013 :: looking forward to 2014

Hello 2014!

I really thought 2013 was going to be a year of change for me, and while it didn't really pan out that way I learned to accept things more and enjoy this moment in time in my life.  Particularly in the second half of the year I realised how lucky I am with my little family and our relatively trouble free life.  I ate better, I slept better, I felt happier, I embraced the every day more and worried less about the "should have, could have, would have".  I was offered a great job and then was un-offered it which was just crushing but it made me start to make some serious plans and find connections that were there just waiting for me all along.  The big changes I was looking for didn't happen but in the end I think I was happier for that.

That said, I hope again that there's going to be a lot of changes for me this year, I'm ready to shake off the full time stay at home mum label, I'm ready to use that teaching qualification I finished four years ago, I'm ready for more sewing and ready for having more fun with photography and I'm ready for a few changes to this blog for sure, nothing like a little shake up and refresh. A new look and a slight name change are brewing in my mind, but I will be tackling that all in good time (I've got my fourth party of guests for the holiday season arriving this afternoon...toilets need cleaning and beds need making!)

Due to a lack of access to my sewing room over the Christmas/New Years break I thought I'd start the year by looking back at some of my favourite makes for 2013 ::

I've never done a recap of a whole year of sewing and making before and I'm really pleased to see it all laid out like this.  A range of clothes for my boys (who says boys are hard to sew for!), skirts, tops and dresses for me, a spot of crochet, one cushion, one daycare blanket, one hat, one toy and some quilt blocks started this time last year that remain unprogressed 365 days later.  I started experimenting with knit fabrics (I'm still in the experimental phase there I think), did a good amount of upcycling/refashioning from found fabrics and op-shop garments and took part in some community sewing events such as Selfish Sewing Week and Kids Clothes Week (which is on again soon by the way, click here to find out more).  I also started making the clothing in my shop to a better standard, taking time to add trims and pockets and buttons that give the items a little more finished and polished look, and I've got plans to sew some new patterns to increase the range of things on offer there.  (I say every year that I must do more with my shop but it never happens, it remains a study in what happens when you put things for sale on the internet and then never promote them! And I'm happy with that right now.)

Here's hoping that 2014 is a happy year for you.

Now, lets get sewing!

Kimono scraps patchwork cushion :: for Mum

Last month my Mum had a birthday, a good enough excuse for me to travel back to my hometown of Melbourne for a family weekend.  It was great, I went alone and relaxed without the children.  I listened to my siblings and their partners talk around the dinner table about their pets. So refreshing, no talk of small people at all!

I tucked a handmade present under my arm when I flew down south.  I made my Mum a cushion - a patchwork of little scraps of kimono fabrics that I had been hoarding for years.  I know she loves pale shades of pink and purple so it just seemed like the perfect project to cut into those lovely fabrics.  I was so pleased at the way it turned out, and Mum loved it too.

Sewing with these fabrics was very much try it and see, there were lots of different fabric types and textures from a stiff kind of crepe to slippery silky ones.  I wasn't sure how they would combine together but it worked out just fine.  As you can see above the layout of the slightly rectangular pieces was four rows of six.  I top stitched down both sides of the long seams to add a bit of interest and to give the patchwork some strength.

The reverse side was three larger pieces using some of the same fabrics. I sewed these together and then just trimmed them with my rotary cutter to match the finished size of the patchwork side.  Again I top stitched along the seams.

I had also been waiting for an excuse to try out using pompom trim so when I saw this mauve trim in the store I knew it was the perfect finishing detail.  I pinned it into the side seams and then machine basted all the way around to keep everything in place before doing the final seam.  There was no way I was going to get a zipper closure into this cushion so I simply stuffed it with poly-fill and hand stitched the opening closed.

This corner was my favourite, a touch of gold on the flower and the dark blue leaves coming in from the edge.  So pretty. 

:: Happy Birthday Mum ::

Deja vu

Got that deja vu feeling this January - too much rain, cleaning up after the storm, the start of the school week routine.  I also got that slip-sliding feeling again from my ironing board cover.  Nearly three years after making my last cover the elastic gave up the ghost.  I will spare you any evidence of the state of the fabric, it had that brown tinged, well ironed look to it OK - yuck.

I dug into my "pattern filing system" and found the pattern I made three long years ago.  A little bit of quilting cotton, a packet of binding tape and some new elastic and I'm back in business.  For the record though, I still hate ironing...but at least my board has a little bit of love. 

I've got to say that my tutorial on covering your own ironing board continues to be one of the most visited pages on my blog.  You too can do your own, its easy!

Scraps, strips and summer

Being the start of the new year and everything I have rolled up my sleeves and cleaned out my fabric cupboard.  I've given it a good tidying and sorted things into new and vintage, plains and patterns, dressmaking and quilting, fat quarters and large quantities.

And scraps.  My scrap bag is full to overflowing.

My last serious clean out of scraps was the year before last, a large bag going to the kindergarten for craft activities.  This time I'm keeping them for myself.  I've picked out the blues (got lots of them, I must like blue), greens, yellows, pinks, purples, and creams to work with, I've left the heavy weight fabrics, the denim cottons, anything too sheer like voile or lawn and anything red or black in the scrap bag (and even that takes up plenty of room in the bag). 

 I'm now attacking the scraps with my rotary cutter, slicing them into strips of all sorts of widths and lengths and sewing them into quilt blocks using the method I found here.

After trimming up the strips as I sew them together I am left with the teeniest tiny little squares and rectangles of fabric.  Should I now throw these away....?

I made eight blocks of about 20 x 20cm in a concentrated afternoon sewing effort.  I'm not sure how many blocks in total I will have at the end of this exercise but its certainly something fun and easy to work at over the warm summer days and evenings we are having.  We'll see where this project takes me over the coming weeks.

Ticking off the list

Before I allow myself to start anything brand new I am forcing myself to finish things from the great pile of the unfinished and getting down to a few "must do" projects.  I've sewn buttons back on shirts and cardigans, lengthened a dress, whipped up a pair of baby pants for a friend's newborn and dedicated a whole day to creating a costume for my boy to wear to the school fete.  My sewing machine has been purring along out on the back deck.

Scraps of fabric from bag making and previous forays into pants making were crying out to be combined into a new pair of shorts for the babe.  

And I'm trying to finish a cover for my third Ikea chair.  It needs a tiny bit of tweaking before it's a perfect fit.    I didn't care to finish the cover off this afternoon though, I was too busy chasing my cheeky one around the chair with the camera.

 

Hopefully once my chair cover is done I'll be free to launch into making a few new items for the shop.  Yipee!

Doona diversion

Late last week and for some of the weekend the back stairs which lead to the sewing room looked like this:

When this happens I sometimes feel a little cut off and isolated upstairs, it doesn't make me a happy sewer when I look out and getting to the sewing machine means getting wet in the bargain.

"Curtains?"  I hear you say.  See those wrinkles?  That's where I picked off the curtain tape.

The summer feeling is definitely fading away here.  A massive pile of gifted cotton fabric (aka Mum's curtains) was calling me to divert from all other sewing projects and make us a new doona cover to snuggle under.  Ten dollars worth of plain white quilters cotton was all I needed to bring the width of the fabric to queen size (roughly 190cm x 190cm), then I hemmed the bottom edge (where the doona goes in), and sewed it all together leaving a 1m opening for, well, where the doona goes in. 

Cozy, yes?

I am getting quite good with the handmade doona covers, I made one here a few years ago, and here for my  eldest boy.

Oh, and I did make some progress on my new dress too.  I'm loving the colour, but where is the sunny weather to wear it??

Apples!

This weeks sewing starts with this gorgeous apple fabric.  A little project for a friend that I have been very slow to start on.  My turn around time for friends and family is way slower than for complete strangers. Does that happen to you?  My brother just asked me to make him a new ironing board cover, he might get it when he comes visiting in May...

I'll reveal what this little number actually is in a few days, and I'm writing a tutorial for it so stay tuned.

PS, I love you

At our house we have a thing for the Ikea PS arm chair.  When we moved to Brisbane early last decade we bought one of these chairs, and proud of it we were too.  A nice neat style, fitting right in with our Klippan couch, removable and washable cover...and then one day we thought we would get another (not sure why, maybe to keep the other one company), so we trekked out to Ikea and what do you know, the PS chair was discontinued, not more chairs, no more covers, nothing.

Again, for reasons that I can no longer remember we then turned to searching them out on Ebay.  They were, and still are, very hard to find but about six years ago we found a pair being sold in Sydney with synthetic sheepskin covers (picture above).  We bought them for a few dollars and then paid heaps to have them transported to Brisbane.  It sounds totally stupid, it was, but we really love our PS chairs.

Late last year, in our new house and everything (and probably something to do with that thing called the "nesting instinct") I decided that our PS chairs needed fresh new covers.  The fake sheepskin look was on one hand kind of retro, but on the other hand they had lost their best and were marked and worn and starting to disintegrate.  See the picture, kinda gross with suspicious stains...

You can buy covers for these chairs from the Bemz website for about $35, but with nearly $30 of postage and four week wait for delivery why wouldn't you try to make your own for the cost of materials only? Well, why not, I say. One day I took one of the covers off and grabbed my seam ripper and started to rip that cover right apart.  I made a few notes about what bits were stitched to what to get the order of assembly of a new cover right, and then traced around all the individual bits and pieces to make a pattern.  I just set to making a new cover with no idea if it was going to work, and it worked absolutely perfectly.  I'm pleased as punch!

Out of our three chairs I have so far covered two.  One in a furnishing fabric from Spotlight, this one lives right now in our lounge room but would also be at home in our bedroom.

And one is covered in an Ikea fabric - this one is in the littlest boys room for night time feeding but it would also look good in the lounge room (not necessarily along side the floral cover though).

The third chair is in a corner in our bedroom with clothes all over it (a chair-robe if you will), but I do have plans to cover it in a plain white (or slightly off white) fabric so that it will go with either of these patterned ones.  Sometimes if we have guests staying we have two of these chairs in the lounge so there is enough seating for everyone.

I'm so pleased to be giving these chairs a new lease on life, and without breaking the bank account either.  Bravo!

All kinds of crazy

I confess, I went to Ikea on a Saturday - crazy I know.  I didn't only go for fabric, but I did buy a metre and a half of this lovely spotted fabric.  I love how you can cut your own fabric at Ikea, it feels nice to roll the heavy bolts across the measuring table and reach for the scissors to slice into it.  As a result of my trip to the great Swedish furniture warehouse an industrious session of chair cover making is going down in the sewing room at the moment.

I'm also sewing a few things for the shop, using a lovely organic cotton a friend gifted to me (she hung some on her wall and gave me the left overs, how nice is that!).

And a new pair of pants for the babe because when I was standing in the queue at the fabric shop to buy half a metre of blue cotton there was a blue checked seersucker remnant going for 20 cents that went perfectly with the blue, and well I just planned myself another sewing project right there and then.  Crazy, I know.

Old towel, new tricks

At the back of the linen cupboard I found an old towel.  An odd sized, well used, pale green towel with a few stains here and there.  I washed it and cut it in thirds.

I went to the fabric store and bought half a metre of flanelette for $3.  I cut that into thirds.

I ventured back down to my sewing room and in a few stolen moments during the week I sewed towel and flanelette segments together (sewed the stains on the towel to the inside!).  Now I have three lovely and functional "burp cloths" (not that I set much score against "burping" my baby).  They're certainly not the neatest sewing job I have ever done (a bit of speed sewing required to finish off seams when baby started crying), but they're perfect for putting under his little head in the pram, over the bed sheets, on my lap or over my shoulder after a feed.  Baby can now have a little dribble or overflow of milk and I stay clean and dry and then just throw these little cloths in the wash when needed. 

But of course, sometimes he misses the cloths, and I get sicked on, and thats OK too.

Finished size if you are interested: 50cm long and 25cm wide

End of the season

Not the world's most exciting post today, really all I did was make a drawstring bag.  My favourite way of making them is to use this tutorial from Kootoyoo. 

A carry bag for all the small plastic beach toys - just in time for the end of summer.

Why I didn't do this earlier to facilitate carrying toys from car to beach and back to car is really beyond me.  Better late than never I suppose.

The sun and the rain are taking random turns at dominating the weather conditions around here lately.  Just when you think how lovely it is, its bound to start to rain.  I'm just hoping for a last minute fling of beachy weather over the Easter break.  Its only a few weeks away now.

Rest with the best

Sheets for rest time at kindergarten next year. 

I was putting all the effort into making these thinking why, why, oh why? The boy doesn't do rest time, hasn't for ages, he's a twelve hours a day go, go, go kid.  Enforced rest time is boring, but the powers that be say there will be rest time so sheets are needed, in their own drawstring bag no less.  So you know, if you have got to have them, you may as well have the coolest.

Just because

I have been making myself try some new things in the last week.  I have been making peasant tops for myself, so I had a go at making a peasant dress for a girl.  Love this daisy fabric.

And I have a few wrap dresses in my wardrobe that I like wearing and I looked at the construction of them the other day and I reckon that I could make one just by tracing the pieces.  To get my head around how one is constructed I had a go at making a size 2 wrap dress.  Starting small with this project obviously.

Now, onto other projects that are awaiting my attention.  I've almost got too much sewing to do, but thats a nice problem to have, isn't it? 

Deconstruction, reconstruction

These fabrics used to be stitched together in the form of a doona cover. Nobody loved it anymore and donated it to the charity shop.

I bought it, washed it, and set to picking and ripping my way through the seams and I now have four lovely pieces of fabric, and a nice harvest of cream buttons.

I got distracted after that...and I am already wearing some of it.

A happy sewing day.

Action shorts

Yes I did it!  I revisited my childhood and made my kid try on some clothing that was bristling with pins and command him to "stand still!"  and "turn around, I need to see the back" and "don't worry those pins are on the outside and are not going to hurt you" (wink, wink).  Aside from that slightly traumatising experience for the boy my foray into sewing for him has met with a resounding thumbs up.  He loves his new shorts and I am happy to report they got a good workout at the park this morning (I love that boys wear dark fabrics).

The pattern I used (Burda 9793) has a fancy false fly front (let's call that the FFFF for short) and I was somewhat unhappy with the way the front of the shorts sat when they were being worn, but taking the seam in a bit around the FFFF area fixed that right up.   I might not even repeat that detail next time because I don't think it really adds to the look of the shorts that much.  I also enclosed all the wasit line seam allowances inside the wasit band. I kind of sewed the waist band on like binding and then folded to the inside and top stitched to catch it on the reverse side - very neat!

I also love that these shorts have an elasticised waist - soooo much easier for getting on and off, you know, when nature calls, and usually kids are saving that up right to the last minute when getting pants down is the priority rather than undoing buttons and zips.  For this reason these are going to be great to wear to kindergarten too.

To my delight I found more boys drill fabric while shopping yesterday - the boy is looking forward to car shorts next.

My Creative Space: one for the boy

Its so easy to sew for girls, isn't it?  Those cute little dresses and skirts that take no time at all to whip up, all those beautiful fabrics to work with...  Pesonally I think that making clothes for boys is harder because (for me) there is a higher level of technical difficulty in making shirts and shorts and fabric choices are comparatively limited.  As the mother of a boy I always find myself retreating to the department stores to buy pants and tops, and I try to buy the plainest I can because I hate commercialised rubbish and dumb slogans.

In my creative space I am starting on sewing some summer clothes for my boy, and trying and make it look really good, not too "made by Mum".

I have a pants/shorts pattern and some printed cotton drill.

And some plain t-shirts, ready for an applique or two.

...plus I have to make a super-hero costume for next weekend - more on that next week.

For more creative space, head on over to Kootoyoo.