Jan May

My blog posts have been lacking the last few weeks.  This is due to moving home and trying to sort out the chaos.  One of the things required was that hubby thin down his clothing, or there would be no room for any of mine in the fitted wardrobes.  At the last count he had well over a hundred shirts.  Ridiculous.  Under strict instructions to free up half the wardrobe space for me, he set to with bin bags, to turf some out for the charity shops. With a large selection of shirts ousted, I started looking at the fabrics and wondered if I could make use of them myself.  There's a surprising amount of fabric in a mans shirt, particularly an XL one. After cherry picking the ones that were all cotton and nice fabrics, I sat down and scratched my head for inspiration. My first of two makes is this pillow.  When I began I had no real vision of what it was going to look like.  I just knew that I wanted to use some of the front pockets, and make a feature of a cuff or two. After

Adding binding to a project is something I rather enjoy.  Not only reserved for quilts, I've also been finding it pretty useful when making pillows.  It makes putting a pillow together a doddle, is quick and easy to do, and is a whole lot less fiddly than messing about with piping. After talking to a few quilters, including some who have been sewing for years, I've realised that not everyone knows how to sew a mitred binding.  It's dead simple, and easy to master.   If you haven't attempted it before, do give it a bash.  You'll be adding binding to everything in no time! Many quilting patterns say to cut binding in 2.5 inch wide strips.  I find that 2 inches is ample for any quilt, and looks neater.  With the recent pillows I've been making, I've reduced it to 1 3/4 inches - giving just enough fabric to turn over and stitch down. Anyways...... lets get on with the info....... Start off by cutting enough strips to go around the outside edge of your qu

 I've called this my French Boudoir Pillow, as it does have a bit of a French theme going on, and I reckon the only place it can go is on my bed.   (Boudoir it ain't - but it sounds good). I think this is the most fun I've had with my sewing machine for ages, and considering the "gay abandon" with which I attacked this project, I don't think its turned out too badly. From Moda - Curio range  You see I had fallen in love with this piece of fabric, and wanted to do something with it.  Due to the overall stripe pattern, I didn't want to cut it up.  However, just a plain pillow seemed very boring.  How to jazz it up? In the end I went a little bit mad.  Grabbed a bag of vintage lace and started attaching.  Then I printed off a few French themed vintage images onto printable fabric sheets.  Three vintage doilies for good measure, a handful of ancient buttons and a few bits of broken jewellery later - I had a cushion front that looke

Ok.  I'll admit it.  I had no idea what "Liebster Blog" meant, although I've noticed it on a few blogs I follow.   Apparently,  "Liebster Blog" is German and means something like "My favorite blog".    How lovely to find myself nominated. Thank you Cindy for nominating me, it's such a great idea to help us smaller blogs get noticed.  Do please check out her Tops to Treasures blog, it's a lovely one to follow. By accepting the award I have agreed to the following... Thank the person who gave you the award Link back to their blog   Copy and paste the Liebster award to your profile Pick 5 blogs that you feel deserve to be in the spotlight (they must have under 200 followers)  That was simple work!  Now to find 5 blogs to nominate.  There's so many I follow, but until I investigate, I can't say I've ever paid any attention to the number of followers.  My Liebster Blog nominations..... (In

If you have a pretty charm pack in your fabric stash that you're wondering what to do with...... Why not quickly make up a charming little Love pillow?  Extremely quick and simple to put together, you can run one up in next to no time.  The finished width is the perfect size to place on the bed in front of your pillow. To complete this project I used 28 squares from a charm pack.  (Curio by Moda).  Simply sew 10 together to form each side.  I then drew the letters onto bondaweb and ironed on to 4 of the squares.  These in turn were ironed onto 4 plain squares.  I then cut around leaving about a 1/4 inch border without going into the fiddly shapes of the letters. If I'd had enough bondaweb left I would have attached the letters to the pillow that way, and hand-stitched them in place.  I didn't, so instead I used spray adhesive to hold them in place whilst I stitched around the edges by machine.  I then did a quick running stitch by hand, using