Well, exactly 1 year after my last post (purely by accident rather than design), I’ve decided to revive my sewing blog to follow my progress once again. I haven’t exactly been idle on the sewing front in the last year, although not much got done in the heat of the summer!
Once again, I’m using this as a motivating tool to try and keep myself on track learning some new techniques and disciplines – and improving those I already know. I’ve been creeping my way back in to hand embroidery and very simple garment-making and have discovered some very useful websites and designers along the way. Some of particular note are:
For hand embroidery – Mary Corbet’s Needle n Thread – https://www.needlenthread.com/
For indie design dressmaking patterns – Tami Bunch Meyer’s Love Notions patterns. Can’t speak highly enough of these. So simple anybody could do them. Great tutorials on getting the right fit and on various methods of achieving a good look and the patterns are all downloadable on your home printer – https://www.lovenotions.com
And another site I am using a lot is Lori Kennedy’s ‘The Inbox Jaunt’ for her Free Motion Quilting designs. Tip: Spend a bit of time drawing them first. When you can do an A5 page without taking your pencil off the paper you are ready to go to the machine -http://theinboxjaunt.com.
There are more and I’ll flag them up as I go along.
I have actually managed to complete one item from a Sue Spargo workshop that I bought on Craftsy quite some time ago. Sue works with felted wool which is quite hard to get in the UK and Europe but very popular in the US, so it took me some time to actually collect the materials I needed to make the piece.
A tip from two lovely ex-students of mine put me on to Sew Hot in the UK – https://www.sewhot.co.uk, the only one I’ve found so far outside of the US that sells the felted wool of the right quality to do the applique.
Here’s my finished piece:
I worked slightly differently to Sue. I made my background as she directed, but then I did the free motion quilting before doing the applique as I felt that I could do a better job of it if I wasn’t working around the butterflies – which are really quite close together. The quilting design came from The Inbox Jaunt (see the link above).
It did mean I had to be careful to hide any knots from the applique and embroidery so they didn’t show on the back, but it wasn’t too difficult to do that. And the top layer of mine is buttons and beads instead of Sue’s 3rd layer of applique and embroidery. I have such a collection of both, it seemed a good opportunity to use some of them.
I’ve worked on other smaller pieces but I’ll show those when I’ve made some progress on what I am intending to do with them.
The other recent big finish is Anaya’s Advent Calendar. The tree was designed on my EQ7. I could just as easily have sat with paper and pencil and worked it out, but EQ makes it so easy to play about with the design until you get what you want at the size you want and then directs you as to what size each piece needs to be cut – or you can print it as a foundation pattern if you prefer. Here’s the basic design:
My idea was to for Anaya to decorate the tree with little stockings – 1 stocking each day and a star for Xmas morning. Each stocking to have a sweetie in it. I wanted the stockings to hang on buttons to make it easy for her. I ended up adding a panel at the bottom where the stockings can live while they are waiting to go on the tree because the whole thing looked neater that way – and another advantage was that I could then use double the amount of buttons and reduce the stash a bit further! Not that you’d notice…but here’s the real thing how it will look on December 1st and then on Xmas Day:
I turned the pot of the Xmas Tree into a pocket to hold the start for Xmas Day. It’s currently in the post going from Alhaurin el Grande in Spain to Runcorn in the UK. It’s fair to say I’ll be holding my breath until I know it has arrived safely.
I made the star from pelmet vilene for stiffness and covered it with Red and gold voile using Bondaweb to add a little more stiffness. The sparkly bits are Hotfix gems. It has a bit of Velcro on the back so that Anaya can stick it in place. I covered the Velcro on the tree with a bit of green fabric so it didn’t look ugly for the rest of the month until the star goes on.
I’m currently working on some postcards to use for birthdays. I have 2 in November, 4 in December and 1 in early January as well as the 2 that will be needed for November and December postcard group swaps. That should keep me out of mischief for a bit!
I also have a workshop from Academy of Quilting (https://academyofquilting.com/) called ‘Fabric-ating Embellishments’ that has been sitting there waiting for me to start on it, but other things have got in the way. So, hopefully, I will be able to get to that shortly! That will be the first of many….says she with confidence…..
Barbara
A Stitching Life 