August...ing

Making - fleecy PJ's for my girl even though it is August.

Selling - our house! Only showed round one person with it on the market for five weeks. We will be moving to our smallholding very soon.

De cluttering - every cupboard and drawer in the house. The dross, honestly. This is the contents of the pine kitchen dresser drawers.

Building - our carpets are now fitted at the new house. I laid all the underlay and gripper rods myself. The guy said I put a lot of carpet fitters to shame!

Admiring - this local garden. I walk past it every day with the dog and get to peep over the wall. It gets better and better: phlox, hollyhocks, verbascum, mallows and yarrow.

Watering - two neighbours gardens while they are away with permission to pick what we can eat.

Making - beetroot chutney with the above: beetroot, apples and onions.

Eating - down the freezers so we can move them whilst still continuously filling them with courgette soup!

Revamping - my grans Victorian cabinet with Orla Keily gift wrap and PVA glue.

Knitting - the boring grey bit of my alpaca sweater but it is so soft to handle. I probably manage about two rows a night of mindless but comforting knitting. There are always socks when the mood takes me.

Saving - a beautiful quality M&S T-shirt with a vintage doily I bought in France 4 years ago. I got a huge grease stain right in the middle of my top but I've covered it with this little beauty.

Celebrating - having a teenager in the house with this awesome red velvet cake made by her sister. It was a faff but totally worth it even with the ermine icing. She coloured it with beetroot powder and added freeze dried raspberries as a topping with rose petals and fresh raspberries in the layers. Just divine!

  

Feeling - a little bit overwhelmed.

Thanks for dropping by. Enjoy the sunshine. Jo xxx

Cutting Paper Once

I was excited to get my hands on this pattern. It seemed so versatile and I thought a pattern that made lots of different tops without having to keep cutting out paper pieces all the time would be a good idea. It was...

The first version I made last year has been worn a lot. The photo on the front of the packet was what really drew me in to get it in the first place. My first blouse looked very similar, made in cotton dobby.

I chose a Ponte Roma to make a short sleeved version next but the sleeves were a little stiff and made an unsavory silhouette so I made a box pleat and added a button. It is a good top to wear tucked in with a skirt or worn out more casually over trousers. I think there are a lot more opportunities with this pattern to use up some of my left overs to make the peplum version or the gathered sleeves. 

This pattern is a winner. Thanks for dropping by. Jo xxx

Bed Runner

I have been working on a quilt for our new house. Not for me but for my big girl. We have been very lucky parents; our girls have never asked to have their room decorated in all the years they have been alive! With this in mind we are trying to make sure they have full choice for their new rooms when we finish building our new house. 

I don't normally choose fabrics for a quilt, quilting for me is something that uses up left overs, but I had to choose something for my Minerva next month and I just don't want anymore clothes right now. The fabrics are a range of Micheal Millar cotton quilting patterns.

There is a palette of grey, navy and mustard in geometric prints.  She has chosen an Orla Keily Navy and white duvet cover so we were looking for something to inject a bit of colour but not clash with a retro print.

I didn't really have a pattern, I just wanted to make sure that there were no scraps left over so I cut bricks from all of the fabrics and used the last of my Minerva cotton from a seat pew cover to add some solid colour cohesion to the design. I did try laying them out as a brick wall but with the prints, it looked a bit too 'busy' so I returned to the idea of having them patched corner to corner.

I made strips which were sewn into a rectangular topper. It wasn't quite wide enough so I used some fabric which I had cut from shortening her ready to hang curtains to add solid borders. I saw the curtains in a sale bin for £40 and decided I just couldn't be bothered to make a pair to compete with that kind of price. All of the cut offs have been used now which feels like an extra bargain.

 My daughter and I worked together to stick a calico backing to the floor with parcel tape; layer on the batting then smooth out the topper. It is hard on the knees but we didn't have a large enough table.

We safety pinned all the layers together. I decided to hand quilt it because I always get puckers on my machine because my sewing machine has a very small aperture to shove a quilt through. 

Heidi made a template from a cereal packet using an Orla Keily storage jar as a guide. Together we marked out leaves and stems using a water soluble pen. 

A couple of nights of evening hand stitching and I knew we had made the right decision. Finally, I added a binding which was left over from another quilt to enclose all the edges. It has quite a loose top and bottom border which is not quilted and this gives it a relaxed blanket feel. I washed the whole quilt because I like the crumpled effect it gives. She was thrilled to try it out on our spare room bed and helped me put the duvet cover on.

Good morning!

Goodnight!

Another item to pack away for our house move. I am getting quite excited about opening all of the bin bags of home furnishings I have been making but we will have to wait another year yet, so much more house building work to do.

Thanks for dropping in. Stay cosy. Jo xxxx

A Cracker of a T-Shirt

Thank you for visiting my ing post. They are always very popular.

Today I have new T-shirt to show you. I am lucky enough to part of the Minerva blogger network which has kept me in fine fabric and wonderful wool for a good few years. Sometimes I get the opportunity to try something new through them and an exciting email appeared asking for volunteers to join a book review collaboration with Wendy Ward, this was way back in April 2018. 

Her new book Sewing with knitted fabrics is a comprehensive encyclopedic offering of useful knowledge on sewing with stretch jersey fabrics along with a capsule wardrobe of patterns. 

If you sew for yourself or your family you may find that making woven cotton dresses and skirts starts to become a little limiting after a while. I found this and once I had decided that I wanted to make most of my everyday clothes it became apparent that I needed to be able to sew jersey for T-shirts, tops, leggings, PJ's, loungewear and underwear.

The book contains paper patterns for tracing in the back. All of the patterns are interchangeable so the T-shirt pieces double up as a T-shirt dress, crop T-shirt, Long sleeved T-shirt and a natty patchwork detailed one. There is a creative element of building your own design each time which I really like.

Minerva asked me to try a pattern from the book and sent me a top quality piece of Art gallery cotton jersey. I like a new learning challenge as you know so I went for a T-shirt with a shirring waist detail. I have not done this before so I referred to the section on winding a bobbin with shirring elastic and had a go on a practice piece first.

Previously, I have used trial and error, blogs and Youtube to learn to sew jersey but I wish I had had this book back then. The knowledge section of the book is really good. It is written for home sewers of a beginner level, however as a more experienced sewer, I still found it very stimulating but easy to understand.

The T-shirt was a triumph. It is worth mentioning that I made this entirely on my normal sewing machine without using my serger. The techniques in the book guide you to useful stitch selection, length and width choices which made sewing easy.

Ah, my summer tan has faded now and I am back to being the colour of a raw pig!

Thanks for stopping by. Jo xxx

Best Dress Tunic

 Hello! Well, here is Burda 9380 take two. This version has a few little alterations which makes for the most comfy best dress tunic.

  

I have made my older girl this pattern in jersey here. Little M wanted one too, in fact it was her I chose the pattern for in the first place but I got side-tracked experimenting with knit fabric.

 My youngest girl will wear virtually anything colour wise so long as it is modest and comfortable. I don't know why. She hates wearing sleeveless or strappy tops or having bare legs - it may stem from  always being very slim, maybe she is trying to pad herself out a bit - who knows. Anyway, I knew this dress had to be lined so that she would find it comfortable with leggings as a tunic.

I also predicted that she would not like cotton sleeves which got stuck inside her cardigan sleeves so I made them in jersey and the main dress in cotton. This red fabric is a light cotton weave ideal for hard wearing children's clothes matched with a coordinating jersey.

I turned the raw edge of the jersey hem over once and ironed it down with hem tape then used a decorative stitch to 'overlock' the raw edge on the inside and leave a nice finish on the outside. I have used this technique a lot lately because my overlocker has been playing up. The hem tape stops the hem stretching and rippling so it looks sharp.

We added the iron on motif just because we had it and it matched the colours. Minerva have lots. I have a selection at home for ironing over holes in jeans.

She loved it and said it was soooo slippy on the inside. 

That is a good thing!

A great pattern with so much potential for using up bits and pieces.

Thanks for looking. Bye for now. Jo xxx