Too much mustard?

Back in August when my local sewing shop began getting in their winter stock I practically fell to the floor in a swoon when I saw this mustard-coloured wool suiting. Thinking of winter bags and wishing the last days of summer away, I bought some right then and there, along with a little dark blue to go with it, as one of my favourite winter coats is just that colour (I was unsure if I was making it for myself or not...but illogically I tend to only make things that go with my own clothes). I'd had this weird up-and-downy scallopy effect in my head (I wonder if there's an official name for this technique - I'm sure that I've seen it on children's clothing before. It reminds me of honeycomb though...so for this reason this will be called The Honeycomb Bag) for a long time and couldn't wait to try it out. It made my head ache trying to work out how big the pattern piece needed to be to accommodate my scallops and they took far longer to execute than I could have possibly envisaged (for it needed to be done for both sides). However, I'm sure that I remember that Julia once wrote about giggling to herself as she sewed something that she found especially delightful (I'm so sorry to pin this one on you if it wasn't you, Julia - I can't find it in your archives!), but anyway, I must admit to partaking in a little of this mad laughter, for despite the time-consuming nature of it, the finished effect made me feel quite giddy.

So what a shame then that I ruined the whole bag by making some hideously thick piping for it and then installing a frumpily thick tab on it too. When I'd finished I hung it up on our cupboard doors (this is where all finished bags spend at least a couple of hours, so that I can decide whether I'm happy with everything) and sat feeling rather gloomy...would it be too over-dramatic to say that looking at my own poor workmanship and the bag's ugliness made me want to poke my eyes out with a fork? It stayed there taunting me for a couple of days, and then I put it away in my cupboard of finished Made by Florence shop items (which was a mistake, because it completely ruined the karma of the cupboard for me). Anyway, that was August and this is now. When getting something out of the cupboard this week I suddenly realised that I would either have to snip the bag into tiny bits to obliterate any evidence that such an eyesore ever existed...or would have to gently take the whole thing apart with my seam ripper, install some narrower piping and leave the cumbersome tab off all together. On environmental grounds I chose the latter.

I phoned a dear friend (who is incapacitated having just broken various body parts while cycling DOWN a hill as fast as her legs would turn the pedals...even she doesn't know why she chose to do this, but it just makes me love her all the more and makes me think of the Lotta books) and sat unpicking stitches while we giggled over what a loon she can be at times and the logistics of getting dressed without fully-functioning limbs.

And a couple of hours later I felt as though the bag had been rescued from the brink, even though Mr Teacakes says that mustard doesn't really appeal to him and looked slightly pained when I asked him what he thought of it. But then I have the same reaction to polyester football shirts, so that's fine, I suppose....for mustard makes me happier than a happy thing (NB. luckily Mr Teacakes understands the importance of not wearing this type of shirt at any other time than when actually playing football himself...which makes me even happier than the colour mustard).

Here's some close-up scallop action.

Other sewing this week has been canine related. Long-time readers may remember that a long time ago I made this cushion featuring a Westie dog for a friend of the smallest Teacake. Anyway, they recently asked me if I might rustle up a matching Christmas stocking, which of course I was only too happy to do.

I hung this up in Zebra-girl's room to photograph it as that's where the sun was and sweet little Honey happened to be sitting at the bed head with her paws resting over one of the little cats that decorate Zebra's slipper socks (bought from Monsoon in case your own girlie might like a pair...or inspiration for those of you who can actually click your knitting needles together like Dorothy and her red shoes...I'm like a farmer in wellingtons for that particular activity, which is why the slipper socks are bought, rather than homemade...but oh how I'd love to make stripy cat-adorned slipper socks). I was unsure as to whether she had noticed what was on the socks, and whether the paw was protective or predatory...but she looked so scrumptiously lovely sitting there in the sun that I had to take a photo of her.

Anyway, even more exciting than bags, stockings or cats is that we are off to meet a new baby this weekend - my sister-in-law has just had the most gorgeous little boy and the smaller Teacakes are beside themselves with what cousinish fun might be in store over the coming years. Horah!

Thank you so, so much for spoiling me with so many lovely and kind comments on my last post - I'm delighted that all three pictures have now been sold. If anyone is interested in commissioning one they are priced at £40, including framing and p&p (UK mainland only - overseas postage will come to a little more).

Wishing you a lovely weekend.

Florence x

p.s. for photos that are less grainy and blurry (why do you do this blogger?!) you can visit my photostream at Flickr.

To the ball...

I've recently felt (well a month or so ago...because there's a slight time-lag in my blogging at the moment) that I had so many ideas bubbling away in the background that I wasn't giving any time to that I just might go into melt-down if I didn't get them stitched and out of my head. With custom orders and trying to make stock for the craft fair (intermingled with going to spinning classes and the gym, which may seem like a self-indulgent way to spend time, but really my days are so sedentary that it began to seem a necessity if I was to have a hope of seeing my 33rd birthday) there didn't seem to be time in the week to set aside vast chunks of it for more experimental stitching that might be less likely to sell.

So one very wet and rainy weekend, the lovely Mr Teacakes let me spend two entire days and nights (yes, it was a this-is-so-much-fun-I-can't-waste-time-sleeping sort of affair) cutting out small bits of fabric, while he and the children pottered about playing board games and watching videos together and occasionally coming in to sit on the floor where I was working for chatting and the nibbling of jelly beans (vegetarians take note - delightfully, the Jelly Belly and M&S jelly beans are all free of gelatine and so are perfect for making up for all those lovely looking jelly sweets that are out of bounds...and the colours and flavours are so lovely that, luckily, my children find them far more appealing anyway). Cinderella going to a ball was first on my list of things that I really wanted to do. I love the fairy godmother and carriage scene and golden thread seemed the only way for me to go to attempt to make it seem as sparkly and magical as the written story is when read aloud.

It took me hours to decide on fabrics...I have the most enormous pile of wheel-shaped rejects, which was a piece over which I seemed to become particularly indecisive. I framed the final picture in white.

My next picture is of a girl on a swing. I think there's something inexplicably lovely about swings, both to children and adults and I know that Zebra-girl loves them (although more recently I just experience horrible vertigo-like feelings whenever I go on one, which I feel so annoyed about)...if only our own tree was strong enough to hang one from. This feels both spring-like and wintry to me, depending on whether you think of the background as sky or falling snow.

This was the picture that I ended up being most pleased with, as I really like the colours.

And because I really love her hair...and would quite like to have hair like that myself occasionally.

I tried each one hung on our own walls to see how they looked...to do this I had to take down one of our existing pictures and was greeted by forgotten evidence that it was me who had hung that picture, as the wall behind is covered in failed attempts to get the nail in properly. Oh dear. Picture changeover was done while Mr Teacakes was out of the room.

And finally, I've felt desperate to do something involving a hot air balloon for well over two years, so it was with complete happiness that I cut out the pieces for the balloon. I decided that this one needed to be a little more boyish and so I changed my thread to silver and stuck to bold primary colours.

There is a little grey cat peeping over the edge of the basket, although dinosaur-boy assumed that this was a wolf. I think I like the idea of a wolf in a hot air balloon floating over the tree tops and roofs tops even more, so I'm sticking with his interpretation.

Wishing you a lovely weekend.

Florence x

**UPDATED** Thank you so much for your enthusiasm and all your lovely comments - they are so appreciated. I'm delighted that all three pictures have now been sold. If anyone is interested in commissioning one they are priced at £40 - this includes framing and P&P within the UK mainland (I am happy to ship overseas, but this will cost a little more). x

Through the letterbox

Long time readers of my blog may remember that my sister, Laura, edited an anthology of poems a couple of years ago for Penguin Classics entitled Poems for Life. Well yesterday, her third anthology, Love, plopped onto my doormat and is just as lovely. Cloth-bound like the last, with thick creamy pages, it is a delicious treat of a book. And I can't help but be delighted by the fact that this book has page marking ribbons in contrasting shades of red...

Ordered into sections by the different ways in which we might experience love ranging from Suddenly, Secretly, Nearly and Tentatively, through Haplessly, Incurably, Impatiently and Passionately, to Greedily, From a distance, With a vow and Happily ever after. Stopping at The morning after, Treacherously, Bitterly and Indifferently, in between. My list omits so many other thoughtfully titled ways in which we might feel the ups and downs of love.

New favourites have been comfortingly found in the Happily ever after section, most especially one by Adrian Nowlan entitled Parlour Games (which I have been unable to find online to link to), which gave me that deliciously rare feeling of instant recognition, that can come as someone so eloquently expresses a snapshot recognised from your own life - he writes of a couple reaching a silent truce through smirks and sideways smiles over the course of a visit from unexpected guests who had arrived mid-argument in the most perfect and generous way.

I was propelled back to being a 17 year old as I re-read a much studied scene from Twelfth Night, revisited my first year at university when reading an extract from Roger McGough's book Summer with Monika and loved reading of moments captured on paper from the lives of others - In-flight Note by Judith Rodriguez, A Friendship by Connie Bensley and Ironing by Olivia McCannon.

She has included Invisible Kisses by one of my most favourite poets, Lemn Sissay, and for our Mama the book ends with Leonard Cohen's Dance Me to the End of Love. And on turning to the acknowledgments, she has dedicated the volume to myself and my parents....which makes me feel all butterfly stomached and watery eyed.

Just as beautifully bound and almost as lovely, my sister sent me this wonderful edition of Pride & Prejudice last month. After hearing her talk about Austen novels and recalling my own love of Emma, I rued the fact that I still hadn't read Pride & Prejudice, so she ordered me this very special mustard-hued copy, which I read, barely stopping to eat, over the course of 24 hours.

In the same way that one can see how a cliche becomes a cliche because of its very trueness, one can also see why a classic becomes just that - it is just so very, very good. I loved it and entered into the Bennett's world so whole-heartedly that for several days after I found that my speech had become slightly more formal and quaintly phrased (luckily I was able to email Joanne in character and know that she would be most sympathetic having spent nearly two years fashioning an Austenesque dress in which she might answer the door to the postman...how very odd that makes her sound! She will thank me for mentioning that out of context, I know).

Anyway, after a spell in the Austen decompression chamber I returned to my partially normal self and started devouring this wonderful craft book that I was sent pre-publication in October (which excited me no end for the only thing more delicious than a new sewing book is a new sewing book still in its comb binder arriving on my doorstop to peep at before its even arrived at Amazon HQ).

I love the premise for One-Yard Wonders, being someone who hoards her fabric greedily, not able to cope with the idea that a project might use up my entire supply of a certain print. As it says on the cover there are 101 projects and they are incredibly diverse.

I particularly loved the ones where fabric was used in a more unconventional way - like Junie Moon's project which shows you how to cover an old-fashioned pair of bathroom scales with fabric and seal it so that it has a rock-hard totally unfabricy finish, or Danielle Wilson's project which inspires you to fabric line the backs of shelves.

The projects which use fabric more conventionally range from children's and women's clothes, to bags and cushions, to holders and cosies, toys and blankets. There are some really fantastic ideas in there too, such as the beanbag booster seat, which I would have loved when my two were small. The photography is beautiful and many of the pages are edged with strips of lovely fabrics.

Storey Publishing are currently running a giveaway to coincide with the release of the book where one can win free fabric for a whole year - you can find the entry form here (and you don't have to actually buy the book to enter...although the book is so lovely that it's well worth buying - you can find it in hardback here - the paperback is yet to be released).

So much postboxy loveliness that I think I may need to go and lie down. If this isn't the linkiest, longest post that I've ever done then I'm not sure what is...if you're still here and haven't got lost link-following then hurrah! x

A pocket for everything...and one more for good measure

Well now, somehow an entire month seems to have passed by without a blog post, and part of it hasn't even been my fault! But more on that later, first some sewing, because my stitching archives are nearly three months deep now with unshared makes. A couple of months ago I was asked to make a bag to be given as birthday gift. The colours were to be kingfisher blues on donkey-coloured suiting...so many shades of donkey...so horribly open to interpretation...I was very much hoping that we were imagining the same donkey. I'm not sure we were, but I've since heard from both the gift-giver and the recipient that the bag has been very well-received, and so I'm assuming that all shades of donkey can become beloved.

Anyway, I hadn't found myself wanting for donkeys and kingfishers, but I have to admit that I did try this bag on a few times and became so consumed with wanting one that I rustled one up for myself too. Mine is the one at the top of this post with the more subdued blue piping...let's call it petrol...or dolphin.

And now here is my very own bag (at a jaunty angle as Zebra girl is becoming rather arty if in her photography). It has a much shorter handle than the other bag, as when I know I'm making something for myself then it becomes part of my 'petites range' (he he!) which is more suited to people who are only 5ft 1. Originally most things that I made were cut this way until it was broken to me (very tactfully) that normal people need longer bag handles.

I don't tend to experiment with things quite as much when I'm making them for other people, but as it was for me and it mattered far less if it all went horribly wrong and ended up in the bin, then I thought I'd attempt an internal zippered pocket, which is something I've always wanted, but never found the time to try. Anyway, Lisa's tutorial for this provides all the pointers a girl could need for getting it right first time and I have to admit to having butterflies as I finished the pocket as I was so thoroughly excited by seeing for myself that it really was perfectly do-able. And like an over-decorated Christmas tree I added in a key holder, as well as a pocket for mobile phone, wallet, pens and a whole host of other things that I found it strangely pleasing to make perfectly-sized pockets for. It's not very clear here, but there are actually additional pockets beneath the zip, as well as piped pockets on the other side. I listened to a Damian Rice album six times over that day as I was working so fast that I didn't feel I even had time to get up and change my iPod to something different. By the time I went to pick the children up from school the room was a mess, Damian was starting to grate a little, I was covered in thread, but my bag of many pockets was finished.

The magpie in me is loving these shiny hoops, also from Ms Lam's shop - is there no end to that girl's goodness?

How odd though that it doesn't feel like my bag after all that...it actually feels like my mother's. Last year I made her this bag in very similar material and now whenever I use my bag it feels like I'm borrowing it from her. Hmmm.

Anyway, I did say that there were reasons for my blogging absence. The first is that I suddenly had so much work on, that when not deciding to quite illogically drop it all to sew millions of pockets for myself instead, I didn't have time to blog. At some point I came down with the usual October coldyness which seems to have left me partially deaf, but in amongst all that we took ourselves off to the most wonderful cottage in West Wittering with my parents, where we stayed for several days. The weather was perfect and every day of our stay was spent at the beach playing football, cricket and searching for shells. There was such a healthy sense of competition between the adults that two came home with sporting injuries after making tackles with more vigour than seaside games might usually require. The beach at West Wittering is amazing and every day gave a different look to the shoreline.

Arriving home I was all ready to get back to work and had a long list of things that I wanted to do...which all suddenly became impossible once we found that our Internet connection had somehow broken while we were away and that I would have to spend the next week on the phone trying to work out why it had broken and what could be done to fix it. Anyway, BT have now installed some new cabling somewhere a long way from us, and after something of an Internet detox I now feel quite delighted by the idea that you can have a thought and then google it immediately, rather than delaying the gratification by waiting for 10 days.

But there was lots of of sewing to be done and I am now beginning to make some things for the We Make Fair in Chelsea Town Hall in December, where I will be sharing a stall with Joanne & Helen. I am loving the idea of shared stallship for it means there is so much less pressure to produce a mass of things. We are in a smaller room, that is a little less grand than the main hall, but is apparently very near the tea and cakes, which seems like a good compromise.

What have you been up to? x

Zips and other things

Back in May 2009, when I was writing this article for Sew, Mama, Sew! I initially started by trying to think of one item that I could make that would utilise every sewing foot...I quickly scrapped trying to tackle it that way and instead ended up using old photos that happened to capture different techniques being demonstrated (or attempted in the case of my rather sorry free-motion embroidery). However, one photo of the discarded pencil case (for that was the item that I decided could cope with such over-footedness) I did use in the article (see below) as it demonstrated well how utterly indispensable and fiercely fine a walking foot can in keeping things aligned and in their intended place.

Anyway, the pencil case (which used the zipper foot, walking foot, quarter inch foot, open toe applique foot, and a standard foot...horay...I find that so thrilling, but have no idea why) looks like this and sat in a box for some time quite forgotten about, until someone spotted its peeky slices of fabric and asked if I could make her several to give as teacher's gifts for Christmas (as it's currently October, I am rather awestruck by the fabulousness of this lovely girl's organisation on such matters!).

Oh walking foot, how do I love thee, let me count the ways...

So here are the pencil cases all lined up and ready to go...the zip colours make me think of rolls of refreshers, so soft, pastelly and happy.

These ones are without the embroidery, as strangely the customer in question didn't have at the forefront of her mind the need for me to use all possible sewing feet in the construction of her pencil cases, and so was happy for them to be left plain.

And finally today is an extra specially good day for us, having narrowly avoided awfulness. On the way home from meeting family for lunch, we were driving along a fast country lane when a deer appeared from nowhere in front of us...as I started to do an emergency stop, three further deer also ran quickly across our path one after the other - it was utterly horrifying for every time I thought we might just miss one another appeared...it felt an absolute miracle that we managed not to hit any and the last only escaped by an inch or so. But as everything seemed to happen in such slow motion my over-riding memory is of how utterly beautiful they were seen so close up - a perfect pale grey down with dappled white spots covering their sides - they looked so serene even in their fright and we carried on our journey feeling that all of us had been rather lucky (apart from Dinosaur-boy who stayed asleep throughout having eaten enough chocolate ice-cream at lunch to allow him to happily hibernate for the rest of the year without the need to surface).

Oh and I must also show you these lovelies which were delivered by the postman a couple of weeks ago - the most beautifully scented lavender bags, filled from this blogger's own garden's supply and I am in love with the fabric - thank you Pomona!

They are now nestled between my winter jumpers, minus one, which Zebra-girl quickly snaffled up for herself.

Wishing you a lovely weekend. x

Rainy day stitching

The above was something of a peg bag emergency for me, if there can be such a thing. One of my loveliest local customers asked if she might call round to pick up a doorstop that she'd seen on my website...and would it be possible to make her a peg back to collect at the same time. I was in the middle of making a kimono at the time, so the room was rather a thready mess of material that the overlocker was spitting at me (because who actually remembers to attach the thread catcher before starting work), so it was a challenge to clear enough thread-free space to start working on something else entirely.

I'm sure if I'd not had a deadline to work to I could have spent several hours drafting and redrafting a peg bag pattern, but as I only had 1.5 hours to draft and make it, it put an end to any such procrastination and dilly-dallying and made me uncommonly decisive. It was one of those wonderful days when the bias-binding behaved so well that it was almost as if it had bound itself and I'm now dreaming up projects just for the excuse of using more of it.

The kimono is now nearly finished (the making of it having been punctuated by several smaller projects as well as the peg bag) and I have several bags to share just as soon as I'm sure that they have been received. Below is a custom order for an owly pencil roll.

I was particularly delighted to find a Jennifer Paganelli fabric that seemed to me to have obvious owly eyes within its floral pattern.

The little pink and gold tray that it's on, I am quite in love with - purchased at an antiques fair a couple of weekends ago, the lady told me it had belonged to her grandmother. As a sentimental hoarder it always amazes me that people are able to part with these things, so I amused myself by imaging that the grandmother in question might have been a fearsome old dragon who was best forgotten...but her china tray feels so happy I'm not sure that can be true.

Anyway, it's now hideously rainy, so I am planning an afternoon of cosy, central-heated stitching finishing up a few orders and then tomorrow will perhaps venture outside to buy some wool suiting for a dress that I'm about to start work on - I'm most excited about this - it will be my sister's Christmas present and, having become more attached to my overlocker over the last few months, and also having bought this book, which teaches some of the basics of dressmaking that I had previously been guessing at, there's nothing I'd rather be doing. Thus far my sister seems to have been the sole recipient of my dressmaking attempts (yes, the latter found a home with my sister and she has worn it so frequently that the material is now beginning to bobble. How pleasing...sort of), then I am also now drawing up designs for myself, that may or may not see the light of day depending on how this third attempt goes.

Thank you so much for the cushion love of the last post by the way...just in case anyone wanted to make something similar, if I had access to it (I don't - in the colours I wanted this was the only width of velvet I could get purchase, but who knows what vintage lovelies you might have in your own sewing drawers) then I would use much, much wider strips of ribbon and think that this would go a long way to making it a less stressful, impish project.

Birthdays

In the last couple of days Zebra-girl and both her grandmothers have had birthdays. My own mother was 60 and so I wanted to make her something lovely. I knew that she'd been hankering after some cushions, but felt that making something out of the more muted, unpatterned upholstery fabrics that would compliment their lovely minimal home wouldn't feel quite special enough to mark the occasion. I wanted to blend together all her favourite colours and create something that would be both tactile and simple...which is what eventually led me to come up with the idea of weaving velvet ribbons.

I found it difficult to source my most coveted shades of velvet in the vast quantities that I required them in (that's the problem with possessing colour charts for a range...once you know what's out there you can no longer be happy with the standard shades that your local haberdasher's stocks)...but with an much amended and then re-amended list of most-wanted colours (because apparently half the colours on the chart aren't even stocked by the reel in this country) I finally pulled together 70 metres of the stormy seaside blues, greys and creams that I was hoping for. Seventy metres I had foolishly thought would make two cushions. It doesn't. But if it had I may well have lost the will to live making the second, so that didn't end up being too bad a thing.

The weaving took longer than I'd imagined it might, but it was nice to have a rare piece of lap work to do while I had a friend over for the day...a scientific sort of friend who, after watching me weave for nearly three hours, pointed out a much simpler way of doing it which involves throwing alternate ribbons up and then simply placing the horizontal ribbon down and then laying the alternate ribbons back over it...something I never would have thought of, but which delighted me no end.

After hours and hours of weaving I'd nearly finished when I started tightening and pulling some of the ribbons down a little....and quite quickly I was left with a square of weaving that tunnelled and curved upward at each ribbon edge, that wouldn't be teased back into shape and that could not forgive my meddling in what had been nearly perfect as it was. And so I found myself having to unweave the entire cushion and start over again. It was a dispiriting evening that called for a large mug of hot chocolate and a soupçon of swearing stirred in.

Second time around I seemed to weave a little quicker though and I used my overlocker to secure each edge in place before adjoining it to the reverse fabric. This is the back of the cushion - some grey-blue tweed suiting. The zipper opening allowed me to get the cushion pad in easily, but also seems to imply that the cushion is washable. An implication I hadn't anticipated until my delighted, ever-practical mother gasped: and I can even wash it! Mmm, well no. I simply can't imagine how all those ribbons would react to a spell in the washing machine.

I have had so many projects on the go over the last couple of weeks that my overlocker has stayed out next to my sewing machine, so that I can switch between the two more quickly. It has been incredibly cramped and lends the room a slightly industrial feel, which I'm not sure I was actually hoping for. Some WIPs are piled up on top of the machine which are now all sewn up - I'll hopefully take a few photos of those before they're sent away.

Anyway, more exciting than any stitchery I could show you, are the cakes that Mr Teacakes starts making the moment there's a birthday on the horizon. For Zebra-girl there was a cat (for which I seem to have inadvertently switched my camera to the black & white setting for most of my photos):

And here's some colour:

And then for my Mama (for I started a cake for her myself, but soon saw that there is a very good reason as to why cakes are left to Mr Teacakes in our house) he made this rocking horse (the relevance being that she loves rocking horses). He had just two hours to make and ice the entire cake and in the rush, and under my awful guidance, we chose colours that, in retrospect, are more suitable for a newborn than a 60 year old. How we howled with laughter when we stood back and realised this just moments before we had to leave with the finished cake for her birthday lunch.

Luckily, she liked the idea of being reborn for cake purposes.

In amongst all the birthday celebrations I seemed to lose the ability to sleep and buzzed about the house sometimes for almost the entire night trying as quietly as one can to clean out every kitchen cupboard and reorganise pots and pans. It was a truly productive week and I realised that one would be capable of mammoth amounts if only one didn't need to sleep. But unfortunately the minute the birthdays were over I returned to my bed-loving self, looking a little more baggy-eyed and feeling ready to hibernate for the winter. If only one could.

Back to school notes:

Such a long time seems to have passed since my last post, that the summer and all its loveliness and then the feelings of elation as the first signs of autumn began to appear, now seem a long time ago...rather than the two weeks that's actually gone by.

After an unbelievably busy couple of weeks for my little shop at the start of the summer, the balance of things didn't seem to be working and I decided to switch off my sewing machine, barr the odd evening, and spend the rest of the holidays with the little Teacakes and, unintentionally, this seems to have led to some sparseness on the blogging front too.

Our week days were filled with picnics (not all of them sunny, and some of them comically windy), bike rides, painting, baking, outings, seeing friends, having water fights and spending wonderful chunks of time with my mama. Somehow it transpired that every weekend throughout August the small ones went and stayed with their grandparents for a night, leaving Mr Teacakes and I free to enjoy a summer of parties, meals out and spending more time with old friends. It ended up being the most perfect summer and by the time 7th September came (back to school date) I realised that I felt more refreshed than I had done for several years.

A couple of days before school restarted I was sewing a name tape into a school shirt when Zebra girl came and sat next to me and said: you don't really sew very much anymore, do you? This made me feel so happy with the relief that the first few weeks of summer, where she and Dinosaur-boy had played while I'd worked each morning, had been forgotten in her mind and that I had managed, in this case, to go some way toward unpicking my mistakes. Her comment also gave me all the permission I needed to allow myself to mentally slip back into stitching mode and make plans for my child-free time. I had several orders to get started on straight away, as well as some birthday presents to stitch and it's been so nice to immerse myself in them, particularly as for the first time ever both children have gone back to school feeling entirely happy.

In a fit of optimistic back-to-school enthusiasm, I also decided that I needed to do something about how sedentary my working week in front of the machine had become. Spinning classes have been attended and trips to the shops are now undertaken on my new shiny black bicycle, rather than in the car, which is almost as fast, even if it's several times more terrifying as cars hurl themselves into my path. I have found that skinny jeans lend themselves perfectly to pedalling and mean that one doesn't have to suffer the indignity of wearing trouser clips or other such foolishness. Unfortunately the cycling helmet is proving to be a non-negotiable sartorial faux pas...but I'm thinking that being without a brain would be a far worse look.

Anyway, I'm hoping that time will allow for more regular posting now, which will hopefully be stitch-related, as I've so many things to show you from the last fortnight. But in the meantime, I hope that you've had the most lovely summers and are finding it as exciting as I am to find that the red-leaved, cosy, pumpkin-filled season is finally upon us.

Thank you also to all those lovelies that continued to purchase a copy of my Tabitha Bag pattern over the summer - your enthusiasm for it has delighted me and seeing some of the pictures of the finished bags has been such a treat - thank you. x

August

Making me happy at the moment is this makeup bag that I made a couple of months ago in a fit of self-gifting. Knowing that it was for myself liberated my stitches and allowed me to cut corners in a way that I can never bring myself to do when making things for my shop. Yes. I decided that I wouldn't change my top thread for sewing in my label...and that I wouldn't change my bobbin thread to make my top stitching around the zip blend nicely in with the lining. And all because I could. I think this is what is called Sewing Dangerously.

And now, oddly, this green stitching on a pink background is what gives me the most pleasure when I use my makeup bag each morning...which makes me think that contrast stitching may make an intentional appearance on more of my shop things...and also makes me think that sewing for one's self occasionally, when one's sewing is more experimental, is a virtue and not something to feel guilty about (she wrote, guiltily).

Making me less happy is the Sunday Night Feeling that I have from taking the small ones to buy new school shoes today. Oh how horribly fast the summer has been going, but what an utterly busy and wonderful August we have had - there have been parties, picnics, swimming, more meals out than I can remember and the buying of bikes for adult Teacakes, which has seen us whizzing around with Mr Teacakes shouting 'look no hands' in a moment of recaptured youth and with a nod to the Lotta books of my childhood (in which older siblings Jonas & Maria do just that)...we are discovering that there are cycle tracks and trails hiding just about everywhere and that they are all within easy reach if you don't grind your newly-fitted tow bar onto speed humps while getting to them. There have also been funfair rides of the seriously scary variety at Lambeth Country Fair in Brixton (proving that the country really is so much more fun in the city) - when I look at this picture I still can't believe that my small Zebra-girl was up their in the clouds sandwiched between her father and his good friend, Dan. The three staggered off, with the smallest recovering first, and the two men looking a handsome shade of, what I think is referred to on the Farrow & Ball colour chart as, Cooking Apple Green. There has also been the fun of realising that despite the fact that Joanne lives in London and I don't, that we are actually within Popping Distance and she popped over today for only a frivilous couple of hours and joined the Little Teacakes and I for lunch at our favourite cafe and for a dash of fabric shopping, what a wonderful mid-week treat.

And in between all the fun we have been practising, practising, practising every day with Dinosaur-boy to try and help the jumble of letters that he sees sink into some sort of order. We have played word pairs, word snap, word memory game and a whole list of other word-related amusements and just when we were all about to cry with boredom (actually, that may have already happened) Mr Teacakes has stepped in with some of his computer wizardry and put my homely looking snippets of paper and card to shame with these wonderful Star Wars word and number cards made specially for Dinosaur-boy.

They focus on the high frequency words that crop up in nearly every sentence, but aren't necessarily easy to sound out. Each card features a Star Wars figure and beneath him or her (or it!) a quote of something they say in one of the films with the word to be learnt in bold letters. If Dinosaur-boy reads the word correctly he gets to keep the card, and if he doesn't then whoever is playing with him gets to keep the card. Once he's read through all the cards, we then use the ones that have been won to play Star Wars Top Trumps with him, which makes the whole thing feel much more game-like. Combat Ability, Jedi Power, Dark Side and other Jedi traits are rated 0 - 20, which is good for covert number practice too. Happiness is a small boy bouncing onto your bed at 6.30am who actually wants to play a word game.

Ps. I am, as ever, behind with emails. Please forgive me - I am trying to keep the computer turned off so that I can avoid being sucked into it and finding that my holiday time with the smalls has been mysteriously swallowed up. Normal borderline disorganisation will be resumed in September. Blog reading is confined to the 10 minutes in the morning when I am drying my hair, which doesn't lend itself well to commenting as my hair can only take so much multi-tasking while being tamed...but I am reading! x

Appliquéd everything...

This post is a hotch-potch of appliquéd things that I've made over the last couple of months that I somehow haven't managed to get around to blogging until now.

Above is a Darth Vader t-shirt that I made as a gift for a small person that we know - I'm delighted to report that his love for this t-shirt is so great that he has to be coaxed into allowing it to be washed and parted from his person for even the shortest time. Making it was a huge amount of fun and caused me to stay up until a long way past midnight with the excitement of finishing it - it was a challenge for me as I usually appliqué individual pieces together to make the picture, but Darth required that for certain areas minuscule pieces were cut out of the main applique piece and then each of these holes had to be overlocked around the edges (Some of them are so small that you can only just see them - little slits of red in between the eye areas)...a precision task that was new to me and made me feel utterly thrilled when I finally realised that it was all very 'do-able'. Unfortunately, I had a slight wobble when it was all finished and I was busily steam pressing it at 1am and happened to catch sight of the size label and realised to my absolute horror that the t-shirt was the wrong size! Luckily, it somehow ended up fitting anyway and I am forever grateful for the curious ability of this boy to morph into a child a few years older than himself for the wearing of this t-shirt, to the extent that it actually looks like the right size!

Next is a tractor & trailer bib that I made at the request of my lovely friend Clare, for her to give as a gift to a friend with a new baby. That's the loveliness of custom orders...they inspire me to break away from cakes and ice creams for a moment and come up with other designs that I want to use in my shop once I get around to making another batch up.

I loved this project, also a custom order, this time for a small boy who was new to wearing glasses. The brief was for the case to be funky, but tasteful.

Every time I get an order for more boyish things or I attempt to make up some boy's things for my shop I feel quite disappointed by the blue section in my fabric drawers...so the minute this order came through I finally felt prompted into action to try and rectify the situation and did a little online shopping, for what I had was tasteful, but not really funky. I was so delighted with the little blue, green,red, orange, yellow and brown stack of fat quarters that arrived a few days later...but a little over-zealous in my wish to boyify my fabric stash and so forgot to photograph the loveliness before putting it away (actually, I have come to think of the putting away of fabrics as 'filing'...sometimes this can be fun...other days it is a bore, a little like working in an office. That day it was very good fun).

So anyway, I plumped for making this stegosaurus on what I have come to think of as a background of sputniks.

And finally a blue cupcake t-shirt, made at the request of this lovely blogger, who knits by candlelight and makes wonderful dresses for her daughter...and even encourages me to think that I really might be capable of following a pattern to do the same.

Anyway...there has been some quite alarming fabric accumulation over the last month or so, to the extent that it was necessary to do all sorts of drawer rearrangement and jiggery-pokery to make for stress-free fabric filing this evening. I feel that the make-up of the stash has changed so dramatically that it may be deserving of some more storage photos in my next post.

I hope you've had lovely weekends. x

Things I have learnt about myself...

One of our holiday highlights was seeing this gorgeous Saddleback pig. At the start of a walk on a very rainy day we came upon a farm yard and as we approached, about twenty of these gorgeous little piglets came rushing towards us snorting adorably and pushing their snouts through the fence toward us. The curly tails, the coarse hair, the sad, but twinkly eyes...all four of us were quite taken with their utter perfection and the thought of seeing them at the end of our walk propelled us up and down a mountain more quickly than on any other day.

We climbed a mountain a day for the first four days of our visit to the Lake District...but on the fifth day I woke and had to confess to Mr Teacakes that the idea of putting on my muddy walking boots for another day of walking actually made me feel physically sick. As I had far surpassed his expectations of how many days of mud stalking I would actually happily participate in, he was more than willing to leave me at our lovely cottage for the day. I had gone truly believing that I might find my inner country girl lurking within....(although Joanne claims that she knew I wouldn't find her, even before I went. She is a wise one.), but actually I think that in the same way that Mr Teacakes finds the rush and buzz of Soho stiffling after a couple of hours, I find being surrounded by mountains on all sides induces vague feelings of claustraphobia. But these observations aside, we did have the most lovely time and luckily the Teacakes possess far more of Mr Teacakes' genes than my own and so continued to approach the climbing and mud tramping with enthusiastic gusto.

The night before we left home I started to feel incredibly twitchy about the prospect of a whole week without my sewing machine, and so found myself wedging embroidery hoops and linen into my over-packed bag. I spent some time embroidering these rows of dresses, but actually, I disappointed myself yet again, by realising that it's not hand-sewing that makes my heart sing - it is the pattern drawing, fabric-picking, hum of the sewing machine and hours spent making edges and lines marry up perfectly that makes me feel truly happy.

So this weekend we had another mini-holiday. One of our lovely friends was celebrating her birthday and we decided to stay in London overnight for her birthday party. A quick search on Last Minute found us booking a nameless hotel near to the party for the grand total of £58. Oh the joy of getting the confirmation email and it being revealed that we had booked some 5 star loveliness!

A couple of weeks ago the birthday girl's boyfriend had contacted me to ask if I would make a kimono for him to give to her - it's so flattering when someone wants to give something that I make as a birthday gift, so I was delighted. He chose this Sister Boom fabric from a selection that I had four metres of (which wasn't a very large selection), which I was really pleased about as it has an enormous repeat pattern, which means that there was more fun to be had in making it work so that the pattern ran centrally down the back...small things like that make me feel so much happier when working with an enormous volume of material which naturally allows less room for paying attention to tiny details.

After a lovely evening with a few too many mojitos we pottered over (actually we didn't potter at all, we jumped in a taxi as we discovered that you really need to start the day unstrenuously after a late night of rum drinking) to Fabrics Galore on Lavender Hill where I wanted to choose some suiting for autumn-winter bags. The wonderfulness of this shop never ceases to delight me, nor do the lovely people who run it and I came away with a very heavy bag. This is their current window display, which looked wonderful in the sunshine with all the butterfly shadows on the wall behind...although my photograph doesn't really do it justice.

Anyway, we finally have some glorious weather, so we are off to a friend's house today to make the most of it. Wishing you a lovely week. x

p.s. The blogger spellcheck seems to have taken leave, so please do try and avert your gaze from the spelling mistakes and typos that will undoubtedly litter this post!

Elephant and Bear en vacances...(& moi aussi!)

Meet Elephant & Bear. After my recent hedgehog crisis (where kind commenters where left talking me down from the parapet, such was the scale of the disaster, and my sister has since insisted on adopting some hoggy goodness, or should that be hoggy badness?), I am more than a little delighted by having sewn something that I think might actually resemble the intended creatures in my head.

They have been made to go in the little Teacake's holiday bags (bags of treats opened an hour into the long journey). Each one has a little pocket on the bib of their clothing, which I'm hoping might eventually double as a receptacle for milk teeth to be left out for the tooth fairy, for while Zebra-girl has a cloth mouse from France for this purpose, Dinosaur-boy has, thus far, had to make do with leaving his on his shelf for collection, which doesn't seem quite right at all.

They both have bendy, pose-able arms and legs - I found some illustrations in one of the Tilda books that show how this can be achieved with yarn and buttons and was amazed by the simplicity of the technique and have had to restrain myself from spending hour upon hour whizzing the arms round and round just for the sheer fun of it.

After studying how some of the Teacakes own shop-bought bears were made up and looking in books, I felt as though I'd had a small breakthrough with the comprehension of softie construction...bits of the 3D magic suddenly started to click a little more for me and by the time I'd finished the bear, drawing up the pattern for the elephant felt weirdly intuitive. So perhaps it's just small snuffly things that are my stumbling block.

But anyway, the time has finally come for the animals to be packed into their bags and for me to turn off my sewing machine and computer (the latter thrills me more than the former...I did wonder about taking it with me) for a week. I am feeling so in need of a break, for despite the fact that I feel head-spinningly in love with what I spend my time doing, I am now utterly shattered. The last two weeks I have been operating on the extended working hours of going to bed at 2am and rising to sew again at 6am, so that I could write my bag pattern and get all my custom orders made up and posted off before our holiday. Not because I have any impatient customers, but because it makes me feel anxious not to have everything done and all the loose ends tied up properly, in the same way that it would to leave the house untidy when we go away.

One final thing before the creatures and I depart though: Thank you so much for the overwhelmingly enthusiastic response to the Tabitha Bag PDF and to all those that have bought a copy (I am so bowled over by how many of you want to make one - I can't wait to see some of them). For anyone wishing to buy a copy, you are still very welcome to, but if it is purchased after 5pm GMT on Friday 24th July, then the PDF won't be emailed to you until 3rd August.

Additionally, to those that have already bought a copy, you may remember that I said in my accompanying email to the PDF that extra photos were available for nearly every stage should you struggle with any part of bag construction - you are really welcome to email me, should you need to, and I will get back to you as speedily as I possibly can at some point after the 3rd August.

Wishing you all a sunshiny, happy week,
Florence x

P.S. And whooopeeee! As I've been spell-checking this blog post I have just received my first email from someone with with her very own handmade, brand new Tabitha Bag who says that she is delighted with her bag and really liked the pattern - I can't tell you quite how happy this makes me! The newbie pattern writer in me has had to exercise massive amounts of self-restraint not to take to the sofa and leap up and down doing my best impression of Tom Cruise jumping on Oprah's chaise declaring his love for Katie Holmes. Down on the carpet once again, the other thing that I will pass on is that this particular lovely bag-maker said that compared to other bag patterns she has followed, she found the order that I chose to do things in unexpected, but went with the flow anyway, and by the end completely 'got' why it made sense to do them like that for this bag. As someone who's never followed a bag pattern herself, I've never been aware that my order might differ to convention, but to those that do notice this, I hope that you will bear with it, as it seems to work out well in the end.

Tabitha Bag Pattern PDF

The Tabitha Bag pattern is finally finished and I want to thank you so much for all your suggestions and ideas about what makes a good pattern...they gave me so much more direction and confidence about the best way for me to do it.

The majority of people seemed to be saying that they preferred PDF because when the wish to sew something strikes one really doesn't have the time to waste a week looking longingly at the letterbox waiting for the postman to arrive with instructions. So that's the format that the Tabitha Bag pattern will be available in.

I've absolutely loved writing and designing this pattern - so thank you to the lovelies that nudged me to do it.

So, for those that are interested in purchasing a copy here are the details:

• The Tabitha Bag is available as a PDF.
• It has bullet-points for those that like their instructions concise and to the point...
• ...With notes in between in italics for those who like a more wordy explanation with tips and reassurance.
• Each point has one or more hand-drawn black & white diagrams to save on printer ink, with colour photos only appearing when a step might be particuarly challenging to interpret without.

• The pattern pieces are full-size and can be printed out on A4 paper (portrait, not landscape, orientation) with no need to enlarge them.
• The instructions include detailed explanations on how the pattern pieces should be cut and labelled, as well as an explanation of any terms that pop up during the pattern.
• In terms of what level of sewer the Tabitha bag might be suitable for, I would suggest intermediate to advanced. It is a challenging bag to make in that there are so many pieces to it, many of which require being aligned very precisely for it to come together looking perfect.
• The PDF will cost £8.00 (that's just over $12 USD) and is for personal use only.

It has taken a huge amount of work to put this pattern together and has been written and tested, rewritten and re-tested several times. However, if you have any problems with it then please do let me know, so that I can smooth them out as quickly as possible.

Once I've received a payment for it, I will email the PDF to you within 24 hours (normally sooner). If you haven't received it after that time then please do email me to let me know, after first checking to make sure that it hasn't ended up in your spam bin, as things sometimes can.

If you get the chance, I would absolutely love to see any photos you have of your finished bag.

Florence x

Colourful thoughts & I'd love your opinion...

These thread colours are making me feel so happy at the moment. My thread rack is opposite our bed and from early morning the sun shines brightly through our unlined curtains (black-out curtains seem to make me wake feeling bleary), giving me time to mentally sort them from my pillow...these five seemed to me to be the most exquisitely vibrant colours - sometimes it's hard to believe that a manufacturer can get it so very right...it makes me think that there must be men going about their work in laboratories and factories, stumbling upon the perfect thread colour perhaps only once every couple of months and leaping from their chairs with joy when such a thing happens and perhaps gobbling a chocolate chip cookie to celebrate. What absolute perfection - I think they look almost too good to be real.

They've ended up temporarily on Dinosaur-boy's boat for these photos...I don't know where they're going...

Carrying on the sunshine theme...I actually made this yellow teabag holder a couple of weeks ago, but then the weather became so gloomy that it seemed unseasonal to post something so apologetically cheery.

It, and several others, will be finding their way into my shop at some point over the next week or so...but time seems to be going sneakily fast now and I can't quite believe that on Friday my little Teacakes will be at home for seven weeks...there is so much to do before then and my dream of having my hair cut and taking the cats to the vets before the Teacakes are with me all day seems most unlikely to actually end up happening....which will mean waiting seven more weeks for a haircut because the place that I go to is in a wonderful, architecturally beautiful place that in the spirit of restfulness allows neither children or mobile phones to enter the building. But I'm so tempted to try and squeeze them into my pockets on this occasion if I don't manage to make my way there this week (they can go out of pocket to the vets and will hardly be noticed amongst the mewling menagerie in the waiting room...it's just less fun trying to cross roads with two children and a heavy, unsettled cat carrier).

So this week keeping me busy is a handful (well, actually far more than a handful) of make-up bags...and also trying to write the Tabitha Bag pattern that I mentioned in my last post - indecision has been cleared away in time to try and squeeze the writing of it into this last week of the school term...and I'm realising that it may well take the entire week, for not only is it the most complicated, multi-pieced thing that I make, it is a bag that I now know so well that I easily steer around the little quirks in my pattern, knowing where to give or take an extra centimetre or two...but I'm very aware that I need to hone my pattern to iron these things out before I can pass it on to other people to buy.

So while I'm thinking of pattern writing, I'd really love to hear your thoughts on a couple of things. What do you like in a pattern: diagrams or lots of photographs? Bullet-pointed instructions or a tutorial written with hints and tips for how best to go about each step? And finally, are you happy working from a PDF file on your computer, so that you can have your pattern almost as soon as you've paid for it, or do you tend to prefer to pay a little extra and send off for your patterns and have them arrive a few days later on paper? I'd love your opinions (irrespective of whether you'd ever buy my bag pattern).

Sorry for so many samey pictures...sometimes the light seems just too good to not take a whole series of photos of the same thing...but then picking which ones to blog can lead to indecision...so much quicker to just put them all up there!

Thank you so much for the people who've resubscribed through Bloglines (problem still not rectified...oh dear) and for the lovelies who stopped by to check what I was up to when they noticed that nothing had appeared in their Bloglines from me for a while.

Bloglines...or not

Just a quick weekendy note to say that after I put on my technical hat to do clever things with Feedburner at the start of July, I inadvertantly put in some wrong code...this has somehow meant that my Bloglines subscribers have been cut off. One of my bloglines feeds has now been restored...but the one that contains 134 subscribers is still behaving oddly....

....so if you would still like to be told when I have posted more of my ramblings, then I wondered if you might consider re-subscribing to the feed that has the fewest people on (that's the rss feed), as I'm yet to find a way of solving the problem with the other one. 

Oh, and there might just be four posts beneath this one that you've never even read! 

Happy Saturday. x

(p.s. in future I won't be attempting any more clever technical things)

More bags

I have had lots of custom orders for bags recently...it's not easy to become bored of making the same thing over and over when there's still the excitement of seeing each new bag take shape with a completely different look depending on what fabrics have been chosen. First is the confectionery combination of turquoise and brown - how is it that those colours make me think of sweets so much, I wonder, but they do - minty, chocolatey flavoured sweets. I remember having my first After Dinner Mint aged about 7, and falling quite in love with the whispery thin black paper that houses each mint and the lovely sweet, fresh smell that rose from the box the minute the cellophane was pulled back. I thought they were so incredibly grown up. Anyway, this fabric made me think of After Dinner Mints for the entire time that I was sewing.

So it was something of a relief to be sewing something entirely more sober later in the week.

The inky blues and blacks and muted sages in this fabric made a more conservative looking bag, which I love. I have to admit to trying it on in front of my mirror after it was finished, and like Narcissus, I fell quite in love with my own reflection (although, not entirely like him, in that my focus was on the bag, rather than my face) and I eventually managed to tear myself away to pick the children up from school rather than dying right there before the mirror...so actually, the similarity is slight, thank goodness. But let it be known that I thought it looked damn fine with a pair of jeans.

I love this minty lining, but I mustn't think on that too long. Do you see? My life is perpetually interrupted by the linking of inedible visions to sugar-laden goodies.

I've noticed that all my bag pictures tend to be taken either on my cupboard doors, or next to my sewing books. I am limited in that I am terrified of taking them out of my sewing room into territory that may be home to the odd cat hair, and so a pattern has emerged in my limited surroundings: the minute the bag is finished it is hung up on my cupboard doors - this somehow seems the perfect place to look at it from a distance and make sure that everything is lined up nicely. The next morning it seems to find itself moved next to my sewing books above my fabric drawers where I tend to take one final photo before I wrap it and post it off...bags feel a little like the sewing equivalent of babies to me - they are a labour of love that are harder to part with than some other things.

And then after a spate of Tabitha bags, this bag below is based on the Melly bag and was created for a Mother-of-the-Groom.

It took many emails of outfit photos and colour swatches to find just the right shade of olive and lime to go with her outfit, and actually when the chosen fabric eventually arrived I was utterly shocked by the colour of it - the fabric swatches that we had been looking at on the Internet (and indeed on Ms Butler's own website) show this fabric as being a soft sage on an olive background, but in reality it is far more zingy (and even a little luminous). But despite the shop being willing to let me return the fabric, she was happy to go ahead with this more lively proposal...and I'm now so glad she was. It looked far less shocking once it was made up into a bag than it had as a flat piece of material and by the time it came to posting it, I was feeling much more enamoured with it.

In a fit of wildness I thought I'd put this one onto a chair to photograph. The little sash on the chair is a matching band for the lady's hat, and below is the inside of her bag...the dash of cream seems to do much to tone down the intensity of this print.

Anyway, back in May I blogged about the bag that my mother ended up putting her name on before it was even finished (that I've subsequently named the Tabitha bag - you can read why here). I've since had numerous emails asking whether I'd be willing to sell the pattern for it for personal use. I'm hugely, delightedly and suprisedly flattered that other people love this bag design as much as I do and the generous and kind comments that I've had about it have been so appreciated. I feel bad not to say yes instantly to this when I've had so many lovely requests but I'm mulling on it, primarily because it's one of the things that I sell in my own shop...and also because I'd never really considered that selling patterns could be another arm to my little industry (or that I could be capable of writing a pattern in terms that normal people could actually follow - I've only just recovered from shock of the positive response to my make-up bag tutorial...so many firsts here!), so it needs a little thinking about...and I do tend to think quite slowly. Bear with me. x

p.s. I've posted about this here due to my being so appalling at keeping on top of my inbox - I'm so sorry not to have responded to individual emails on this.

Cosy cushions for a rainy day

I had other things that I was planning to show you today...but they were yellow and sunshiney things, and today the weather is rainy and glum and so somehow posting such summery happiness seems all wrong. So instead, out of order (for I have a massive backlog of things to post about), I will show you this cushion that I've just finished which seems much more representative of the blustery weather: cosy and snugly.

I have been feeling desperate to make some ruffles recently. What only months ago seemed like 1980s hideousness, has somehow infiltrated my thoughts becoming destigmatised by frequent bouts of unexpected thought-exposure-therapy and eventually worked to make itself seem so delicious that a point was reached where I simply couldn't do anything useful until I have given in and satisfied my need to make some cushiony ruffleyness. Sometimes the wish to sew a particular thing can be just as powerful as in an insatiable desire to eat Guyllian chocolates.

So here it is: part gift for Zebra-girl, part shameless self-gifting for me. Sometimes it's even more fun to make the gift than it is to give it.

I'm now adding a ruffler foot to my list of coveted things...ruffling by hand takes time and can be fiddly...but not so fiddly that I feel like I'm entirely rid of my ruffling bug. Next time I'd like to make one for a bigger cushion pad to make it a little less fussy, for one doesn't want to be all ruffle and no cushion.

Thank you so much, lovely blog readers, for your restorative comments on my hedgehog crisis last week - you said so much to cheer me and your suggestions for de-ratting the hedgehog were so wonderful that, with a little cheerleading from the lovely Siobhan (whose comment made me laugh and smile), I don't think I am quite ready to give up on my quest for hedgehoggy perfection...or just hedgehoggy goodness as I'm aware that I may have to set my bar low in this area. So you may see more spikey snuffling here before long, but now I am off to do some much needed tidying up before the Teacakes return from school.

x

Wretched hedgehogs

Despite a mounting sewing To Do list I managed to fritter an entire dispiriting, awful day on making a family of wretched, half-finished, troublesome, ugly hedgehogs (I'd only wanted to make one, they became a family only as my reject pile grew bigger). I woke thinking of hedgehogs this morning as the still heat reminded me of a day spent sitting on our front doorstep as a child waiting for our cat Beanie to come home...he never came home but I do have strong memories of hearing rustling from the flowerbed and the flicker of elation that rose in the belief that it was my cat about to emerge from the undergrowth. It was actually a hedgehog, the first I'd ever seen, and I don't think I've seen another one up close since. Perhaps the infrequency of my hedgehog sightings (one every 32 years being relatively low) holds the key as to why I seem to have been so incapable of sewing something that resembles a hedgehog today.

Drawing a pattern for a hedgehog foxed me for longer than I might have imagined...but then I suppose it would - I don't often venture into the realm of softies and I'm not especially good at visualising the flat parts that make up a 3D shape. But then once a pattern had been drawn the sewing and stuffing brought yet further frustration..how to stop it from looking so irritatingly mouse-like...it seemed an impossibility, no amount of putting tucks in around the cheeks could convey the longer snoutiness of a hedgehog. Some were abandoned with only one ear, others without the nose being embroidered on...and so a family of disfigured hedgehogs was born. Standards slipped as I grew weak with the knowledge that this was a doomed project and that every hour spent 'having one more go' was an hour when I should have been doing something else.

How seamlessly a failed softie can repurpose itself into a pincushion...in this case the pins surprised me by helpfully going some way to giving the illusion of spikes...but even in its new utilitarian guise it looks more ratty than hedghoggy.

It is days like this when I lose my faith that I can sew or will ever manage to sew anything nice again...I felt like weeping at 3pm when it was time to pick the little Teacakes up - such a waste of a day: not only in time, but also general happiness and morale. I feel miserable (and a little dramatic - perhaps it's the heat). I will be staying away from stuffed animals for the foreseeable future. I had decided to make one for each for Zebra-girl and Dinosaur-boy's holiday bags (bags of goodies to be opened an hour into the journey - as you can see the blue colourway never met the light of day)...but in this case, I think I may actually buy some. Grrrr. One of those rare times when making things by hand feels all wrong.

When I went to the school I bumped into my lovely friend Tamsin: couldn't they just be mice she asked. That seems like such a reasonable suggestion...but no, they could never be mice when in my head they were meant to be hedgehogs. To allow them to be mice would be to accept my own uselessness. Also they don't have tails.

I'm so sorry to rant. I'm very much hoping that I shall wake up a normal person in the morning. x

Manly iPhone holders

I'd mentioned the wonderful Arcadia range in my last post...and here's some of it all stitched up. I'd had a couple of requests for some manly iPhone holders and this range, with its miniature prints, is perfect for this type of small item. As so many of you will already have discovered, the wonderful thing about the iPhone is that it's mp3 player, radio, email, phone and internet all in one, dispensing with the need to carry several electronic gadgets around in one's pocket...which is what I am guessing men are forced to do in the absence of any Man Bag.

But luckily for them, in the same way that a man's make-up free face never seems to look pasty and washed-out, a man with his pockets full of keys, money, phones and all the other gubbins that gets taken along never seems to suffer from a bulky or misshapen silhouette. I have no idea how this can be so, but despite this natural propensity to looking good, still one of the commissioning males was not content with mere gadgetry downsizing, and requested that his iPhone holder should double as a wallet also. So on the back I have created a little card and notes holder.

The other man requested that his should have a Velcro flap to keep the iPhone securely in place. I like to believe that this is because he is planning on doing cartwheels and handstands and other things that might potentially cause his iPhone to go leaping wildly from his pocket.

While I was making these I noted down the need to research whether some sort of hand-held miniature sewing machine exists...there are some things that are just too small to fit onto the arm of the sewing machine and it took a frustratingly long time to find a way around this problem.

Anyway, this post is forced into being uncharacteristically brief (addendum: this is no longer the case...as I end up wittering on for so long), for while I am so excited that the little Teacakes will soon be off school for the summer holidays, there is so very much to do before that can happen (I say 'that can happen' as if I have some control over when the school term ends...I don't, just a feeling that all loose ends must be tied before our days become a lazy stream of swing parks and ice-creams). But the next two weeks look set to be overtaken by the anticipation of the children's separate sports days as text messages are sent at lunch time to let parents know whether the weather is just right for such an event: not too hot, not too cold...I'm feeling doubtful over whether the perfect temperature is going to present itself before the end of term, but am keeping my fingers crossed as Zebra-girl tells me that she will be sack racing and few things are more delightful than watching children bobbing frantically along in their sacks grinning wildly, especially when one of them is your own...I am just so poor at shoehorning tasks into potentially fragmented bits of time that I find this kind of uncertainty most unrelaxing.

Sunday Stash

Somehow nearly two weeks have passed since my last post and I'm having a where-to-start sort of moment because I have so many things to blog about. But it's Sunday, the sunshine is unbelievably zingy, and I am feeling a little weary after a family game of pyjamaed dodge ball...so I shall save ordering my thoughts until the week...which promises to be no less hot, but at least I will be dressed and perhaps have a modicum of sprightliness about me. So instead, I will fall back on a Sunday Stash post and share with you the lovelies that came through the letterbox from Sew Mama Sew a couple of weeks ago. I couldn't believe it when I opened the packet...I'd never seen fabric cut and then lined up with such precision that it actually looked more like a sheaf of brightly coloured papers, than fabrics. The temptation was to leave them that way...

But they were too delicious not to unfold and gaze upon properly and then put into colour order. Which could be done with wild abandon when I realised that no amount of folding and refolding could recapture how perfectly aligned they'd been.

And then for some local loveliness: there are not often things that make me gasp with delight in my nearest sewing shops...so imagine my excitement to walk in and find myself faced with these stacks of Arcadia fat quarters filling the cubby holes. I have fallen quite in love with the colours and clean lines of these prints. Although I'm finding it hard to source solid cottons that co-ordinate exactly with the minky browns and limey yellows that are used in this collection.

But I've still found ways to cut into them and am loving how versatile they are - I have had a couple of requests for Man Products and some of these prints lend themselves perfectly for being made up into just such a thing...but more on that in the week, for a sundress is calling me.

Unsuitable for dogs

With a custom order for a couple of pencil rolls to make up, I finally found myself prompted into action on redesigning them before I made a new batch last week. My mother, who is the font of both wonderful frippery and downright practicality, had long ago told me that, despite the opportunities for pleasing ribbon-fabric coordination, she didn't think that a pencil roll that required fastening with a bow was at all suitable for small hands or their busy mothers. I think that she is wrong in some ways because one happy customer told me that her child's pencil roll doubled as a coat for their small dog and that her children had spent many happy hours being delighted by seeing the dog trot around in a spotted pencil roll jacket, the bow tied at her tummy. It is my firmly held belief that any other fastening would not have so welcomingly accommodated even the smallest of canine girths.

However, not everyone has a dog and it will only be a fraction of pencil roll purchasers who have hopes that their roll might be dual-purposed in this way....which is why I have heeded my mother's wise advice and redesigned my rolls to have velcro tabs. I had felt a little sad that this didn't allow me to have the happiness of choosing ribbons, but actually, I made my own fun in trying to find little pictures or nice fabric swatches to go on each tab.

And how could one not go foraging for little details like this when one has been set up so nicely to think that way by the thoughtful manufacturer who chose to produce inspiring selvages like the one below - it's so lovely I can barely believe that it actually exists and resides in my house.

And one of those sweet little houses and trees found their way onto the front of one of the pencil roll holders - I would have loved this when I was small. It reminds me of some yellow and red hair bobbles that I had that were made from a plasticised fabric and featured a hot air balloon...how I would love to still have those (to look at, not to wear...no weirdy pigtail regression here!)....there's something so lovely about very miniature things.

Some of these will find their way into my shop within the next week...which I feel I can now say with much relief, having lost my shop (and email - horrors!) for 24 hours due to strange server problems. But it's over now, and I can breathe again. How oddly attached one becomes to one's website - it feels like an extension of myself and for it not to be there felt tantamount to suddenly being told that my ear lobe had gone missing. Mr Teacake tells me that despite the fact that I pay nothing for his web services, I am somehow more demanding than any of his real clients. Mmm. This is probably true...but I have deemed this to be the prerogative of the person who maintains a constant supply of pistachio nuts solely for his nut-eating happiness.

Happy tulips...

Anyway, there is so much more to tell, but not quite enough time to tell it in, so I shall leave you with this photograph of the wonderful matryoshka tape measure that my sister surprised me with last week.

I am off to do some measuring with it...and tomorrow, we are off to the hospital for Mr Teacakes' operation on his hand. Thank you so much for your well wishes for him. x

Stitchery from the small ones

A couple of weekends ago I was photographing the roses when Mr Teacakes came and stood beside me. Before I could turn to look at him properly I caught a glimpse of our shadows on the lawn and let out a delighted squeal, for in my somewhat wild imagination, we temporarily looked like a Rob Ryan picture (to Mr Teacakes we looked like two silhouettes of ourselves...and I can see how that might seem to be so to one less prone to flights of fancy!) I had a split second to take this photo before he began to un-rob-ryan us and I was left staring at him using the deep shadow pool to make animal silhouettes.

Anyway, with making your own fun in mind, I have meant to blog about these monster kits since my sister bought them for the little Teacakes at Christmas time. I am not often fond of kits, as they often feel too prescriptive, a 'craft' that lacks the opportunity for creativity and can lead to the small one feeling frustrated when it inevitably doesn't resemble quite what it says that it might on the box. However, these monster kits are something quite different and the antithesis of all that is bad about craft kits.

Inside the bag are a random and rather jaunty collection of fabric shapes and you are invited to use them to fashion your own monster. This is right in so many ways - for by its very definition, a monster is a creature of the imagination that can look any way you might conjure it to be, and so they were able to set about positioning their fabrics with gusto, actively eschewing two symmetrically placed eyes or a properly placed jumper. Fabric shapes were traded, possible combinations giggled over and finally, fantastical one-eyed, underpant wearing monsters were created. Dinosaur-boy's monster reminds me of an elephant, while Zebra-girl's has just enough of a feel of 'human' about it to make it even more ghoulish.

Best of all, I found no need to sit on my own hands or superglue my own lips together to prevent myself from making 'helpful suggestions' - I could relax into the realisation that these monsters did not have to resemble anything on the packet for me to feel that our sewing session had been successful. Dinosaur-boy was four when we made these and stayed immersed in their creation for nearly two hours, his mouth pursed in concentration as he formed each lovely stitch.

I suppose these kits could be stuck together with glue...but that would feel all wrong when there's the opportunity for some hand-sewing. And I can see that there could be an argument for making them from my own stash of left-over fabrics...but somehow this was nicer...I know that if I made the kits myself then I would cut pieces with a purpose for them in mind and feel anxious when I saw the carefully shaped underpants that I had cut out being used a hat. It's hard being a control freak.

This week I seem to have sewed at a snail's pace and am staggered at my own lack of productivity - how did it take two whole days to make six pencil rolls? I think it may be the distractingly lovely presence of Mr Teacakes working in the same room in between hospital appointments. SQUEAMISH READERS: PLEASE STOP HERE. One of Mr Teacake's games of football ended in disaster last week when he collided with the goal keeper as he went to shoot and broke his finger. His appointment with the hand specialist this week confirmed that he has broken his knuckle and finger very badly and will need an operation to have metal pins put in it, in the hope that he will recover the use of it. This is no small thing for him when his job designing websites relies on him being able to click a mouse all day and his guitar requires that he is in possession of all his fingers.

He is also distraught that this will mean he can't play football for the time being. I have implored him to wear a padded foam bodysuit and crash helmet once he returns to the pitch, but oddly, he does not seem keen on this idea. Instead he just speaks of me fashioning him some kind of attractive fabric finger support. I have no wish to branch out into the realm of personal injury sewing though, so will continue with my pencil holders and buy him a consolation ice cream instead.

x

Sewing Machine Meme

Following my article on sewing machine feet for Sew,Mama,Sew! I've had so many emails asking what machine I have that it seemed a good time to complete their meme. Beth & Kristin are compiling a database of links so that potential buyers can read the memes written about different makes and models of machine - I so wish this had existed when I was making my choice. There comes a point in one's buying research where one has read all the technical information available and simply craves to hear subjective, personal opinion...so here is my very biased offering coming from one who is wholly in love with her machine!

What brand and model do you have?
A Pfaff Classicstyle Home 1529.

How long have you had it?
Over a year.

How much does that machine cost (approximately)?
Around £400 (about $650). Although I part-exchanged my old Babylock and the numerous feet that I had to go with it and so only paid £250 for it.

What types of things do you sew (i.e. quilting, clothing, handbags, home dec projects, etc.)?
I use all different weights of material and make everything from handbags, to quilts, to kimonos, to oven gloves and even curtains if I'm forced to...I can't think of anything I couldn't sew using this machine.

How much do you sew? How much wear and tear does the machine get?
On average I sew for about six hours a day or night, five or six times a week (although some of this time will obviously be spent pattern-drawing, cutting, pinning...and eating an occasional biscuit to sustain myself), so fairly heavy-duty usage.

Do you like/love/hate your machine? Are you ambivalent? Passionate? Does she have a name?
Oh, what's not to love? I actually find my machine perfect in every way, although I've yet to personify it by giving it a name. My love for it comes primarily because it stitches perfectly every time, so that I can get on with making things rather than losing hours fiddling around with the settings - this sounds like a small thing to be grateful for, but so many machines don't seem capable of this.

I chose to buy a Pfaff because of the built-in walking foot (IDT) which can be used in conjunction with most of the feet that I own for it. The walking foot makes sure that the top and bottom pieces of material are fed through the machine at exactly the same rate (on a standard machine the material nearest the feed dogs is fed through a fraction faster which can result in less precise results). The other thing that I love is that the feet are able to flex up and down a little, meaning that it can effortlessly sew through varying thicknesses of materials without my ever having to lift my foot from the pedal. The only thing that I sometimes wish for is an automatic needle up/down feature (this is where your machine always comes to a stop with the needle down in your material so that it's ready to pivot, rather than you having to adjust this with your flywheel), which it would need to be computerised to possess and the Luddite in me feels quite passionate about keeping my sewing machine the old-fashioned way. It would completely change the relaxation that I find in sewing if I was having to deal with a computer's inherent quirks and naughtinesses.

What features does your machine have that work well for you?
I love the different needle positions (something that my old machine didn't have)...and again, all of the above.

Is there anything that drives you nuts about your machine?
Nothing. At first I wished that it looked a little prettier and longed for shinier feet to attach to it...but I've come to love it the way it is and fight the bit of myself that craves for all utilitarian things to be aesthetically pleasing. I now look to the vintage Singer (above) that my father bought for me when I'm needing a fix of sewing machine shininess!

Do you have a great story to share about your machine (i.e., Found it under the Christmas tree? Dropped it on the kitchen floor? Sewed your fingernail to your zipper?, Got it from your Great Grandma?, etc.!)? We want to hear it!
Oh, how I wish to make something amusing up for this and tell you that my cat dragged it home after the metal foot plate accidentally found itself attached to her magnetic collar...but that would be untrue, not least because she doesn't have a magnetic collar. I bought it at my local shop. I am delighted with it. We have had no mishaps together. And now I'm feeling like a crashing bore. Did I mention that I can fold myself in half?

Would you recommend the machine to others? Why?
Yes, I feel quite evangelical about it...and would only just stop short (due to worries of being labelled a fascist) at expressing a wish for ownership of this make and model to be compulsory and for all others to be taken off the market.

What factors do you think are important to consider when looking for a new machine?
When I was buying I spent an awful lot of time craving a machine that could do fancy stitches...but I've since realised that I can't imagine very many times when I'd use these and so I'm pleased that I didn't make my choice on that basis...so I suppose it's most important to think about what kind of sewing you currently do. What's really important to me is that my machine behaves impeccably so that I'm able to produce things that look exactly the way that I'd hoped that they might. I'm lucky that my local sewing machine shop really think about how each customer will use their machine and what will be best for them. When I discussed the things that I make and how many hours a day that I sew for, the lovely man there was able to convince me that what I really needed was a reliable, sturdily-built workhorse, despite the fact that even a top of the range workhorse will nearly always be less expensive than a computerised model. It's so rare to find a salesperson imploring you to spend less, but because of this I trust their advice implicitly and would now never risk buying a machine from elsewhere and have attempted to go some way to rewarding their kindness by buying a small army of feet to attach to it. My machine's simplicity means that I can fix most things myself and that on the rare occasion where I can't, it can be fixed on the same day in their workshop without waiting for expensive parts to arrive. My machine is German (and I think assembled in the Czech Republic, but Pfaff have now switched production over to China, so I'd be unlikely to buy from the newer range) and having tried out comparative Pfaff models side by side manufactured in the two different places I can say that even to the untechnically-minded, the Czech models sound and feel far superior to the Chinese versions.

Do you have a dream machine?
Yes, exactly what I have now...but I'd really like two of them so that I can stop worrying about what I will do when it eventually gives up through overuse.

And no, the materials have no relevance at all to this post and aren't even recent purchases...it simply felt too gloomy to write this without a little bit of fabricy loveliness to pad out my words!

Wishing you a lovely weekend. x

All things footish...

Firstly, welcome to anyone who is visiting from Sew Mama Sew! - it's so lovely to have you here. Beth and Kristen recently asked if I'd like to contribute to their month-long June Sewing Machine extravaganza and I was utterly delighted - if you haven't already, do go and visit...they're even giving a way a whole sewing machine (yes, in its wonderful entirety!). I chose to write about sewing machine feet as they're something I feel weirdly passionate about...and also because the minute Beth gave me my options I imagined the potential for creating this ridiculous picture with my ballet slippers housing my sewing machine feet instead of my own feet...and well, small things amuse, no?

I have been finishing off some custom orders for t-shirts today, as well as making some more bibs up for my shop...which is good, because yesterday I achieved virtually nothing as it was so lovely and sunshiny that it felt all wrong to be inside when I could be outside having lunch in the garden with a good friend...this could bode badly for summer productivity levels, but I shall ask my sweet Mother not to send me emails letting me know that the forecast for the rest of the week is poor so to enjoy it while it's there...it leads to panic sunshine consumption.

Dinosaur-boy had asked if I would make him a t-shirt with a chocolate ice-cream on it - I felt a little sad seeing him trying it on, because I realised as soon as he put it on that by next summer, when he'll be 6 (or gosh, maybe even just by next week), he will almost certainly want his t-shirts with something cooler, scarier and just more raaaaa! on them and will be unlikely to continue to enjoy something just because it gives him the opportunity to pretend to eat himself. I love how chubby and little his arms look in this photo though.

Anyway, as this post started on feet and shoes, I thought that I may just end it on them too...here are some feet of the non-stitching variety at home in their new shoes. I am completely in love with these shoes for they are mustard and go perfectly with the bag that I made for myself last summer, have chunky high wedge heels and are just all round perfect. I love them to the point of considering buying a back-up pair just in case these ones are involved in any kind of unfortunate footish mishap.

I took this photo during a four-hour long swing park marathon with the little Teacakes over half-term...sandcastles were built, ropes climbed, the delicious smell of suntan lotion on warm skin was breathed in and I felt ridiculously happy every time I looked at my shoes. And just in case you were worrying, no, I haven't been ironing strange creases into my jeans...these are just denimy-coloured wide-legged trousers...a point that I feel an overwhelming need to clarify.

x

Through the letterbox

Half-term has been whizzing by and after the sunshiny loveliness of last weekend which saw us going butterfly hunting (hunting to see them, not actually eat them), we have had a rain-soaked couple of days of pottering, setting up a cinema in the living room (we watched Two Brothers which is about the hunting of tigers and was absolutely amazing - even the littlest Teacake thought it was wonderful, although very sad in places). With child-filled daytimes I have been sewing a lot in the evenings: below are some of the make-up bags that I was stitching earlier in the week - two for a custom order...and an extra one that will go into my shop (Updated: now in shop).

I've also made this co-ordinating tissue holder and herb teabag holder that are heading off to New York soon. Once finished I happened to put them down next to the new bag that you may remember I'd blogged about making in my last post...I love it when one stumbles quite unintentionally across matchyness! It would be very pleasing if I could keep them all like that, weirdly assembled on the shelf. (Updated: this bag is now finally in my shop!)

I have also had exciting things arriving through my letterbox: some of you may already know of a new sewing magazine launching this month called Sew. Well, the first issue arrived with me a couple of days ago and it was such a treat to flick through its pages, for not only did it contain excellent interviews With Amy Butler and Eithne Farry, but it also had more obscure things like an insight piece into the traditional tailoring processes at Gieves & Hawkes on Savile Row, which I found myself strangely fascinated by...I love hearing about how people with traditional, more formal training work for I feel like they must be in possession of a kind of magical expertise, possibly handed down though a long line of descendants from the Elves & the Shoemakers. The little Teacakes were unusually eager to leaf through the magazine the minute it arrived on the doorstep to play a game of 'spot our mummy' as they knew that there was to be a small piece featuring my blog in there...and horay! It really was there.

On my second read-through, once the small ones were safely tucked up in bed that evening, I quickly realised that I couldn't possibly relax without my laptop next to me to follow up all the links to the previously unexplored fabric shops that were scattered throughout its pages. I was truly amazed - I'd thought my own internet trawls for UK stockists of my favourite fabrics had been truly exhaustive...but it seems as though I had only scratched the surface, for there is much loveliness to be found closer to home than I had first thought.

Bagsy

Last week I spent much of my time working on a new bag design. I recently sat down in a shop next to Joanne (we were there for the long haul, so it seemed a sensible thing to do) when I noticed that she had a wonderful tote bag with a central split in the middle revealing the most scrumptious green Amy Butler print. Joanne summed its loveliness up perfectly when she said: well, you don't always want a bag that's got colour and pattern all over it. And with all the suggestibility of a Stepford Wife, I found myself nodding my head and thinking: Damn it, she's right. I don't always want a bag that has a pattern all over it (although, sometimes I do...for there's fun to be had in being a changeling). The bag I eventually came up with has the same outline shape as my Melly bag, but with a different arrangement making up the inline (is that a word?) shape.

My lovely Mama popped round while I was mid-make. She has become so used to the constant production line that dominates my room that she has long since ceased to notice whatever it is that I'm working on and gets down to the happy business of tea-drinking and chatting while I cut things out and scuttle round trying to de-thread the carpet so that she doesn't go home with an extra coat. But most pleasingly, she set upon my new bag, ooohed and ahhhed in the most gratifying way and declared that she must have it, despite the fact that doesn't actually need another bag...which was perfect as it was at just the right point in production that I was able to make the handle a little shorter than usual for her, which is just the way she likes them. Here I am with it in one of those weirdy self-portrait photos that one occasionally feels compelled to take...yeah, that's me...just lounging against the wall...oh and I just happened to press the self-timer button before I began lounging. There's something so silly about it.

I created a narrow horizontal flap of material to visually tie up the two pleats of colour on either side, and have done the same thing inside to give the internal pockets a little more interest and detail.

I enjoyed making it so much that the minute I'd finished I started on this creamy lemony version, which is destined for my shop once I've taken some proper photographs of it.

Here's the inside purse and phone pockets:

I really want to make one of these bags for myself, but feel utterly indecisive as to what colour will go best with all my summer clothes...you'd think that I might just make them up in every colour...but somehow I find that I feel guilty making things for myself when I should be putting them in my shop.

Anyway, I have an appointment with a box of shoes now, so must go. Wishing you happy Mondays. x

Lined, zippered pouch / make up bag tutorial

This morning I was in a rush to make a simple lined make-up bag and had a quick look on the internet to see if I could easily find any dimensions for such a thing. I could find instructions on how to make a pouch, but none with dimensions and none with covered ends to the zips, which is how I like my zips to be finished. It now seems quite illogical to me that I decided that I simply must write a tutorial for such a thing when I was meant to be 'rushing'...but it seems that most things can wait. So here we have a lined, covered zip ends make up bag / coin purse tutorial (for personal use only, see tutorial end for other terms). Photos are plentiful and instructions (hopefully) basic, in the hope that a beginner will be able to make this easily.

This make-up bag will end up measuring: 7.5" x 5".

Here are the ingredients you will need:

1 x zip (it can start off at any size, but should be cut down to measure 8" exactly)
2 x lining - 8" x 5.5"
2 x fancy fabric for outer - 8" x 5.5"
2 x fancy fabric zip end covers- 3" x 1.5"
4 x sew-in interfacing - 8" x 5.5"

The interfacing is optional...but I think that as this will probably be used in a handbag (rather than on a dresser) it should have some substance to it and not be prone to wobbling around like a blancmange...don't say I didn't warn you!

Yay! You decided to use the interfacing - you won't regret it! Take a piece of the interfacing and attach it to one of your 8" x 5.5" rectangular pieces by zigzagging all the way around the edges. The do the same for your other 3 rectangle pieces. This makes them more manageable and less flappy to work with later on. Now set these to one side.

Take one of the 3" x 1.5" pieces of material. Fold it in half across the length and then fold back by a 1/4" at each end as above.

Place your zip so that it butts up to the half way fold that you made.

And then pin the ends down just like this. Then do exactly the same for the other end.

Now make two neat rows of stitching (it will show at the end so make it pretty) across the zip to secure your zip cover in place.

So the ends should now look like this.

Now it's time to make a tasty fabric sandwich. Put your outer fabric face up. Place your zip on top of this face down. Now place your lining on top of this face down. Pin it so that the top of the zip and the top of your fabrics are all perfectly aligned...don't worry, your zip end covers will be higher than the rest of this...just pretend they're not there!

Pull the zip open halfway. Put on your zipper foot and start at one end and begin to sew. With you finger gently feel for the zipper teeth and make sure your zipper foot presses up alongside these. When you reach the zip fastener keep your needle down and raise the presser foot and gently slide the zip backward a little before carrying one sewing.

Once you've finished, flip the fabrics over so that they're the right way round. It should look like this. Your outer fabric and lining will now be touching wrong side to wrong side.

Now it's time to attach the fabric to the other side of the zip. Make your sandwich exactly the same as before, aligning the top of the zip with the lining and outer fabric and pretending that the first sandwich isn't there (almost as if you've eaten it). If you think you've got it sussed, don't look at the below picture as it can make your head hurt if you think about it too much...if you're struggling, eyes down:

So remember: Main fabric face up. Zipper facing down. Lining face down. Now sew! After you've flipped the fabrics round the right way it should look like this:

It makes sense to do some top-stitching on each side of the zip so that you're never faced with the horror of catching your fabric in the zip teeth and being left unable to reach any of the makeup or contents inside. Gently hold the lining and outer fabrics taut as you do this.

Mmmm...see how lovely this makes it look. Afterwards, when laid out flat, the lining side should look like this:


And the outer side should look like this. Scrumptious.

Now, it's time to stop faffing around with zips and start making your fabric into a make-up bag or pouch (eugh, such an unpleasant word).

Pull your zip open half way and leave it right there. Don't touch it again...no, really, don't touch it! Now hang onto the two pieces of outer fabric and put them so that the pretty sides are facing one another. The do the same with the lining: make the right sides of the lining face one another. Pin the outer fabric sides first, making sure that the edges of the fabric all match up nicely. Now pin the linings together, making sure that the zip ends are pointing downwards into the lining side and not into the outer fabrics side. Can you see on the picture above - my outer fabric is on the left and sits completely flat. My blue lining is on the right and has the zippy bits pushed to that side.

If you have a 1/4 inch foot then use this as your seam allowance guide...if you don't, then mark a 1/4" seam allowance all the way around the edge.

Sew right around the perimeter of the material (above, I'm halfway through), leaving a 2" turning gap in the bottom of the lining.

Nearly there now. Now it's time to de-bulk your zipper-end covers so that when it's all turned the right way out you don't get horrid lumpy bits. Take a fine pair of scissors (this is not the time for large shears) and snip carefully outside any lines of stitching to de-bulk wherever you can. Then make a little snip on each of the four corners of the square - again, being careful not to cut through any of your stitches.

Next turn it all the right way out through that 2" gap in the bottom of the lining that you left.

What a mess! Will this ever look right? Keep going....now aren't you so pleased that you didn't touch that zip and that you left it half-way open? Not doing so can cause the most undignified amount of expletives at this point, so it's really much better this way.

So now you're all turned out the right way out, but your corners look a little puckered, no (see below)? With your hand inside, between the lining and the outer fabric, use your fingers to poke it until it sits more neatly (I think a turning point is too pointy for this task and should only be used on the outer corners).

Keep poking....ahh, there, that looks much better, no?

Pull the lining out a little, fold the turning gap in the lining inwards and sew up neatly. You're nearly finished, but the time for waltzing around the room, holding your beautiful new make-up bag aloft and singing is not yet upon us. Don't you remember how scrunched up all the fabric got when you were turning it the right way out? Delay the gratification and get thee behind the ironing board for you still have work to do!

With the lining out (because if you leave it in it will get ironed into horrible creases), first iron the outer of the case and then the inner.

Then put the lining back into the bag and relax. If my pattern has gone according to plan and I haven't omitted a vital instruction, you should now be in possession of some pouchy loveliness (no, these two words will never really go together will they).

Now it's time for some chocolate...mine are some deliciously indulgent champagne truffles that someone lovely bought for me last week... but really any old thing will do on this occasion. Remember to chew...it wouldn't do to have a choking fit all over your nice new bag.

Yes...I do seem to have come over all bossy when in tutorial mode. Forgive me. And if you use this pattern, I'd love to hear how you got on.

Reminder: this free pattern is for PERSONAL USE ONLY. I am, however, happy for you to sell on a small scale from this pattern if you make a PayPal payment for a small fee of £3.00. In doing so you will have bought the right to sell from this pattern.

Happy sewing. x

Paws from sewing...

Well, the pause from sewing is only in the form of this blog post actually, as my machine has barely been turned off as I have been busy designing a new bag, but I suddenly felt more like doing a cat report than anything else. When we got our lovely cats in January I knew that we were primarily getting them for the little Teacakes and that there would be many sacrifices on my part...the copious hairs, closed sewing room door and hours of extra housework I have got used to...but the one thing I couldn't get used to was coming downstairs to find mice and other creatures racing around the kitchen when I was least expecting them. I tried to think positively and view them as the thoughtfully caught catty gifts that I knew they were, but I'm just not that good around nature and so in the end I avoided going downstairs during the day as I was too terrified by what I might find. I also began to obsessively remove any potential creature hiding places...the recycling trug was removed, my plastic bag carrier was hung elsewhere, the coat rack was re-homed, stationary pots were thrown out in favour of tins with lids on and the children's lunchboxes were carefully hung up to air upside down each night...I was turning into a mad woman.

And then one day Joanne said to me that she didn't think the cats would mind if I just closed the cat flap for a couple of hours to give myself a respite each day when I knew I wasn't going to be faced with rodenty surprises. And suddenly I felt very much better because, with this suggestion in mind, the cats and I struck a deal (I talked, they listened and then blinked at me in that way that is meant to communicate that they love you and I also took to me that they recognise that I am neurotic and are accepting of this). The deal is this: they can get out through the cat flap whenever they want, but re-entry is only permitted once I've seen that they are not secreting extra house guests about their persons. I check regularly to see if they want to come back in and I was so happy because this system was working wonderfully and the cats seemed completely happy. But then a couple of days after this new arrangement began, it started to rain while I had popped out to the shops. I came home to find soggy cats sheltering under the garden furniture and felt utterly distraught that my plan was so fundamentally flawed and that the poor cats must have felt so unloved.

So imagine my delight when I dreamt up the idea of a cat house for those times when I'm not there to let them in...and then my even greater delight when I discovered that this was not an original idea and that there were already whole companies in existence dedicated to creating lovely cat houses. And even better, one that would agree to paint their usually brown cat house a nice shade of willow green before they posted it off to me. It even has a window that Bella & Honey can peep through, space for a water bowl and some bedding and a general feel of home from home when the need arises. And best of all a properly felted roof, so that they never need to get wet again.

Above is a picture of Honey peeping out through the cat flap.

I finally feel that the cats aren't just here for the smaller Teacakes and it actually makes my heart do somersaults when I call for Bella and she bounds excitedly back from several gardens away, leaping over flowerbeds, and then making a lovely little chirruping noise when she performs an emergency stop next to my legs. In the same way that one does with a newborn baby, so much time can be lost just watching cats and admiring their lovely features. These photos were taken last Sunday when I was meant to be getting everything ready for the start of the week, but found that it was actually far more fun to laze on the grass with Mrs Belushi.

Which given that, following a lovely day of fabric and shoes shopping, I had been up until 2am chatting to Helen & Lisa the night before (Joanne should have been there too, but she left early due to a more pressing prior engagement with a pregnancy-related pillow and a bottle of Gaviscon) was just what was needed. Ahhh. Cats.

PS. At the risk of reducing my odds of winning horribly, my lovely friend Charlotte is having a giveaway here. x

Cakes, icecreams and hobnobs...

I write this post with all the joy of a person who has just unexpectedly found an unopened packet of chocolate covered hobnobs at the back of the cupboard, when only moments earlier she had thought that the house was entirely lacking in anything nice to nibble upon. There is double excitement to be had from realising that for perhaps the first time in my life I had actually put something nice in the cupboard and then forgotten about it for several weeks...how I have always longed to be the sort of person that does that and to be able to nonchalantly say 'no, I've never really been a great lover of sweet things, I much prefer savoury'. The celebration cannot be entirely joyful though for this oversight can only be put down to a worrying forgetfulness, rather than the lack of a sweet tooth.

So it is all rather thematic that for this blog post I have surrounded myself with fairy cakes and ice creams of the stitched variety. Ever since my children were tiny I have made them appliqued t-shirts using whatever plain ones happened to be in their drawers (the one above is an old Boden t-shirt modelled by Zebra-girl). So how excited I have been to finally take the leap, after a couple of years of research (this is no over-exaggeration, it is something I have looked into on and off since Dinosaur-boy was around four months old), with an ethical supplier of scrumptiously soft organic cotton bibs and t-shirts that I might applique my designs onto.

Here is the finished version of the bib that is being stitched a the top of this post.

I was very tempted to put my labels beneath the applique pictures...just because I found the colours so pleasing and matchy, but after refusing to buy Dinosaur-boy a cap that he liked at the weekend because it had the shop's branding across the forehead, I was swayed away from doing this and sewed them onto the ends of the ties instead. I am still on the trail for a cap (why can't he be happy with the bucket hats that he's always worn and in which he looks so very lovely and little boyish?) that meets our now mutually agreed terms of not being branded or printed with army camouflage. I am having to stop myself from purposely buying one with a legionnaires flap on the back in the hope that this might prevent him from wearing it backwards as I know he would end up disliking me for it or insisting on walking around with the flap hanging down over his face. Oddly, I know that once I have found a cap and he undoubtedly starts wearing it backwards I will (grudgingly) adore seeing him in it, because I will know how much enjoyment he will be taking from wearing it and because it is so lovely when children decide what they think is 'cool'. I can't tell whether it is a good or a bad thing about motherhood that it allows one to take leave of one's previous likes and dislikes in the face of one's delighted offspring.

Anyway, ice creams....stripey, beachy...

The brown one is an ancient design from when Dinosaur-boy was about 12 months old, but his was originally appliqued by hand, rather than by machine.

He has asked me to make him a t-shirt with a large black bat on it. I love that he thinks up what he would like and puts requests in...and it makes me realise how far off the mark I normally am with trying to second-guess what they might like. I never would have thought of that.

Anyway, today the heating is on, the hobnobs are being eaten and a feeling of cosiness of drifting over me and making me feel most happy that I don't have to leave the house until school pick up time. Enjoy your day. x

Playing smallfoot...

Somehow it seems to be May, but for this blog post I'm rewinding to something that Lisa asked me to make for her back in December as a Christmas gift for her lovely man, Al. Due to Royal Mail having a few problems it actually missed being with Lisa & Al by nearly four whole months and after finding its way back to me, it was eventually handed over in person, rather than risk resending it and facing anymore mishaps...which while irritating, was very happily combined with eating cake and going fabric shopping together, along with Joanne & Helen. Such hardship.

The Christmas before last I had made this notebook cover for Mr Teacakes. I'm guessing that every guitar-strumming, lyric-writing man has his own name for his songwriting book...so while Mr Teacake's book has been referred to as a 'lyrical pad' or 'book of lyricals' ever since I've known him, Lisa was very specific that Al's should be a 'Groovy Tunes' pad. I love that for most songwriters there is one place that holds all these thoughts in them...the thoughts that aren't expressed in every day conversation.

In theory Ian's lyric pad is sacrosanct...but rather wickedly the children and I occasionally write messages to him in there. Luckily these make him laugh more than they make him want to chase us around the house with a fork.

Anyway, I was so pleased when Lisa asked me if I would be happy to make one of these notebook covers as the guitar applique is one of the things that I have most enjoyed designing. And I loved doing it a second time around even more...for a whole sewing year has passed and I felt more confident in how to make it this time. It's amazing how much you change the way that you sew over the course of a year... Mr Teacakes noticed this too and was a little less delighted by this improvement than I was.

Oddly though, the week before Lisa asked me to make this for her, I had made Mr Teacakes a second covered notebook as one of his Christmas presents, this time based around his other love: playing football. For Ian this cannot be confined to a 'football season' - his love for it is so great that this is a year-round activity and he can be found meeting for friendly games even when there are a couple of inches of snow on the ground or the pitch is completely frozen. On his return I had noticed that the first thing he would do was race upstairs and write down on scraps of paper the stats for each game of how many goals had been scored and by whom. So for Christmas I decided to make him a small notepad cover so that he had an official score book. Unable to cope with the maths of creating a black and white ball with hexagons on it, I decided to try to recreate a Subbuteo football figure on its wobbly base, which is particularly pertinent as I tease him that he is off to jouer au babyfoot when he goes out (there's something about the term that we both find utterly delightful - perhaps because in English it conjures such amusing images of small-footed men racing up and down the pitch)...but actually Subbuteo is nearer to the real babyfoot. His shirt does have his name on above the number, but you can't see that in the photograph.

Anyway, back to the present: I have so many ideas for things that I want to sew this week, that after a lovely 3-day weekend, I have many plans for things that I am hoping to squash into my 4-day week. They involve some metal hardware though...so an early morning visit to the haberdashers will be required before I can get started.

I hope you've had a lovely bank holiday weekend. x

On eyebrows and other things...

I can't tell you how much I love seeing this little bowl of appliques sitting on top of my sewing drawers ready to be positioned, repositioned and then decided upon without all the trauma of having to get fabrics and threads all over the floor...it's all been taken care of in one large messy session that now seems a distant memory. Some of them have been used on a batch of teabag holders that are now stacked up against the bowl. I've gone for different colours this time...so while there are still lots of pinks...

...there are also some of the olivey-limey colours that I talked about having fallen in love with in my last post (in the form of Orla Keily mugs), as well as some in blue. I feel like my pink-obsession has finally reached a plateau where I almost resemble a normal person with varied tastes.

Well almost normal, for here are some more pink ones.

When I finally finished sewing the labels on to my teabag holders and taking all the photos of them for my shop this afternoon (Horay! These things never take as long as I expect and there are now twelve new ones ripe for the picking here...as well as some new make-up bags here...I actually have more still to photograph, but one must break one's mountainous tasks into bite-size pieces if one is to avoid collapsing on the floor in a useless heap), I used the last hour of my day before picking up the children to fill a photo frame that my Mama had very kindly bought for me as a 'just because' gift from The White Company. We have family photographs absolutely everywhere and I suddenly felt as though I wanted something different to go in this frame and my mind was still very much on the completely dreamy Anna Maria Horner fabric that I'd received yesterday so it felt like this may be a good thing to put in. From top clockwise: some of Mrs Butler's finest, a little bit of Heather Bailey, some more Amy Butler for good measure and then the Anna Maria Horner loveliness. I find that sweets always look more tempting when lined up with others, if only because it makes the one that you crave the most stand out like the iced gem on top of the biscuit base...I'm finding the same may be true of fabrics, so yes, for this week only (because normally my love for them is unwavering) AB & HB are making the AMH print look even more wonderful.

I found that the easiest way to get the fabrics to sit perfectly straight and flat was to spray mount them to some cardboard and then iron them before putting them into the frame. I was unsure about whether heating cardboard up in this way posed a fire-risk, but feeling that this method would achieve perfect flatness, I'm ashamed to say that I threw caution to the wind and whacked the heat up as high as it would go. I'm delighted to report that all is fine and I am still in possession of my eyebrows (which incidentally are newly 'threaded' - this may sound to the uninitiated as though I have quite inexplicably attached myself to my bobbin case, but no, a proper explanation lies here, and my eyebrows have never looked quite so neat and groomed. Sorry lovelies - you know who you are - they suddenly felt unmanageable and I just couldn't wait. Please forgive me).

So here it is insitu...at what looks to be a very odd angle. We actually have the standard variety of vertical wall, even though you may be under the impression that our walls are sloping - I hadn't realised at the time what an odd camera angle this is. I put this picture frame up myself. Mr Teacakes has agreed that we won't take it down until we are ready to move house so that he need never see the horrors of broken and missing plaster that lie behind it, the product of my mis-hammering.

Happy long weekends to all. x

Wanting to eat colours...

Blogging has taken a back seat over the last week or so as I have been sewing almost constantly and I now have the most enormous stash of things around me waiting to be photographed and loaded onto my site, as well as shared here on my blog. So in the meantime, here are some photos of some pincushions that I made for a custom order at the start of last week. The delicious matryoshka card in the background was sent to me by my sister, another one of Gwendolen's wonderful designs.

Here they are about to be tissue wrapped...which would have been a lot quicker if I hadn't kept stopping and taking photographs of them - the sunshine was so lovely that day and nice light always makes me feel like getting my camera out and taking a completely excessive amount of pictures.

So other than sewing I have been answering the door to the postman...

Today I received these fabrics from the wonderful Saints & Pinners - it is such a treat to find a website that is based in the UK that stocks the kind of fabrics that all too often, and very upsettingly, only seem to be available from overseas. It is perhaps rather remiss of me, but I have never owned any Anna Maria Horner fabrics until today, and my heart did a little leap when I unwrapped the package and saw this amazing print on top - the colours are, to my eyes anyway, completely perfect. Is it wrong to want to consume colours, I wonder. I can't stop glancing at this print as I write this... it is destined to become a make-up bag I think.

I wonder if eyes have changing appetites and preferences for certain colours in the same way that our tastebuds do for food, because this morning I saw a similarly olivey Orla Keily mug in a shop and practically passed out with happiness. Mr Teacakes would be so proud of me though, for despite the fact that it felt like I may suffer grave pains if I walked away without purchasing one, somehow that's what I did...helped by the thought that I would later show them to him on the internet and see whether he felt similarly in love with them - there's something about Orla Keily prints that makes me feel they must be just as appealing to men as they are to women. I feel absolutely positive that drinks would also taste better out of them. You see what awful things eyes can do! Be still, eyebuds!

Anyway, back to the postman, he also brought some reading material for the Little Teacakes, after they were gifted with an Amazon voucher. Zebra-girl has been reading Gobbolino the Witch's Cat to herself at night and loves it, but I wanted some that I could read to both of them after school time, so chose the Adventures of the Little Wooden Horse by the same author, as well as several others which look interesting. The reading of them will hopefully be a lot more relaxing than what we got up to last night.

The Teacakes wanted to make buses for their Littlest Pet Shop creatures - they were specific in their requirements - wheels must be able to move and be on an axle (!), doors must be able to open, windows should be plentiful...it was quite a challenge for me and it became increasingly clear that mummy was not up to the job. The wheels, while free-spinning on their axles in mid-air, do not turn around on carpet (or any other surface for that matter). Dinosaur-boy disposed with his and kindly told me that his bus would be on imaginary skis instead. Then I realised that the Littlest Pets actually have the largest heads and no amount of breathing in was going to get this puppy through the door - he now entrances through the window, Dukes of Hazard styley.

A shop update around tissue holders

It seems like forever since I last updated my shop...and that's probably because it is. I've been lucky enough to live off custom orders for the first part of the year (well, I seem to have written 'live off', but that makes it sounds like there's ever a possibility of Mr Teacakes becoming a kept man or that I have been the one funding weekly sprees in Waitrose...there's not and I haven't - I just meant that my time has been nicely filled!). In between the custom orders I have been making and squirrelling away some stock and then making and squirrelling away more stock in order to avoid having to photograph and then itemise for my website the first lot of stock that I made...this has been punctuated by urgent and intense studying of paint charts on days when I've felt like I really ought to be doing something other than more sewing for a shop for which I seemed incapable of getting round to updating (the paint charts are because I am hoping to change the colour of the front door to a lovely sagey green...but no amount of tester pots is bringing me nearer to quite the right green - it is so clear in my mind and so elusive on the colour charts).

But last night, in a fit of Teacake household efficiency, I took lots of photos, named and sized them and then when Mr Teacakes came in from playing football he loaded them all up for me, in between harrumphing about my inability to count (why were my product IDs unsequential and picked at random out of my head, he wondered...well, they weren't actually meant to be - I just seem to have lost the ability to count in a straight line without missing a number out here or there). While I tried to catch the last of the evening sunshine for my photographs my lovely mother looked after Dinosaur-boy and did general tidying...quite the nicest thing. There's nothing more delicious than coming downstairs and seeing that everything has cleaned itself without any involvement from me.

So there are now some new pencil rolls, tissue holders, summery handbags, slouchy make-up bags and a handful of new glasses cases on my site - but I was so surprised and delighted to turn on my computer this afternoon and find that a couple of things have already been sold...almost like elves had been in the shop overnight!

This post contains photographs of a small array of the vast number of tissue holders that I have created over the past couple of months...for no other reason than that a post without photos is just all wrong.

Enjoy your weekends. The Fired Earth paint chart arrived in the post this morning...so I'm off to analyse the different greens and hoping, really, really hoping very hard, that there might just be the perfect green in there. x

Painting, eating, breaking and making eggs

Easter weekend found the Teacake household a hive of activity and mess. While the little Teacakes and I blew eggs, dyed them (somewhat unsuccessfully - how much food colouring must one use to achieve even the softest pink glow?! - I remember the ones that I made with my own mother as a child being almost maroon!) and then painted them at the dining table, Mr Teacakes took over the breakfast bar constructing a contraption needed for a competition at work on Tuesday - namely who can throw an egg from a 3rd floor window and get it to reach the ground without it breaking. An elaborate contraption using cardboard, a cats cradle of shock-absorbing elastic bands and a parachute has been made and repeatedly flown down from our bathroom window to whoops of delight as we discover that yet again the egg has remained intact...we began to wonder whether the egg was faulty, with a strangely unbreakable outer shell.

So here are our eggs. We visited Grandmama's house for tea on Sunday and hung them on her Easter Tree.

Other things causing mess and mayhem was the hand-making of chocolate Easter eggs. Somewhat selfishly I chose to save this activity until after the small ones had gone to bed as I knew that, never having done them before, but always having wanted to, I would want to be control-freaky about the finished result and didn't want to inflict my pained grimaces and helpful suggestions upon the children as they tried to get on with the joyful business of whooshing chocolate across the room. But really, I should have been more relaxed and let them in on the fun as they were, for me at least, impossibly difficult to get right and resembled a child-like creation in the end anyway. Three layers of chocolate must be built up and allowed to dry in the moulds to make the shells thick enough to remain whole when taken from their plastic nests...it was only after making and then breaking six eggs that I discovered that the final act of separating them from their moulds could be completely painless if they were left in the fridge to harden for a good couple of hours, rather than an impatient 15 minutes...but no matter, for one must eat what cannot be salvaged.

I began to feel rather professional when I attempted mixing white and brown chocolates to give a swirly outer shell...but the wonkyness of the edges, the rocky terrain of the interiors and the inability of the two halves to be stuck together hints at the fact that a true chocolatier had not had a hand in their making.

This was Mr Teacake's Easter Egg - we have become somewhat obsessed with Jelly Beans since realising that they don't actually contain gelatine as we had previously assumed.

I hope that you all had lovely restful long weekends and that the Easter Bunny gave generously. x

Wiggly waggly

Well, last week really did end up feeling all together holidayish. With my gardening companion installed for the first part of the week, overlapping with Mr Teacakes taking a week off work to work on his music from his soundproof cell (and actually, it really is like a cell, so instead he set up in the playroom while the babes were at school), it seemed like a week when sewing could take a more experimental turn.

A couple of weeks ago I was having one of those evenings when Internet travels are drowsily continued only to avoid having to turn the laptop off and get on with the tiresome business of brushing one's teeth before falling into bed (I don't know why I never learn that it is simply better to turn the computer off the minute I have finished checking the weather, rather than remaining delusionally hopeful that magic fairies might appear to do it for me). Anyway, somehow in this drowsy haze I found myself on a blog called Don't Look Now that acted like a dose of smelling salts and left me sitting bolt upright in a such dizzying excitement that I nearly had to lie straight back down again. Oh dear. Am I gushing? How undignified. But really, the applique stitchery on there is breathtakingly lovely. Which is what lead me to the doodling shown in the photo at the top of this post: I've always previously favoured the overlocked applique method (shown here if you haven't a clue what I'm talking about but have a wish to know) as to me it looks neater and feels more 'finished'...but seeing the effect of the free-motion* (*explanation at the bottom of this post) quilted applique on the Don't Look Now blog made me feel like I had been missing out on something rather wonderful (as well as seeing Mette's beautiful coin quilt earlier this week with her lovely wavy quilting which made me long to be able to quilt using something other than straight lines).

I love the three-deep lines of stitching used to form the birds tail (which I have attempted to imitate here and found it to be so much harder than it looks) and the way that the thread always matches every individual fabric piece which must be so time-consuming, but looks so wonderful. Anyway, as you can see from my first effort I found it difficult at first to consistently move the fabric at the same speed so as to keep the stitch length regular...as well as it being difficult to keep an even pressure on the foot pedal to keep the stitches coming at the same rate. I eventually found that it was easier to keep the stitch length more even when I pressed down harder on the foot pedal...but other than that my technique has remained rather experimental.

But what fun it has been trying something new (although not entirely new...I tried it when I first bought the Big Foot over a year ago, but found it so difficult that I gave up after ten minutes). How very much I would love to hear your tips on free-motioning if you have any!

This weekend we have had Dinosaur-boy's birthday party. He was five. I can't quite believe how old he is...but also how very young he still seems. He has little of the worldliness that Zebra-girl possessed at his age and still seems happily round-cheeked, lispy-tongued and sweetly naive, only to occasionally startle us with a question or comment that belies the air of littleness that he usually carries with him; recently a question about wartime evacuees and his obvious brooding anxiety about whether where we live would be classed as the city or the countryside suddenly appeared mid-Lego construction. Mr Teacakes made him this rocket cake which we are still gobbling our way through...he has also been making wooden borders to the flower beds in the garden. This has involved much hammering. I have sat on a chair and provided moral support... and photographed the flowers...I feel all gardened out after last weeks efforts.

Anyway, the two photos of my stitching attempts were actually taken at night, but I seem to have accidentally stumbled across something that gives the illusion of sunshine! My desk lamp has a 40w reflector spotlight bulb in it that gives a very white light...with the sewing machine light turned off (as this tends to be very yellow) it all seems very day-timey. So after a winter of struggling to take pictures through the gloom, I have realised that were there to ever be a nighttime photographic emergency I would be well-equipped to deal with it. What a pleasingly Girl-Guidish thing that is.

*What is free-motion quilting? Unlike every other type of sewing where your feed-dogs guide the material and regulate the stitch length, with free motion you have your feed dogs down and can basically doodle in whichever direction you wish. Oh how delightfully easy and relaxing that sounds!