Storybook Mural

We moved house recently!  This meant that I finally HAD to finish my mural.  I started painting this on my daughter's bedroom wall before she was born and (predictably) didn't get time to finish it once she arrived.  It sat there unfinished for a long time, but moving out gave me the push I needed to spend a couple days finishing it off.  We are renting our old house, not selling it, so even though I don't get to look at it anymore at least I know it won't be painted over.  Well, I  hope not anyway.

Here are closeups of the book characters featured:

Ratty's house by the river from Wind in the Willows (Kenneth Graeme).  The castle is not any particular castle, it could be from any number of stories.

Ronia from 'Ronia the Robber's Daughter' by Astrid Lindgren.  I read this book endlessly as a kid.  Ronia was so wild and fearless, I adored her.

Rupert (Fred Bestall) and Noddy (Enid Blyton, illustrated by Beek)

Ramona and Howie from the Ramona series by Beverley Cleary.

Anne from Anne of Green Gables by L.M. Montgomery

The Cat in the Hat (Seuss) and the Magic Pudding (Norman Lindsay).  Two books I STILL find incredibly funny!  I re-read the Magic Pudding every few years, it never gets old.

Frances from Bread & Jam for Frances by Russell Hoban (illustrated by Garth Williams) and Dorrie & Gink from the Dorrie series by Patricia Coombe.

And Babar and Flora from the Babar series by Jean de Brunhoff.


I intended to slowly add more of my favourite (and her favourite) book characters over time but that dream will never be realised now!  Oh well.  Maybe one day I'll find the time to do one in her new bedroom.

One Hour Handbag

Made this handbag tonight, a very quick project!

The reason I made it was that I found this cute handbag in an op-shop a few years ago and have used it so much that it's started to look very old and grotty.

So I decided to make a NEW one! This meant destroying it in order to use its handles and get the pattern shape right, but oh well. It had its time. I probably could've done it without unpicking it and using it as a pattern, but it would've involved a lot more guess work. You CAN buy bag handles from the craft store but they charge ruinous amounts for them, which is an outrage. Might as well fork out for a new bag!
Anyway so once I'd chosen some new fabric and unpicked the old bag, I laid it out on my new fabric and cut the two halves of the inner and outer. Didn't try and follow it too exactly as this is a lovely forgiving bag that totally won't show any wonky seams!

Then I sewed four darts along the top on the outside pieces. I used the old bag to line up where to put them but didn't measure them very exactly or check they were all the same size. I pressed all the darts facing out from the centre.

I sewed the two outside halves together and gave those seams a quick press. Then I folded the bottom two corners outwards, sewed them flat, and trimmed like so:

closeup of corners in case you're confused...

That's just to give the bag a nicer shape, you don't necessarily have to but it's a bit sort of 2-D if you don't.

Next I made a pocket for the inside, which pretty much just involved sewing two rectangles of the lining fabric together, turning inside out, pressing, & sewing onto one of the sides like so:

Then I sewed the two lining halves together & clipped the corners, same as the outside except no darts. Also I left a big hole at the bottom seam, for turning it inside out later. Has to be big enough to fit the bag handles through!



Right, now we come to the two hardest bits! First, you have to put right sides of the bag together and sew them at the side seams here:

This is mainly only tricky at that middle junction where four seams are trying to line up together, you'll probably have to do a bit of clipping in the corners to make it lie flat. Don't stress too much about it, if it looks puckery you can always unpick it later when the bag's finished and hand-sew it.

The next tricky bit is sewing in the handles. You have to insert the handle and THEN sew the final seam, because the handle's circular so it won't work any other way.

Don't forget to fold the ends out so that they will be under when the bag is turned right way out.

 Then it's pretty much done! Turn it all right way out using the hole at the bottom of the lining and admire. Then sew up the hole in the bottom of the lining. If you wanted it to look perfect you could hand-sew it, but if you're bone idle and lazy like me you could just pinch the seam together and sew it wrong-way-out on the sewing machine.
The final step is to tack the fabric close to the handles. This pretty much has to be done by hand but it's fairly quick, you just slip the needle in between the layers and then come out every now and then for a stitch to pull the fabric in close to the handle.

Ta-daaa! Pretty pleased. Looks even better than the old one.

Lotus Applique Cushion

A friend of a friend (Danielle) commissioned me to make her a cushion cover with an applique picture of a lotus flower on it.  She provided the fabric but gave me free reign to come up with a design.  What a fun project!  I was quite impressed with how it turned out.  I started from this picture:

And sketched out a basic pattern which looked something like this (only needed half as I wanted it to be symmetrical):

I cut out the pieces and laid them all out and it was looking really great, I was super excited.

Then I started sewing and realised a few things:

1. I should’ve used interfacing on my base fabric because it was all wrinkling up and looking terrible. 
2. I needed to cut some pieces out much larger than the bit that would be showing, so that they could lay underneath other pieces – otherwise the green background would show through the flower petals.
3. I had sewed a few pieces down first that should have been placed last 
4. I had sewed lots of seams that didn’t need sewing because they were going to be underneath other seams

So I decided to use that first attempt as a practice and work out exactly what to do and which bits to sew, and then do a final copy.  Luckily Danielle gave me way more fabric than I actually needed.  I also bought some stuff from the craft store which is like double sided interfacing, you cut it out to the size of your applique piece and you can iron it down first so it doesn’t shift at all when you sew it.  This stuff is brilliant and I highly recommend it for anyone attempting applique, it makes the end result look so much more finished and professional.  So then I interfaced my base fabric and started again, with much better success:

Oh, and I added some little French knots to the centre thingy which looked really cool, but I can’t take credit for that idea, Danielle suggested it when we were initially discussing the project.  Here is the practice one for comparison, ha ha!  It looks hilariously bad.  Although to be fair, once I decided it was a practice I didn’t make much of an effort to sew it nicely.

 Anyway, so then I sewed the real one all up with the piping Danielle provided around the edge.  I found this by far the hardest part as I haven’t had much experience with piping before and it’s tricksy stuff.  Keeps shifting around like the devil while you’re trying to sew it down – my corners were a bit wonky I think.  Also I’m not sure about the dark green piping, it’s a bit TOO dark.  But still, it looked ok. 

The end result!

Anyway, she was very happy with it so that’s the main thing.  Sometimes it’s hard when someone asks you to do something and they’ve got a picture in their head which they can’t really explain but whatever you do can never live up to it.

Squashy Stripey Knitted Ball

I made this cute little ball for my nephew’s 1^st birthday.  The design is based on this one from Knitted Toys by Zoe Mellor.  I saw a picture of it on Pinterest but couldn’t find a free version of the pattern online.  Of course the honourable thing to do would have been to buy the whole book, but being sly as well as crafty, I decided I could make up the pattern if I put my mind to it!  So here it is:

For each diamond:

Cast on 2 stitches

Row 1 – knit (2 stitches)

Row 2 (and every even row) – purl

Row 3 – knit 1 front and back, k1fb (4 stitches)

Row 5 – k1fb, knit 2, k1fb (6 stitches)

Row 7 – k1fb, knit 4, k1fb (8 stitches)

Row 9 – k1fb, knit 6, k1fb (10 stitches)

Row 11 – knit

Row 13 – k1fb, knit 8, k1fb (12 stitches)

Row 15 – k1fb, knit 10, k1fb (14 stitches)

Row 16 – 30 knit every odd row, purl every even row

Row 31 – knit 2 together, knit 10, k2tog (12 stitches)

Row 33 – k2tog, knit 8, k2tog (10 stitches)

Row 35 – knit

Row 37 – k2tog, knit 6, k2tog (8 stitches)

Row 39 – k2tog, knit 4, k2tog (6 stitches)

Row 41 – k2tog, knit 2, k2tog (4 stitches)

Row 43 – k2tog, k2tog (2 stitches)

Row 45 – knit 2 stitches as one, pull ball through to finish.

Make 6 diamonds, 3 plain and 3 with stripes (change colour every 4 rows).  Sew together, stuff, and you're done!  I used wool to sew the seams on the inside, but went over some of them on the outside using coloured thread, just to neaten them up a bit. 

A very quick easy knit, I did it over two afternoons while the baby was napping & then sewed it all together tonight.  I have no idea how big the original one was suppose to be, but mine is about 30cm diameter.  Oh, and I used 3mm knitting needles and any old scraps of wool from my basket, all of different weights and plys and so forth.  I never find that kind of thing matters too much.  Wool is very forgiving.

I wanted it to be jingly, and in my innocence thought I’d just pop a bell in the middle and that would be that.  But as soon as the bell was embedded in the stuffing it didn’t make a nice Noddy-ish bell sound anymore, just a kind of muffled rattle.  I tried various things, but what I ended up doing was boring some holes in one of those plastic canisters from a Kinder Surprise egg with a pair of scissors, and putting the bell inside that. If you can't get hold of a Kinder Surprise, one of those black film containers might work, or a whiffle ball, or a cat toy.

Sewing Nook in the Wardrobe

I am having a baby in April this year and am currently in the process of clearing out my spare room and converting it into a nursery.  The spare room previously housed my sewing machines and all my art stuff, but I had the perfect place in mind for their new home - a sewing nook in the wardrobe!

We have a large wardrobe with rolling doors in our study which we don't really use, so I cleaned out one side of it and enlisted my Dad to help install a little desk and some shelving inside it.   It was an idea I'd toyed with for ages but never really had a reason to put into practice, and it worked out even better than I'd hoped.

Dad even installed a little light in there for me!  It literally took him one afternoon, including buying and sawing all the boards - so impressed.  The best part is that when I'm finished working on something I can just pull the door closed and it's all tucked away out of sight.  Voila!

Still to do:

1. I want to attach a rack for all my thread spools to one of the inside walls - I'm thinking I might have a go at making something like this:

I got the idea from this blog and I love it, although I think it might be a bit ambitious for me as I've zero experience with woodwork of any kind.

2. I've bought some small storage tubs for things like buttons and safety pins which need to be mounted on the wall also.
 
3. I would love to decorate it in some way, maybe painting or sticking something against that back wall which looks pretty bare at the moment.  But I don't know whether I'll have time as the spare room/nursery is still far from finished and time is running short.

Jessie's 3-canvas painting

Jessie was commissioned to do this for a friend who wanted it on a deep red wall, to go with a bedspread design with a pattern of red cherry blossom flowers (you can see the pillowcase in the first picture).  This is what she came up with!

Colourful fruit

So pretty!