Wednesday WIP

I have a shiny new phone, so this post is as much about testing how easy it is to blog from the phone as it is about a work in progress.  Over the past few days I’ve been taking a break from bookbinding to play with my sewing machine…

… hopefully I’ll have something to show for my efforts soon!

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In praise of good customer service

I’m the first to whinge when I receive poor customer service (although, to be fair, I have experienced some truly shocking service from certain companies in the past).  So I thought I would take this opportunity to shout loud and proud about some very good customer service I’ve just received.

Way back in April 2012 I ordered some fabric from Spoonflower.  Not much, just a couple of yards which were destined to become a quilt.  I used the leftovers to make some notebooks, and they were so popular that at the start of December I thought I’d place another order with Spoonflower.

My first order took just two weeks to arrive, which I thought was pretty darn good, so I eagerly anticipated having my new fabrics by the start of 2013.  Christmas and New Year came and went and there was no sign of them, but I assumed it was just the usual festive delay.  Alas by the end of last week there was still no sign, so on Sunday I contacted Spoonflower to ask what might happen next.

On Monday I received a reply from a very nice lady who apologised for my order having gone missing en route, and assured me that a replacement order would be despatched on Wednesday.  I was pleased with this, although a bit disappointed as I just assumed that it would still take a week or so to reach me.

Boy was I wrong.  My doorbell rang at just gone 9am on Thursday, and it was a FedEx man with my replacement order.  My jaw certainly hit the ground!  The shipping date on it was 22nd, so they had definitely rushed the replacement out in super quick time, and I’m over the moon about it.

This is good customer service: they were swift to respond when I contacted them, they were apologetic (even though it’s no fault of theirs that the first parcel had been lost in the post), and they dealt with the matter super efficiently.  Top marks to Spoonflower for having an excellent range of fabric designs with which to attract customers, and the good service to retain said customers in the long term.

So, what did I actually buy?  Well…

I’ve had two of these fabrics before (the ones in the middle), but these two are a first for me:

I love these and have already made a start on making some books with them… watch this space for further updates!

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Adventures in quilting – part 3

It’s been a long time since I did any quilting (the last occasion being a mini quilt for my bears), but back in March I decided I wanted to make a quilt for my fella’s nephew.  He’s nuts about Dr. Who so the theme was easy to choose, and I bought some great Dr Who themed fabrics from Spoonflower.  That was a while ago… the fabrics arrived and I put them away safely and as I’m off sick at the moment I finally got round to paying them some proper attention.

Having already learned the hard way that you should always iron fabric before cutting it (see here) I spent quite a lot of Wednesday morning with an iron in one hand and a frown on my face.  It was worth it though as I got the squares cut and stitched together pretty easily after that.

As you can see, I decided to use the patterned fabrics sparingly, and used a plain cotton (in a shade called 30s Yellow, from this seller) which I thought showed off the patterns nicely.  By the end of Wednesday I had sewn all the squares together and the quilt top was finished.

This morning I hauled my poorly self up to Hobbycraft in search of wadding/batting – they’d had a rush on, I was the fourth customer before 11am to buy some!  I also picked up some red cotton to use as the backing.

 

After yet more ironing I laid out the back, the wadding and the top and basted them together with pins before taking the whole lot down to the studio…

…where I discovered that quilting on a small machine, in a small space, is tricky to say the least, and requires quite a lot of faffing around.  I had to roll the quilt up so that I could get it on the machine, and keep rolling/unrolling as I went along.  Plus more faffing as my desk butts right up against the wall of the studio, so I’d get so far and have to (you guessed it) roll the damn thing another way so I could keep going.

Another problem I had was that I can’t lower the tracks (dogs?) on this sewing machine, so they kept gripping the backing fabric.  As a result it’s not quite as smooth at the back as I would have liked, but probably no one except me will notice!

Several hours, and almost 200m of cotton thread later, the quilt was finished.

Pretty quick, but that’s because there’s not that much in the way of quilting.  I stitched in the ditch across the whole thing, then sat back and looked at it for a while trying to decide what to do next… and went for the very simple option of criss-crossing each of the yellow squares whilst leaving the patterned ones alone.  Partly for aesthetic reasons, and partly because this quilt is for an eight year old, and I could just imagine him asking why the dalek has got lines all across it.  As it stands I think it works really well: the red thread shows up beautifully on the yellow fabric, and there’s nothing to detract from the Dr Who-ness of the other squares.  The edge of the quilt is simply the red backing fabric folded over the front and hemmed (not as neatly as I wanted in places, because the backing wasn’t perfectly flat).  Simple, but striking

This will now be folded up and kept safely until Christmas, and I will have to report back then and tell you what young Archie thinks of it!

I’m glad this little project is finished, it’s given me a bit more confidence with quilting, and also taught me the limitations of my sewing machine.  The quilt I started making earlier this year (see here) is still languishing in pieces, but I will have to finish it at some point, and it’s going to be a much bigger quilt than this.  I need to get over my fear and use my mother’s scary industrial sewing machine instead, as it’ll be really important to keep the backing fabric from ruching up on such a large quilt, and I’ll also struggle to get the whole thing through my little machine as I’d like to use fleece as the backing fabric for extra snuggliness and I don’t think the little machine will cope with the additional thickness.  I’ll report back in a few months as I need to shelve quilting once more and go back to some of my other projects first.

 

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Wednesday work in progress

I’m a little tired this morning so I’m stealing borrowing today’s title from Kirst over at The Leopard Anchor, she regularly posts a Wednesday WIP and it’s a great idea.

I’ve got quite a lot on the go at the moment, inspiration is a lot like London buses – you wait ages for an idea and then three turn up at once.  The past few days have therefore been a flurry of activity and there really haven’t been enough hours in the day to get everything done.

I’ve been playing with old book pages and felt to make bunting…

… I’ll post more details on the bunting later this week.

I’ve got more vintage books to turn into notebooks…

…and I’m hoping to get some of these finished today.

I’ve taken up an interest in international mining…

…not really, but were you worried for a moment?  I’m working on a custom order for someone and she’s provided her own artwork for the cover, so she needed something to protect the artwork in the post.  What do you do when you haven’t got any stiff card?  Use a random magazine of course!

I’ve been playing with quilting again…

…and hopefully this will be turned into something very soon…

And finally I’m still happily working on the Beekeeper’s Quilt…

…and it’s going well.  I’m knitting in front of the telly most evenings and it’s wonderful watching my stash of hexipuffs growing.  I’ve now got 73 so I’m well on my way to my new quilt!

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Project 365 – Day 106

15th April 2012 – “Patchwork”

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Adventures in quilting – part 2

Last week I told you about my first steps towards quilting, and said that I’d have a smaller project to show you very soon.  Well, here goes.

After sorting out the squares for my own quilt I had an awful lot of scraps left over so I decided to get a bit more practice on the sewing machine by making a miniature quilt.  I followed the same process, just using smaller pieces of fabric (and a much smaller template!) until I had a whole miniature quilt-top sewn together… and then had to stop and think about what to do next.  The next stage in quilt-making is to baste together the top layer and a layer of cotton (or similar, for the bottom of the quilt) with a layer of batting sandwiched between them.  I didn’t have any batting, but wanted to crack on with the project so I had a rummage through my stash.  Oooh, look, fleece!

The fleece is quite thick so I thought it would do perfectly: I could use just the fleece and the patchwork top without having to use any batting.  So I did.  I pinned the fleece to the patchwork and then sewed along the seams first to secure it, then I had a play with the fancy stitch-types available on this machine and sewed some zigzags on the squares.

The back of the quilt shows how neatly I managed to do this (although let’s face it, it was a small quilt so the straight lines weren’t too much work – the quilt only measures approx 12 x 8 inches).

And the finished quilt?… Ta da!

To see who’s using the quilt, click here.

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Crafty Photo Scavenger Hunt: January

If you’re new to the Scavenger Hunt then please visit Kirst’s blog to see how this all began.  Rachel over at The Awesome Lady is acting as guest host again this month, so if you somehow came here first then please do go and visit her blog to see who else is taking part!  I decided to go with a black and white theme this month…

Inspiration

This month seems to have been more about sewing than bookbinding, I’ve certainly spent a lot of time talking about sewing haven’t I?

Something I Made

My first adventure in quilting.  Who cares that it’s only a miniature one for bears?

Motifs: Animal

Very handily I happened to order quite a few papers which feature animal motifs recently, this is my current favourite.

Outdoors

Fungus of some description (I’m not good with fungi!) on a tree stump.  The stump was brought into my garden for decorative purposes and has now sprouted this fungus all over it, I’m now not entirely sure if I should keep it or throw it out…

Details

A close up of a gorgeous panel on my Singer sewing machine.  They really don’t make ‘em like this any more.

Rachel over at The Awesome Lady is guest-hosting again for February so please do pop along to her blog in a day or so to find out what topics we’ll be playing with next month.

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Adventures in quilting – part 1

Back in September I bought a rotary cutter and took my first step towards quilting.  I cut up a load of my old pyjamas into neat squares and then stashed them away.  A couple of months after that I got my first sewing machine, and last week I finally learned how to use it.

I don’t have a proper workstation for sewing at yet so I had to set up shop temporarily on an old drop-leaf table in my mother’s room.  Not ideal, but it did the job.  Now, I’ve not been taught how to quilt, just given advice by people and looked stuff up on the internet.  Pretty much all the instructions I found said to sew my squares into long strips and then sew those strips together.  Hmmm.  As a complete novice with a sewing machine straight lines aren’t that easy… I can manage to sew straight for a short stretch and then it all goes a bit pear-shaped.

So I decided to sew the squares into small strips, and then turn those small strips into a larger square.

First one was a bit wonky and the seams didn’t all meet up, but yay!  This seemed like a good way to proceed as it would be easier to keep track of how the pattern was going (I only had 9 different types of pyjama fabric, so it was definitely fate), and I’m hoping it’ll be easier to sew the larger squares together than to sew lots of very long strips.

Now, I’d thought that my squares were all nice and neat.  Nay nay.  I made the mistake of not ironing the fabric before cutting out my squares (yes, I’m a lazy moron), so they were all a bit on the wonky side after I ironed the cut squares.  So I made myself a template out of paper and used that to help me sew them together at the right spacings (the template is 5 x 5 inches).  First I’d sew two squares together thus:

Then I’d get my next square ready, line one edge of the template up with the seam I’d just sewn, pin the whole lot together and sew along the opposite edge of the template.

That photo’s a bit blurry isn’t it?  Sorry about that.  Anyway, that’s how I got around my wonky squares, and I’m sure there’s a technical term but I don’t know it!

My confidence grew as the day wore on (although I did get confused at some points and sewed the squares together in the wrong order, leading to much swearing and unpicking of stitches) and my large squares got more even.

See, the seams line up!  I’ve now got 20 of these larger squares all sewn together and that my friends is how they’ll have to stay for the time being.  The next step will be to sew the big squares together (probably using another, bigger, paper template) but that will have to wait a few weeks.  In the meantime I’m very proud of myself for finally conquering my fear of sewing machines, and will be posting details of another, smaller, sewing project very soon…

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So sharp you’ll cut yourself…

That, my friends, is my new rotary cutter.  It arrived in the post at lunchtime last Wednesday… and by 3 o’clock I was at the hospital, bleeding profusely and cursing my own stupidity.  Rotary cutters are sharp.  Always remember to put the guard on when you’re not actually cutting anything.  Do not, under any circumstances, forget to put the guard on and then gesticulate wildly with the cutter still in your hand.  Lesson learned the hard way in my case, and hopefully I can serve as a dire warning to others.

I did order the sharp blade of doom rotary cutter for a reason.  For a while now I’ve wanted to learn quilting because I had a very specific project in mind.  I have a rather unhealthy love of pyjamas, and when they get too tatty to be worn anymore I can’t bear to throw them away.  I therefore have quite a stash of knackered old pyjamas which are taking up a lot of room.  Can you see where this is going?

Yup, I want to make a quilt out of my old pyjamas.  Nothing fancy in terms of pattern (just squares), but I think the worn fabric will make a lovely quilt, and of course it’s then built of memories too.

I’ve got some more pyjamas I need to cut up, but I’ve got a lot on at the moment so the project is being shelved temporarily.  I suspect this will be a project I really get to grips with over the winter, when work is quieter.  The squares look good so far though, don’t they?

I had a lot of small offcuts left over, so I’m trying to make a few little things with those (waste not, want not…) before I finally give in and throw them away.  The first thing is this little pin cushion (measures approx 3 x 5 inches):

I’ve already got a pin cushion, so I’m not entirely sure what I’m going to do with this one…

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