Simple Sewing. Couple of small projects and a surprise for me!

 Thank you for joining me today,

I am continuing to find ways to use up the small pieces of fabric in my box. 

I had a dark blue strip of cotton and wondered what to do with it. A while ago I had knitted a cosy for our cafetière. It had begun to stretch slightly, so I decided to line the inside of the cosy with the fabric. This would give it strength and help insulate the coffee better.

First, I pressed the fabric under a damp cloth to get any creases out. N

Next, I folded over a quarter of an inch on all sides, and then folded them over again a quarter of an inch. I gave another press with the iron for nice crisply folded edges. 

Then I lay the Fabric on top of the wrong side of the cafetière. The  hems are facing the cosy so you won’t see them. I carefully hand stitched the fabric to the cosy.

This little bag/purse is for my granddaughter. I had some small bits of bee printed fabric to give a bit more interest. It was a case of folding the fabric in different ways to see what style I could come up with. I folded in a section as you can see to curve the edges at the bottom.

I think my little granddaughter will love her bag. Next time I would remove some of the bulky edges as they were difficult for my machine to get through. I overstitched the curved edges by hand and that came out nicely.

The surprise 

Just as I was almost out of fabric in my box, A friend emailed me to say she was having a clear out of her fabrics and hopefully I wouldn’t mind, but she has sent me three packages of fat quarters, and various offcuts of cotton fabric, large and small!

It looks like I am going to be sewing again very soon.

Simple sewing. Hemmed table mat

Recently I have been wanting to use up the little pieces of fabric I have. I don’t have much fabric at all, but am planning to sew some simple dresses and maybe a skirt or two in the future. I will be buying fabric for each project as I go, which is a nice calm way to go about things.

A housewife’s fabrics are resources, to be enjoyed - and used. Otherwise they can cease to be a resource, and morph into burdens, that will not benefit us.

I began to look at my unused or half used fat quarters, one at a time. There was an attractive green floral FQ in the box which seemed a good place to start

The above planning sketch was not intended to be a work of art 😊 

I used a hot iron on the steam setting,  to press all the creases out, then folded over about a quarter of an inch on all sides once. Then folded  over again and pressed to get a nice crisp fold

At this point I could have hand stitched along the hems, but decided to use my old Bernina mini-matic sewing machine to sew them, on the straight stitch setting. Then I pressed all around again to “set the stitches”. 

I hope to post more simple projects if you find them interesting