A new card reader was received by post last week but it wasn’t what I had ordered so it’s now about to be returned. Fortunately I had also ordered another from a different supplier and it arrived on Saturday. The second reader was the correct kind so I’m happily transferring images from camera to computer once more.
Here are two more of the fabric bowls I made last week. More to see tomorrow!
I have been asked in the past if I sell the things I make but I’ve always said no and I recently turned down a commission to make a fabric bowl or two for someone who liked one of my fabric pots that was being used to display items in my son’s shop. I don’t know what changed my mind about selling them but I did and this week I’ve made two large lidded pots and a small bowl, with another under the machine needle as I write this. My son has kindly agreed to sell them in his shop at the end of November so I have lots of time to make more and still do other things too.
The Mad Hatter is my current evening stitching piece but I can’t say that I’m enjoying much of it. Not long after I began it I altered the original outline drawing and unpicked several hours worth of black stem stitch in favour of a slightly less severe grey. I don’t like the style of the hand holding the teacup so until I rejig that, it will remain unstitched. To prevent me from discarding the whole thing, I moved on to colouring the trousers and once more unpicked several trials of different filler stitches before settling on the ubiquitous satin stitch. I may end up as mad as the hatter at this rate. He will however serve as a means to while away some of the seven hour long journey on the train next week when I go beyond-up-north to visit Big Sis.
The multi-coloured fabric you can see behind the hoop is a small fabric chest which I am about a third of the way through making. It needs a little oomph of a contrast colour on the yet-to-be-appliquéd panels or on the background fabric itself but the jury’s still out on what that should be.
Well, roughly based on a ginger jar shape anyway. This was all stitched before I had made the jug in yesterday’s post but each time I pushed one piece into shape it would collapse somewhere else. The solution was to inflate a balloon inside it but I was all out of those so that had to wait for a supermarket trip yesterday. The balloon puffed it up quite nicely and I then painted it with a branded fabric stiffener rather than my normal go-to PVA, but there are still a few little dents in places so I think a second balloon and another coat of stiffener are in order.
Constructed from a scrap length of the usual heavy duty interfacing which I had painted with acrylics many months ago and using a bog-standard glue stick meant for paper, I attached a now unidentifiable thin fabric to the back, ironed it to help set the glue and then free-motion stitched five of the panels and the base. On the sixth panel I strung a length of small beads randomly tied in overhand knots before hand stitching them to the panel. It stands about 5″ tall and approximately 4.5″ wide and has no earthly use whatsoever. I think it needs a lid but I didn’t factor that in at the beginning and I used the largest remaining scrap for something else which I’ll show you another day.
Another pot which is a bit ‘rough and ready’ as it was a trial at making a straight-sided pot and I wasn’t concerned with the finish although I do like the swirl! It looks huge in the photo but is only 2″ tall with a 5 x 3″ base. All of the pots constructed on the sewing machine tend to flare out once you start to curve upwards but I’ll try several times more before admitting defeat.
Now that the Christmas pots have been distributed, I can show them here. I’m pleased to say that they were each well received. The little orange and red pot was taken to ‘show and tell’ at the Janome owners monthly meeting I went to last week and I was arm-wrestled into agreeing to show how the pots are made at a future meeting. Yikes!
Yeah, yeah, I know I’ve two other things on the go but this morning I opened an email from a friend asking if I would be prepared to make her a drawstring purse to replace a recently lost one so it became a project for this afternoon. I stitched some suede offcuts together to make a piece of a suitable size then backed it with calico before over-stitching a pattern using a thread in the colour of an adjacent piece (although the thread colours aren’t really obvious in the photographs). Using the suede gave me a chance to use my sewing machine’s walking foot for the first time and as they say, it did just what it says on the tin!
The drawstrings are two braid handles from one of those big bags that shops give you. I always use the bag to hold our waste paper, and the braided cord handles are kept because they always seem too good to just toss. Two of them were just the right size for the drawstrings and I stitched a patch of leather at the ends to provide a finger-hold.The red and white lining is quilting cotton.
carvingtimefromlife 