Mug Rug

Yesterday I decided to join the 'mug rug club' and had a go at making myself a mug rug from one of 'Handmade by Alissa''s designs on her website.  I shamelessly stole her pattern and colour ideas, but as "imitation is the sincerest form of flattery' I thought that she probably wouldn't mind!  As this was such a small item, only 6" x 8", I drew the design onto a piece of copy paper and used the paper piecing method to make this.

I'll definitely make another one - and use my own design - as it took me less that 2 hours to cut, sew and quilt the 'rug'.  I bound it in the usual way, handstitching the back with a slip-hem stitch, but I think next time I will use the self-binding process and see if that works any better.

Happy Birthday Noah - One Today

Today my grandson, Noah, was one year old!  Where does the time go?  It seems only yesterday that he was just a babe in arms, and now he's all but walking.  We had a small gathering at my house for him today, and my youngest daughter, Katherine, and I made him a cake... what else, but Noah's Ark.

We found instructions in one of Debbie Brown's cake books.  It took us about 7.5 hours in total.Quite a marathon really, but it didn't turn out too badly.  All the decoration is made of fondant icing -  almost 4lbs of it.

Honeycomb Quilt

This quilt is one of the most frustrating I have ever made.  The idea was to make a twin-sized quilt, but due to a major miscalculation on my part, I now have a lovely cot-sized quilt and absolutely no-one to use it! 

The template started out much larger and, in a moment of sheer stupidity, I decided it would be a great idea to cut out all my fabric into squares of a sufficient size to be able to just draw round my template and cut more than one at a time.  I measured my hexagon from top to bottom, added an inch 'just in case', and blithly set about chopping up my fabrics. Unfortunately, what I'd failed to account for was that a hexagon's longest 'side' is from side to side (if you see what I mean).  When I'd cut up all my fabrics into the required number of squares and tried to put my template onto it, it didn't fit!  So, I had to cut down my template to a size that fitted my squares.

Note to self - next time check that the template fits the square before cutting them all out!  (Or, better still, perhaps it would be better to cut them out one at a time)

My next challenge was the quilting.  I'd decided that I'd do simple straight line quilting, using a quilting stitch built into my machine.  A trip to my local sewing shop provided 3 reels of a variegated Sulky thread that I'd heard so much about and thought would be great to use.  The sewing shop owner said that I should use a top stitch needle, but I sort of ignored this advice.  I was machine quilting, and you use a machine quilting needle when you're machine quilting, don't you?  Another very bad decision.  After having to take out 2 lines of quilting due to the fact that the thread was constantly breaking, I thought that perhaps the advice I'd been given in the shop wasn't as odd as it sounded, and changed my needle to a top stitch needle.  It did lessen the breakage I'd been experiencing, but, even though I tried every tension setting I could, the thread broke quite regularly.  Now I am not sure if it was something I was doing or not, but I've never had this problem with any other thread I've used.  Would I use Sulky thread again?  At the moment, it is not likely. 

All in all, the quilt has turned out very well and I'm pleased with the result.  Now I just need a home for it to go to.

Whovian?

While I think about it, here are a few pictures of the cake I made for my daughter's recent birthday.  She is a big Dr. Who fan, and I got the idea from a picture of a cake which I found online via Google images. 

I couldn't quite fit "Police Public Call Box" on the 'sign', but my daughter was more than happy with it, and that's the main thing.  Oh, and it tasted good too!

I had some problems photographing it and getting the colour right, but the second picture down is the closest to the actual colour the cake was.

I've also been working on a knitted project for my new grandson, Noah.  I'm almost done now (though I actually started it in the summer last year - before he was born!), and have only got to sew on eyes, nose and tail.  I'll post pictures when I'm done.

Rethink, Reuse, Recycle

Hello and a very belated Happy New Year!

Over these last few months (and excluding Christmas, of course), I've been working on a project to reuse all our old jeans/denim material.  In the spirit of reducing the items our household throws away each day, I decided to use some of our old jeans to make our labrador, Millie, a blanket which we can throw over any surface for her to lay on.

 
So I cut up the jeans - keeping the zips because you never know when they might come in useful - and made a quilt which will almost cover a twin-sized bed.  I used a very, very old duvet cover for the backing which has been sitting in my linen cupboard, unused, for years.  There's no batting inserted, or any actual quilting, and the binding was completely machine stitched on. 

The denim is 100% cotton, and the backing is a 50% polyester/50% cotton material, but that won't matter as this quilt will not shrink because there's no new fabric in it.  Everything's already been laundered many times over.

The top took me quite a while, but the backing and the binding took no time at all - not even 2 hours to cut and press the binding, pin the backing to the top, and sew on the binding strip.

Now I'm off to search the Internet to find other ideas for using old denim.