Embroidered teatowel

I've been on a bit of a craft book buying splurge, of late. It started just before my birthday. What kicked it off was actually a sudden desire I developed, to own Aimee Ray's Doodle-stitching, which I'd seen for months in the shops (but was now not to be found Anywhere. I looked! Bah.)



I finally caved and bought the book on Fishpond. It came with me to Queensland, at the beginning of the month, and I finished a few small embroideries, including this bird on a branch. Once home I paired it with some glorious quilting fabric and this amazing royal blue tea-towel, to produce what I hope will be a very nice small gift for a friend's X-Mas.

A spot of Embroidery

This is part of a gift I'm putting together for someone. The pattern comes from an (accidentally - my tracing skills were challenged by the waffled fabric!) altered Badbird freebie.

You read that right, by the way; it really does say 'I poop rainbows'.

Peg Bag

I've been promising myself for months that I'd make my family a peg bag.
When we moved into our current home I was heavily pregnant, it was the end of summer, and stinking hot. The two Hills Hoists at the back of our block came complete with pegs, that stayed on the lines all day every day. Over the year or so that we've been here, the unrelenting sun, rain and frost has taken its toll. The plastic has degraded and every day I find more tiny, bright shards of peg death on the ground.

So I finally bit the bullet, googled 'peg bag pattern' and decided to make a simple version of the simplest pattern I could find (Easy Gratification, your home is Here).

More involved heads than mine decided to ditch a large pile of "Medieval" tabards from my local groups' loaner pile some months ago, possibly because they all appear to be made for someone over six feet tall with the constitution of a rake. Somehow, I ended up with the pile. One of these came in very handy when I needed fabric for this project!



Every fabric I touch needs to be embroidered, these days! The bird is a slightly altered freebie pattern I got from Badbird and the word is just one of the free fonts I got on my copy of Windows.
I'm slowly making my little word that much prettier.

Reversible toddler wrap dresses

This has been my major preoccupation of the last month - hence the lack of updates. It's also something I've been holding off on, firstly because I knew documenting the project was going to be somewhat epic, and secondly because I didn't want people to stumble across their daughters' first birthday gifts online before they'd been gifted.




These are four fully reversible, crossover-back dresses/tunics - these pictures are the two sides of each dress. I patterned them myself, working out kinks as I went along, and I am unbelievably proud of them!

I got my measurements and basic outline from a button down the back tunic I got at a garage sale and made a mock-up out of old sheets. The lovely Mummy to one of the little girls who would be receiving let me borrow her daughter to check that my size and pattern was right (Thanks Tracey, and thankyou to my lovely patient model, Lucy!)

This is the first dress I then made (Lucy's Mummy likes to bake).

One side is printed cotton, with silver glitter decoration on some of the cupcakes. Unfortunately you cannot see this, because the weather here has been despicable lately, and thus the lighting is trashy. That, and I need more practice taking decent shots of my own handiwork.
The other side is pale purple polyester dug out from my stash (I bought several metres years and years ago!) which had a nice weight and matched the purple on the cotton. On the front of this side I hand-stitched a circle cut out with a cupcake.

The back two pieces cross over, and it's all sewn together like a simple Gordian Knot (perhaps I should call it a Gordian Knot dress?), which is what keeps the garment on. I'm possibly proudest of this detail, as it means there are no press-studs or zips to catch on sensitive skin or have to wrestle with whilst holding a squirmy child still. There's also no buttons for the small recipients to suck on and possibly choke.

Since two of the dresses are made from quite busy printed cottons they didn't get any sewn detail, but the last dress was made from red and neutral tone linen-cotton blend that had me salivating in the shop but is very plain.
I left the red as it was, since it's such a fantastic colour, and spiced up the neutral side with a little freehand embroidery in backstitch and running stitch. The more I do it, the more I'm enjoying exercising my embroiderer's needlework skills, these days!

Adventures in embroidery

I attempted to secure some stone coloured linen-cotton blend for Ethan a while back, but bought a shade lighter than he wanted, due to the crappy artificial store lighting. So I had three metres of this lovely fabric sitting around. Some of it went to make my son's piggy tunic, after which I had some almost rectangular off-cuts.

Being the environmentally conscious crafter I am, I set them aside for future crafting possibilities. And lo and behold - the other day I was taken by the sudden desire to pull out my embroidery threads and embroidery hoop and fiddle. And what more perfect fabric could I have for an impromptu sampler piece?

Once I was done with my freehand design I was casting about, wondering what to do when I hit upon the idea of making a small pocket out of my piece of fabric - again all by hand rather than machine, as my hand-sewing really does need to be better. In the course of sewing my pocket, I decided to make a pillow of rice from the cupboard and lavender (a Christmas present from my MiL) from more scraps - again, entirely by hand.

Upon seeing the result, my partner promptly christened it a "hot pocket", as it's about the size of a pocket in a pair of pants; perfect for travelling with, or for little aches like sore wrists, knees or to fit perfectly in the small of your back. I'm now working on some more!