Saturday 15 December 2012

A little hand stitching...

It's been slow going around here in the last few weeks, but i have a few things to finish so I can get onto some more fun stuff.  I have been hand quilting my daughters hand pieced Hexy quilt, and made some progress (I'll show that in the next few days), but it feels like a big job, and I'm not even half way through yet!  Oh well, if she gets it before the end of winter I'll be pleased, but hopefully she'll be getting many years of usage out of it anyway, so a few more weeks/months won't matter too much!

I did however finish a pouch (bleugh word) for my bloggy friend Sarah at Duck Egg Threads, and as she has now received it, so I can mention it here!  It was Sarah's Birthday last week, so I decided to make her a little pouch for some perles, as it seems us sewers/quilters rarely have time to make anything for ourselves, and she has been especially maxed out completing all of her Christmas list.


I used Linda Clements pattern for quilted coasters on the front of the pouch, from the book 101 Ways To Stitch, Craft, Create (here is my review from a few weeks back), and just made it a bit bigger.

And for the back I used my Sizzix, Drunkards Path Die Cutter, and made this circle, using some Moda Dotties fabric I got from Pin It and Stitch a while back. The bicycles got included from my stash too as Sarah is a big fan of cycling, and the colour, well it's a Duck Egg colour- which seemed kind of fitting (and luckily I had some in my stash).

My corners always feel a bit lumpy, no matter which technique I try, but it still looked lovely when i sent it off.  Has anyone got any tips on zips and lumpy corners??

For the inside (not photographed, whoops) I used some of the Make Do and Mend fabric by Benartex that I had ordered as an extra for my Low Volume Swap, in case my cutting went awry!  There was a stash of lovely perles included, as I knew Sarah had struggled to find any at the Harrogate show, and well, who doesn't love a few perles??

Ange x

 



4 comments:

  1. Are you doing zip ends? If so, they might need to be a bit longer. Otherwise, no advice, just want to say how pretty it is.

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  2. As far as I can glean there are two ways of going about inserting zippers. You can cover the ends in fabric (as Susan has suggested) and get the zipper centralized or, as I learnt at the FQ retreat, just put the zipper in using your normal sewing foot but use a longer zipper than needed and pull the zipper part to beyond the pouch when sewing. The latter way does mean that the ends aren't at 90 degrees and are a little depressed but it sure is an easy way of doing it. Di x

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  3. I used this tutorial the last time I made a zippy pouch, and I was amazed at how much cleaner my zippy corners looked. It does mean using fabric to cover the ends, which is a bit of an added step, but my corners before this tutorial were awful looking, so the added step did wonders for me!

    I saw this pouch originally on Sarah's blog, and it's so cute! I can't decide if I like the front or back better. :)

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  4. I know I'm so very late in commenting, but a huge THANK YOU for my pouch, it really is lovely. Such a good size and full of perles (I'm in heaven), and the zippy corners are fine, not lumpy at all.

    I tend to use the covered zip ends, larger than needed zip approach, two reasons..I like to use contrasting fabric on the covered ends and buying larger zips means I can cut them to whatever size I need.

    Sarah x

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