Striped Canvas Bags

Today I made some more new bags for my Etsy shop and my Folksy shop.  This one is a small shoulder bag with a long webbing strap and the other two are large tote bags, ideal for shopping or for library books.

I've had this fabric for a while but because it was just in narrow strips I had always thought it was too small for bags, however, when pieced together like this I think it works really well.  Sometimes you just have to keep looking at the fabric stash every so often and then an idea jumps out at you as to how to use a particular piece.  Hope you like them too!

The Sewing Room

At last I have my new sewing room up and running. Yeh! It makes me SO Happy!
All my haberdashery, stationery, bits and bobs and crafty things are stored in these drawers.  Then there's a shelving unit for my fabrics (although you can't see the shelves for the collection of fabrics).

Smaller pieces of fabric are in the 4 new baskets - velvets, silks, tweeds and special pieces.  I also have a long narrow sideboard where I can organise my order of  'projects to do'.

Next is my cutting out table and sewing machine, you can see that it's bathed in sunlight under the velux window.  Note the emergency waste bin that I made yesterday, it works really well.

And just around the corner is my mums old sewing machine and a basket of  'fabrics with no particular category yet'.
I've spent all day up here as there was nobody at home today, I managed to make 9 new bags but was so wrapped up in my new experience that I forgot to have lunch.  Oh well I think a large bit of chocolate will suffice for now as it's just about time to start cooking for my tribe!

Birthday Bernina, Baskets and Bins

Here are three new things begining with 'B' 

I almost forgot to show you the birthday card that I made for Emily a couple of days ago.  She's crazy about Liberty fabrics and so I thought it would be a nice touch to use some of her favourite fabric and machine stitch it onto a card in the shape of her new sewing machine.  It's the first time that I've tried this technique and it's rather wobbly but I'm going to practice with some other designs as well and maybe create some appropriate ones for the rest of my family.

There's a lovely little second hand shop near the museum where I often browse at lunch time, it's called the 'Nutshell' and has 4 or 5 tiny rooms full of ever changing treasures.  I found these lovely baskets in the shop this week for a couple of pounds each and thought that they would be perfect for storage in my new sewing room.  Transport home was tricky as I was on my bike!

When organising my new sewing room (which I'll show you tomorrow), I realised that I didn't have a waste bin - so I made one.  I found a piece of strong furnishing fabric that had a sort of basket weave and just cut out a rectangle, sewed the two short sides together to make a cylinder, sewed a circle to the bottom and hemmed the top edge which folds over to make it more sturdy.  Hey Presto! a new bin in 10 minutes.  It's just the right size to fit a plastic carrier bag inside which will be re-used many times as it's only for scraps of fabric and thread.  I considered myself very thrifty this week.

Happy Birthday Emily

I've been so excited for the past week that I've hardly been able to contain myself!  I bought my daughter Emily her 26th birthday present last week but had to wait until her birthday today to reveal it.

I admit I had to take it out of it's box a few times just to look at it over the week you understand.  It's second hand (a new Bernina like this would be about £700) but it's such an excellent machine, she was ecstatic.  I bought my Bernina when I was 26 so it's rather a nice tradition to start - I wonder if it may continue, I hope so!

Imogen, James, Emily and Lorna after the birthday picnic at Silverdale, just a few miles from where we live.

You can see why it's called Silverdale - it's a beautiful piece of our coastline.

It's very important to keep paddling in the sea especially when you're as old as 26.  Although wellies are essential in these temperatures!  Happy Birthday to my beautiful daughter. X

Beautiful Blackberries

As promised yesterday here is my Blackberry Jam!

Have you noticed the labels though?  They were made a few weeks ago when we anticipated the jam making session and they say August - whoops!

I kept these berries out to put in the freezer; they're a great 'emergency pudding' for unexpected visitors - you can't beat a blackberry and apple crumble in the winter.

Kindle Cases

Just thought that I would show you some of the Kindle cases that I made last week. They are all made from a strong furnishing cotton on the outside, a co-ordinating cotton on the inside and interlined with a thick batting to protect the Kindles. I made eight of them from different fabrics and put some into my Folksy shop and some into my Etsy shop.

 

It was a lovely warm Autumnal day today in the Lake District.  James and I moved about a tonne of rubble and sand to make way for a wood store that we are going to make tomorrow.  There's still lots of work to do inside our new house before we move in but we need to get the wood store organised first so that we have lots of nice dry fuel for the wood burner through the winter.
We also made time to go for a walk up on the hill and picked loads of Blackberries.  These will be made into jam tomorrow so hopefully I'll be able to show you a nice line of jam pots then.

Pfaff 30 - New Home for Old Machine

A few days ago I brought back home my mum's old sewing machine - a Pfaff 30. She had bought it second hand in 1955 when she was 21 and it had been used constantly up until she died 10 years ago.
It still runs like a dream and I am really, really happy to have it with me.  I keep having a little play with it - just for the love of it; it's what I learned to sew on myself as a teenager.

Here are a few things that I found in one of the drawers of the machine table:
A gingham heart that is partly stuffed but not sewn up yet.
The start of a coil of French knitting on a wooden spool.
The beginnings of a wooden bead necklace in an old envelope.
If only mum had found the time to finish her many projects - she always had a variety of crafts on the go - drawing, printing, stencilling, painting, sewing, knitting, crotchet, tatting, gardening, in fact any creative thing you can think of, mum had a go.

Oh, I also found this piece of emery paper with a line of stitching across - I wonder if she thought that it would sharpen the needle by sewing through it?
Happy Days!

Tiny Harvest Time

I wish there were more hours in the day as not only can I find enough time to do the many things I want to do, I can't find the time to write about them either.  It's about 3 weeks since my last blog!

I did a spot of harvesting this morning and I just had to show you these beauties that I'd grown from seed because I am really pleased with them.  When I tried growing carrots last year my efforts were about 3cm long - these are HUGE.

I think that I'll just have to sew some little trousers for this one, in case it runs away!

This is my only other produce this season - well actually there are TWO of them, yes the large quantity of TWO apples.  I have heard many other people say that their apple crop is poor this year but I'm sure nobody else only grew this tiny amount.  I'll have to find a special occasion to sample the taste but they do look rather good!