Materials needed:

Pick coordinating colours for the fabrics.  You could personalise this gift by embroidering the budding seamstress’ name on the front or add some lovely embroidery, beads or braid.  All the fabric I have used is off my scrap box but this is such a simple style you could easily use a piece of fabric with sentimental value or even patchwork.  The possibilities are endless.

Two pieces of fabric in coordinating colours & one piece of wadding.  11” x 14” for the outer and inner shell.

Two pieces of fabric & one piece wadding 4.5” wide x 10” long for the scissor pocket

One piece of fabric   3”x 5” for the additional pocket

One piece fabric and one piece felt 3”x 6” for needle book

One piece fabric 5” x 3” for button pocket

One piece fabric 7” long by 1.5” wide (width will be double plus a bit the width of elastic you will use). Piece of elastic (I used .50”) 4.5” long for the thread holder

1” piece of Velcro to hold the button pocket down. Button for the scissor pocket.

One piece of ribbon 30” long for the tie.

How to:

1. Iron seams down on the additional pocket, the button pocket and fold the thread holder fabric in half width wise and iron down the seams.
2. Zig zag the additional pocket top edge only.

3.  Straight sew the button pocket top edge sewing down the Velcro as you go.

4.   To put the scissor pocket together, make a sandwich of the fabric right sides together and add the wadding to the top. They should go fabric right side up, fabric wrong side up and wadding.

5.  Sew along three edges, clip the corners and turn inside out. You should now have a piece of wadding encased between two layers of fabric. Turn a hem on the remaining side and iron down, sew shut. Set your machine to a smaller straight stitch and using the gauge quilt the pocket sewing about 1” lines.

6.  Mark the middle of the pocket and using the buttonhole foot of your machine, add a button hole.

7.  Now take the bottom shell fabric you cut. Place the pocket 1” away from the two side edges and 1” away from the top (sort of like a frame) and pin this down.

8. Mark thru the buttonhole where the button should be and add your button on.

9. To make the needle book, cut around the fabric and the felt with pinking shears, if you don’t have them then hem the fabric, the felt wont fray so don’t worry about that. Place the felt on the wrong side of the fabric; sew a line down the middle of both layers (felt and fabric).

10. Leaving a 1” gap between the scissor pocket and the side edge of the bottom shell fabric pin the needle book in place. Remember that you only sew down one half of it, so that you can close it!

11. Leaving 1” gap between the needle book and the scissor pocket, pin down the additional pocket. You should have ironed down the seams (step 1)

12. Leaving another 1” gap between the bottom of the needle book and the side seam pin down the button pocket. Pin down the other side of the Velcro to the bottom shell fabric and sew this in place.

13. To make the thread holders, take the ironed piece of fabric (which should look like a long tube) and place the elastic on top of the wrong side.  Straight stitch down one short side and one long side leaving one short side free to turn this around. Now using a chop stitch, pencil or point turner, turn the fabric inside out so that the right side of the fabric comes thru, meanwhile hold the free end of the elastic and pull out and pin at the bottom. Sew this down so that the fabric tube gathers.  Iron this down. Pin 2” from the bottom of the additional pocket and .50” from the side edge and the button pocket edge. Sew the two sides down making sure not to pull. Sew once mid way down so that you have two holders.

14.  Sew all the pockets down. Add buttons and ribbon embellishments where you want to.

15.  Fold the ribbon in half and place it with the fold on top of the edge of the fabric. (scissor pocket top of fabric)

16. Place the top shell fabric on top and the wadding on top of that. So you should have a sandwich; bottom shell fabric right side up with all the pockets facing up, top fabric right side down and wadding on top.

17.  Sew three sides down leaving an opening at the bottom of the sewing roll. Clip corners turn inside out, push corners out, turn a hem in at the gap and straight sew down the four sides.

18. Decorate the top if you wish. Add the sewing suppliers and enjoy!

All of these are for sale on the folksy shop http://folksy.com/shops/seamsoeasy

The apples were divine. So far we have made mulled cider and two crumbles. yum

http://www.craftpassion.com/ and her wonderful site full of ideas and projects, one in particular on this October morning caught my eye. http://www.craftpassion.com/2010/07/experiment-fabric-printing.html if you look through her post and the forum http://www.craftster.org/forum/index.php?topic=129537.0

there is a recipe and her experiment on fabric printing which was very interesting read.

Definitely worth the read…

His love affair with convertables continues… Huaary!   I have been thinking of turning this into a cushion as part of his room re-do . He chose red fabric with white flowers all over it for his cushions. I think the blues and reds will look amazing with this picture

Will upload the pictures of the finished cushions later today.



Am working on a tutorial for a chirstmas present which should be here by the

end of the week and of course my first steps to quilting…

watch this space for more…

I love this months country homes issue and funnily enough that has become by favourite read!

This months is just what I have been after. With thoughts of a possible re-decorating of the children’s room in mind I have been wondering about how to mange this redo of  their shared room without it ending up being too pink/blue. Enter the genius that is homespun style!

The starting project is of course the cushions! My mother in law, a wonderfully warm and creative lady is a wicked cross stitcher. So I have enlisted her help with the cross stitched cushion. I also adore the ideas of pompoms, I find them so tactile, ditto for Tami who could not keep her hands off them on a recent visit to a decor store. She adores pink and purple and as it is her room I thought I would try and keep the cushions in those colours.

A few more steps before am done… and here they are…

I found the lace doily at a charity shop and promptly bought it as it reminded me of tea at my grandmothers. That cushion has little pompoms on a thread which I attached to the back of the cushion. Now to wait till Tami gets up and sees these done!

The next part of the redo will be a (eek) a quilt for her bed. Something that she can keep and treasure. Will upload the pictures when am done.

My new computer is doing amazing things for me. The happiness I feel when it starts up just ridiculous. Having worked the better part of this year with my old faithful that took ages to do anything I weep at how fast all my work is done. I have named her Gertie, she is a lovely shade of red and is just too pretty for words. The upside of all of this is of course the time I have left… with it I have been browsing more and reading more blogs. One in particular.

I am momma hear me roar I have read and learned so much. I loved her posts on photography,  enough to try and sort out my own, see her tutorial here on how to use picnik the photo editing site that makes all work look amazing! thank you many times over for this clare.

I have been working hard on the new tutorial which I have entered as my submission for the sewing directories Christmas Creativity Competition

Fingers crossed for Friday! Cant wait to see all the entries. I will load the how to make one of these here next week and thanks to picnik I have some rather mean photographs to go with the tutorial.

Till then have a great week and count all the things that make you smile!

aliza

Right on to sewing goodness. So over the last couple of weeks I have been reading a great number of very crafty blogs and came across one from A Lemon Squeezy Home that was for a lunch money cuff that was lovely. I have been working on the recycled bags and will post a lot more on that later but as I was cutting up a shirt I realised that the cuffs made the perfect cuff so yesterday I created the cuffs. Inspiration was definitely from Lunch money cuff tutorial by LSH but I changed a few bits and pieces being that I already had the cuffs! So here’s my take on this fantastic idea.

So first cut out the cuffs you want. I was using a men’s shirt to line the inside of a bag so I had these spare.

Next using a tailors crayon mark out the position of the zipper., ie the length.  The arrows at the top are for how deep you want the box around the zipper to be. Next flip the cuff over and make an insertion along the top so that you have full access to the top layer of fabric. (This was a very nice shirt so the lining was extra stiff woven lining which was NOT fun to sew thru!)

Now slit along the mark you made on the right side and slip the zipper into place. I used some glue to hold it all together.

Now you have the task of sewing this in place. I wanted this to be a little different so I hand sewed it into place using a chain stitch.  Please forgive my hand sewing skills which has deteriorated significantly due to lack of use! But what you need to do is sew around the cuff and secure it to the body of the fabric taking care NOT to attach it to the bottom layer.

Ignore the  printed fabric at the top, that comes next! Now you should have a zipper that is attached. Next cut a piece of fabric that is the length of the cuff plus an 1″ extra for the hem and  1.25″ in height.

Now attach this on the wrong side of the cuff like you would for bias binding.  (right sides together, and then turned over to the front of the cuff) This will cover the slit you made on the reverse of the cuff and bind it decoratively.

Pull it into place and iron so that it is flat. I used a satin edge Stich to hold mine in place for the front of the cuff.

 The machines settings for the satin stitch. Almost done. Iron. sew on some decorative buttons and you are good to go

A few of these will make their way into the Folksy shop so if you want them.. come get them!

A lemon squeezy home has some lovely things to make Http://alemonsqueezyhome.blogspot.com;

The Long Thread. Brilliant collection of how to’s and nice projects http://thelongthread.com/

Sew little time – a real time saving how to gather tutorial http://sewlil.blogspot.com/

So many more great sites and blogs out there but these are my current favorites…