Wordy Envelope cushion

A friend of mine recently moved from a gorgeous but tiny one up one down cottage into a much larger house with a spare room for me to stay in. Hooray! What to bring as a small house warming gift that suits both my friend and her chappy? Much inward debate led to today's burst of creativity in the shape of a wordy cushion.

Much as I like the Jan Constantine cushions when I see them in shops they are way out of my budget, a tad too cutesy for my taste and dry clean only. They are also not right at all for my friends. Fresh from making embroidered felt birdies I had an idea for a word cushion. I know that there are hundreds of cushions in the shops with inspirational words emblazoned on the front. 'Love, Hope, Believe'. Sorry but they are just not for me, all a bit too saccharine.

My friend is Welsh and does speak the language. One of my favorite memories with her is when we were manning my stand at a disastrous Christmas Fair. The fair was truly appalling, nobody was buying anything, and we were stuck there for three days. There was nothing for it but to start my Welsh language education with all the rude words. This led to inevitable hilarity much to the bewilderment of the other stand holders as we sat there cackling away.

All in all it seemed appropriate to go down the Welsh route. No not with Cwtch (cuddle), although it is a brilliant word. No not with the rude words! With 'Proper Tidy' in red (washable felt) letters on a grey fabric. Amusing for my friend and suitable manly for her chappy. OK I know a cushion is hardly manly but as cushions go it is pretty butch.

Equipment

Fabric

Felt 

Paper

Pins

Fabric scissors

Thread

Sewing machine
Computer with word or publisher
Printer

Method - Time taken: About three hours.

1. Have a play with fonts in word or publisher (Publisher is easier as you can make  a document the size of the cushion and have much more flexibility to play with sizes and placing.) When you have a font you like the look of make the letters big enough to look good on the cushion.

Top Tip: When choosing a font make sure that you don't have one that has really thin lines in the letters you are using. It will make life really tricky when you come to cut them out and harder still to sew them on. I used Bookman Old Style.

2. Print out your letters and cut them out. I found it easier to not cut out the inside holes as it makes it easier to be neat when cutting the felt out.  Pin the letters to the felt and cut them out.

3. Cut out three pieces of fabric the size and shape of your cushion plus an extra 3/4 inch all round for sewing. Put two of them aside for later.

4. Pin the letters to the front piece of fabric. I went for deliberately wonky as it looked better and to make this kind of thing  perfectly straight is a nightmare. Once you are happy with how they look sew the letters on. It is faster by machine but it would also look really pretty sewing them on with embroidery thread.

5. Looking good so far. Just need to make the cushion up. Take one of the two back pieces of fabric and fold over one of the long sides by about 5 cm, iron and do it again to create a large hem.

 6. Place onto the front of the cushion with the fold facing you and the raw edges lined up with the top and the sides of the front piece.

Terrible picture. Sorry. I'd take another but I can't un-pick the whole thing now.

7. Treat the final piece of fabric in the same way but make the fold 10cm and place on top of the other back piece with the fold facing you and the raw edges lined up with the bottom of the front piece.

8. Pin all three pieces of fabric together and sew around the outside of the cushion. Dead easy.

9. Snip the corners of the cushion to help them  make a nice point and turn the whole lot the right way round.

10. Ta dah! One 'Proper Tidy' cushion cover. I like to iron the edges to make them really sharp but that is me being a bit fussy. Put a pad inside and job done.

  
Top Tip: Using a pad that is slightly too large for the cushion cover will give you a gorgeously plump cushion that won't need to be shaken too often to get it back in shape.

I am going to admit to being more than a bit pleased with how this turned out. If I'm brutally honest I didn't want to give it away and ended up wrapping it up very quickly in order to take the temptation away.

Perfectly imperfect

While putting some finishing touches on a present for a friend last I found myself musing on how hard it is to be pleased with a project. Maybe it's just me but I find myself fretting about tiny imperfections that nobody will ever, ever see. If it's a present I find myself struggling to not point out every single minutely wonky part to the poor recipient who hadn't noticed. Equally when cooking I find it practically impossible to eat the final product without thinking out loud about how it could be better.

I've come to the conclusion that:

1. This is daft
2. It's a tiny bit rude to give somebody something and then proceed to tell them how bad it is

Perfectionism is a great goal. What is the point of doing something if you are not going to try to get it right?

However unrealistic perfectionism is not so great. Bombarded as we are by images of the 'perfect article'. Take a look at pintrest. There isn't  anything wonky there. The fact that behind each photo are hundreds of first attempts, disasters, clever angles, cropping and just a smidgin of airbrushing doesn't occur to you when you are looking at your own work.

Pick up something you like that you bought from a shop. Does it look great?  Now look at it as if you made it. Put your nose right up against it and be just as critical as you are with yourself. See. Bit wonky isn't it? I realised that I had possibly taken pickiness a bit too far when shopping for guest china for work in John Lewis. (I had recently been designing some china mugs for my shop so my 'perfection' antennae was on over drive.) Nothing was good enough. I spotted tiny imperfections that were barely there and nobody else could see.

Aside from the pleasure of creation the whole point of making something is to avoid the mass produced and have something unique. Yes is very good to be self critical and to learn new and better ways of doing things as a result. BUT! It is the tiny imperfections that prove that you spent time and effort on making something.

My new bits and bobs box restoration- Part 2

As I said before, the box arrived when I away. This was truly frustrating. I knew that there would be a huge amount of work to do to get it looking fabulous before I could start using it. I also one of those people who just has to get stuck in.

I got home. I did pause briefly to say hello to my Matey before attacking the packaging with my scissors and fell in love all over again. This was lucky as it is is HEAVY! Quite a bit heavier than I had expected. Heavier in fact than chests I have that are two to three times it's size. I presumed it was pine I suspect now it may be oak. I am no wood expert so answers on a postcard if you know better.

A bit of a look at it and I can see that is it made out of something else. I have no idea what though. The joints are dovetailed and I am sure that they are original. The only thing I can guess at is that it may have housed something mechanical as there are three air holes in the bottom. Maybe a gramophone?

The tray clearly a later edition and is beautifully made out of plywood and stained to match the main wood of the box. I may paint this later. I think that a good contrast is better than an bad match.

The first job was to rip off the frankly revolting padded top. Under the nasty brown was a rather pretty (50s?) floral fabric. In the interests of waste not want not I rescued what I could.

Under the floral fabric was a decrepit eiderdown. Bit nasty if truth be told. I kept it to see if anything could be salvaged but realised 24 hours later it was truly horrible and I needed it to leave my house taking it's dead skin cells with it. (yuck!)

Taking the old nails off proved impossible in some cases. Even my Matey couldn't shift them, and has a nasty looking cut to prove it. In the end if they just wouldn't budge I hammered them in as far as possible. As I am going to re-cover it anyway the top doesn't have to look perfect.

Finally I removed all the fixings and it was sanding time! I am anti taking off the patina of anything old but the front had clearly had some water damage so was never going to look good with just a bit of polishing.  As a compromise I put a very fine sandpaper on my little sander and took the top layer of grime off. A bit of liberon wax and it went from this:

To this:

Just the rest of the box to sand and a lot of elbow grease and polishing to do.

My new bits and bobs box restoration - Part 1

Like most maker doers I have bits and bobs everywhere. Ribbons in cupboards, buttons exploding, glue guns elsewhere, even my new sewing box was a mess already. I have no idea where my sewing scissors have vanished to. I realised recently that I need a box to contain everything. But what? I am very fussy with these kind of things. I wanted something quite large but small enough to fit in the bottom of the wardrobe and carry around. Told you I was fussy!
 

While looking something quite different on gumtree I saw this:

 A nice size and I rather liked the padded top. I'm a fan of things that have a dual purpose and in a small house something that will serve as a seat at a party will always come in handy. Then I saw the inside:

First the tray, then the door did it for me. (The picture doesn't make it clear but the front section on the left opens to reveal a hidden part.)

Sold to the lady drooling slightly.

Minor problem. I'm in London and the box is in the Lake District. I wrote an email asking if they would be up for sending it to me. I heard nothing. Ah well I thought and moved back to eBay. NOTHING was right! I wrote another email asking if it had been sold and if not would they be up for handing it over to a courier if I booked one.

A reply! YES! Albeit at my risk if it arrived damaged. It looked pretty solid so I took the risk. I paid the nice man £25 for the box and £8.50 for the courier. Of course it arrived while I was away. I was itching it get home to get cracking on it.

A jolly good stab at a patchwork quilt

There is a collection of children’s books called 'Green Knowe' by Lucy. M.Boston. The BBC dramatised the first ’The Children of Green Knowe' when I was just the right age for it. Being a bookworm I then read the series of rather spooky tales. There are a number of images that spring to mind when I think about the books, some that I was too scared to always read as a child. But there is one in particular. The patchwork quilt that Tolly's great-grandmother Mrs. Oldknowe mended while telling him tales about the house.

For our wedding in June I undertook the frankly mad project of covering 100 cushions for the seats. It took 5 days and on the final day I actually felt slightly sick at the thought of doing the final 15.

Post wedding I realised that I really do not need 100 cushions.

So I resolved to sell them. The problem was that our choice of fabric was so specific that nobody wanted them.In the end I sold the pads and pondered what to do with all the fabric I now had in the shape of square cushion covers. A patchworkquilt! 

So I pondered on this. Do I really have the time? No. But when has that ever stopped me? I googled it. To my dismay it appears to be a really, REALLY popular thing to do right now. Did I still want to do it? In the end a friend gave me belated birthday present of a book from the 70's about patchwork making.I was committed.

 First I chopped. Yes! I chopped the cushion covers that had taken so long to make into usable strips. My matey was silently watching me and clearly holding his tongue about this.

Then I realised that much as I wanted to use all the fabric some just wasn'tgoing to work. It was a pain in the bum for the cushions. I was not going to re-inflict the pain again for a quilt. This left me with only three striped fabrics indark blue, pale blue and pink. I had a brainwave. We had embroidered tablecloths on the tables and there was one that I couldn't sell because it was stained. Snip snip.

Next problem. I had enough squares to make a single quilt. I wanted a double. Of course I could have cheated and added more fabric from elsewhere but that wasn't the point. I could have chopped up the three tablecloths we decided to keep but that wasn't the point either. I had an idea. In the attic were the sweet pea bedsheets I had as a teenager, rather faded and suffering from an attack of the moths. We got married in my parents garden and the only flowers we had at our wedding were SWEET PEAS!

I started the easy bit of making the strips of squares. The tricky part of making a patchwork quilt is getting it so that all the seams match up. I cheated and put the seams off centre, brick wall style. (I'll aim for perfect next time.)

SO far so good. But I was out of tablecloth fabric and it wasn't big enough. It was also a tad pink and girly, dare I say twee? I was always going to back the quilt with as close a match as possible to my bridesmaids green cotton sundresses so I decided that I would add two borders. One in green and one in the fabrics I did have left.

Not ideal but big enough for me to stick with it. A blanket from the wedding (We had blankets for people to sit on the lawn with.) which had got a bit moth eaten served as the filling and the green fabric went on the back. Time for the tedious hand sewing the border part.

I then attempted to quilt the squares on the machine to make it a proper quilt.This really did not work. The fabric kept rucking up and looking awful. I ripped it all out and decide it was quite nice enough as it. Let's call it a patchwork blanket rather than a quilt.

Time taken. I did it in bits but I reckon that it took around 40 hours to put together.

Cost: The backing fabric was £18 and thread was £3. The rest I already had.

The verdict
Not bad!
All in all it's a pretty good first stab. It's far from perfect but it's nothing to be ashamed of either. Fortunately I do believe that there is no point in making something if it looks like it was made in a shop.

In which I start a blog.....

...for which I have no time for and am slightly bemused as to why on earth I have suddenly decided to have one. Moreover I have started to do one at the worst possible time. With two weeks to go before a trade show I have a set to produce, a catalogue to design, a price list to make and a large amount of black rope to hunt down, preferably in a nice shop that doesn't sell naughty things.

However I have put paw to keyboard and here we are. I am an occasional devotee of the creative blog, usually stumbled across while attempting to make something, getting stuck and Googling for advice. I more often than not I come away feeling depressed as how these people are able to whip up a Victoria sponge, finish off a handmade present and have twenty people for for dinner at moment's notice AND still have a house that looks clean and tidy AND they do all this while looking utterly fragrant, fabulous and CALM!

While I love making bits and bobs, albeit in a not too twee kind of way, being fragrant, fabulous and calm at the same time eludes me. Despite my best efforts I rarely have clean fingernails for more than 5 minutes and my natural default is to tuck my skirt into my knickers and get stuck in.

So let's see how far I get.....