A Week of Just Going with my Sewing MoJo

Half term week from both college courses meant that I had a few days to myself, to do as I pleased. I haven't had much free time in the last few weeks, so it was wonderful to be able to choose what I did each day. I probably should have been doing college work, but my heart was telling me to sew, and I didn't take much persuading. I seemed to have lots of ideas of things I wanted to make, so I just decided to go with the flow.

The first project I started was a patchwork project. I wanted to make a patchwork skirt to attach to a t-shirt and make a dress. The t-shirt was a brown colour with pretty broiderie anglaise sleeves, so I picked out brown, gold and green fabrics from my stash which I thought would go with it and made a large piece of pieced together fabric to make the skirt from.

When I tried to put the two together, I decided that I didn't actually like the fit of the t-shirt on me. It looked too tight, which wasn't flattering. As a consequence, I decided to just make a skirt in a completely different style, using an old pattern that I've used numerous times before, so I proceeded to cut the pattern pieces out of the patchwork pieced fabric.

I didn't get any further with this project this week, but it doesn't actually take long to make this skirt, if I can find some spare time. I just got distracted with other things I wanted to make.

The next project I decided to start, was to make a quilted vest, using the one I'd recently bought from Primark to make a pattern. This had been something I had planned to make before I bought the vest, so I'd already put some fabric aside for it.

To begin with, I created a paper pattern by drawing around the bought vest. This was a bit tricky, but I think it turned out okay.  I then cut out the fabric pieces and also some lining pieces in a co-ordinationg plain fabric that I had in my stash.

I wasn't originally intending to use any kind of wadding, but the fabric I was using was quite flimsy unlike the denim of the original, and as I had some thin wadding, I decided to include a layer of it, so that it would give a better quilted effect. Luckily, I just had enough wadding in my stash. I then pinned and tacked the wadding and layers of fabric in place ready to iron and quilt.

Here's a picture of the pieces ready to quilt:

I am a bit nervous about quilting the pieces, as I need to keep the lines straight and even. I decided not to use the diagonal quilting on the bought vest and to instead just quilt in vertical lines 2cm apart, as I thought there might be less room for error doing it this way, or that errors might not show as much. The pattern on the fabric that I am using does have rows of polka dots on it, so I'm hoping that this might help me to keep my lines straight by following the dots as much as possible.

Once again, I didn't get any further with this project this week, but I made a start, which is something. Sometimes, that's all it takes to get your creative ideas flowing and I do like to have lots of different projects on the go, so that I don't get bored with any one of them.

The final project I started during this week, was to make a patchwork duvet cover for the spare bedroom/sewing room. It was a bit of a random idea, but I've seen some on Pinterest and it's such a great stash buster.  Besides, cotton duvet covers are very expensive these days, so why not make my own with cotton fabric I already have and don't use. I used some of the same fabrics that I'd used for the patchwork skirt, as I wanted to use them up. I stuck to greens though on this project, to go with bedding we already had (i.e. fitted sheets and pillow cases). 

I think I managed to cut enough pieces of fabric to make the duvet cover top, as can be seen from the photo (Please note that some of the colours don't show true on camera). I may still need to add the odd row or two once I start sewing them together, which is what I now need to do. Again, I didn't really get the time to do this during half term week, so this is still an ongoing project, but one that I look forward to moving forward with. I'm not sure what I'm going to use for the back of the cover yet, but I do have some vintage flat sheets, so one of those will probably do the job.

I'll keep you posted with progress on all these projects, but I'm not sure when I'll get chance to work on them again for a while.