Another baby quilt

Another request for a quilt towards the end of last year. Same pattern as the last little elephant quilt I made, and some of the same fabrics. Reds, blues and yellows.

This is how it turned out.

 A little crinkly tag toy thrown in for fun

All rolled up and ready to pass on to the new owner.

Finished Dimensions:
Quilt size 41.5" square
Individual blocks (finished): 7,5"
Blue sashing between blocks (finished): 1.5"
Blue sashing border (finished): 2"
Elephant border (finished): 3"

Another crinkly tag toy....and an elephant!

OneLittleImp has a new cousin! So what have I made for her for Christmas?

A few little things...

First up the tag toy. I think this is the best version I have made, this time in flannel. My felt version was probably a little simpler, but this one does look neater and a bit more 'finished'.  The elephant is an old pattern from a Woman's Weekly, made mostly of felt, and a little bit of left over flannel for the ears.

Tag Toy

Basic Tutorial:

• cut 2x approx 7 inch squares of a flannel fabric
• cut 2x 6.75 inch squares of batting
• cut a 6.5 inch cello square
• cut ribbon of various lengths (between 4 - 12inches)

Fold over approx 1/2 inch along all four edges and iron to crease once square of flannel fabric. I spent a few moments hand stitching each of the four corners so they looked nice and neat. Trim the excess fabric at the corners before you do this if you need. 

Tuck one piece of the  batting the 'frame' that you have now created. Then repeat all of these steps for the second piece of flannel and batting.

 Place both squares together, batting on the inside and iron on a warm (not hot) setting to flatten and ensure their edges match pretty closely.

 Take apart and place the piece of cello on one of the squares.

Close back up to form a sandwich - flannel, batting, cello, batting, flannel - and pin temporarily to hold edges neatly together with a few extra pins in the centre to keep the cello in place. Then start to insert the pieces of ribbon.

Fold most of the ribbon pieces in half and then slip in between each half of the flannel/batting sandwich, with a good inch or so within the sandwich and pin in place. This will ensure the ribbon is well picked up by your finishing edge stitches and less likely to unravel in time. I also doubled over the thinner (teal) ribbon in a few spots for a bit more interest.  Make sure your corners and edges are still aligned before the next step.

• Using a straight stitch, machine stitch the fabric squares together about 1/4inch from the edge,  removing pins as you go & ensuring you catch all the ribbons. Then stitch another line all the way around, close to the first.

Finally stitch a square in the middle (to help hold the cello in place) and you are done!

Hoggie the Hedgehog

Isn't he cute?!

This is not an original - it is from this website. Very quick to piece together. I think my friend who is a bit of a hedgehog fanatic will be appreciative of this little toy for her baby when it arrives early next year.

I think my Hoggie's prickles are a bit denser than the pattern as I ended up cutting another long row of prickle fleece. Perfect for little baby fingers to grab and explore.  I also added a little jingle bell inside the stuffing for extra sensory fun!

Bungle Jungle .. A new quilt

A new quilt!

A baby cousin for Little Imp is on the way, so there is a need for a quilt to be made.

I bought a Layer Cake, Moda Bungle Jungle, a little while back when my brother was in the US & I didn’t have to pay postage and now I get to slice and sew. Very exciting. (In case you don't know a 'layer cake' is a selection of forty 10 inch fabric squares from a single fabric collection)

Hours were spent considering different patterns until I came back to a floating block design. The tricky part with the Bungle Jungle fabric was still wanting to include some sort of Game of Same option and also keep the animals in the animal prints relatively whole so they can be recognizable, kind of like an ‘eye spy’ quilt.

The initial pattern plan is this…no doubt it will change a bit as I go, but a bit of a mud map to go by.

I divided the fabrics into four different sets of colours

aqua and navy

green with navy highlights

yellow and red

 And grey and red.

There are also squares of animal prints in each of the different colours that look something like this:

I didn't take any pics of these animal prints before I started fussy cutting these out to make what will become a bit of a matching game. Not quite the game of 'exactly the same' but a game of 'kind of the same'! Matching the same animals but with different background colours ... the downside of only having a 10inch square of each piece of fabric. You can see some of the pairs I began cutting out to start with here.

Still not sure how I am going to use the large animal print square in the quilt...time will tell....

Nappy bag for cloth nappies, or wet bag

Hello! I'm back. Yay for me (because that means I've found time to craft again). Sure noticed a need for the creative outlet and a few weekends ago I made it back into the 'Button Room', my craft haven. It was a bit of a mess as I'd just kind of left it post Christmas creativity so there were bits everywhere. And dusty too - not good. A big spring clean & I was back in action though.

I made a kind of water / smell resistant nappy bag for Little Imp not long after she started day care. Daycare was happy to use our cloth nappies, but were sending each wet one home in a plastic nappy bag! - not really in line with the eco/cloth nappy ethos. The one feature I didn't include though at that time was a separate pocket for dry/clean nappies. So this is version 2 of my nappy or wet bag, with space for clean nappies included. A girlfriend has just had a little boy & plans to use cloth, so hopefully sh will find this useful! I now also use Little Imp's bag for swimming clothes - it will leak eventually, but still holds up pretty well.

How To:

Materials - 

• Block out fabric (purple), 
• Large tooth jacket type plastic zipper - the length of the long edge of the bag (mine is longer as this is what I had)
• Plastic (I bought a $2 plastic table cloth from a Reject Store & cut that up, you could also use shower curtaining)
• Velcro (hook & loop, about 5cm)
• Cotton fabric for whatever you design on the front of the bag & a coordinating strip for the back

For the main bag cut 2 pieces (12 x16) inches from the blockout fabric (I'll refer to these as A & B)

and

2 pieces (13 x 17) inches (roughly) from the plastic

For the back 'dry' pocket (Piece C) cut 1 piece of the block out fabric (10 x 16) inches.

From the cotton fabric cut a strip about (2.5 x 17) inches.

To create the 'Dry' Pocket:

Position and pin the hook piece of velcro onto the wrong side of piece C, approximately 1.5 inches from the top and positioned so that it is in the centre.
Lay Piece C on top of Piece B as shown in the picture above, aligning the bottom corners and then marking where the loop velcro needs to be attached to Piece B. Pin the velcro in place.
You might also want to lightly mark the fabric using a ruler so that the velcro is nice & parallel to the edges.
Sew the velcro in place on both Piece B & C.

Next take the cotton fabric strip & press over approx 1/4 inch along both long ends.

 

Lay the cotton strip right side down. Using the crease along one of the long edges of the cotton, take Piece C, right side down, and butt the top edge (the edge with the velcro) into the crease.

You then need to make another 1/4 inch fold, this time with both the cotton and block out fabric so that the raw edge of the cotton is hidden in the seam.


The picture below shows me sewing this seam.








 And then the finished seam. I actually decided to sew another row of stitching along this seam to reinforce it (not shown).

Flip Piece C back over so it is right side up. The next step is to sew the cotton strip down, thereby hiding the stitching for the velcro). Re press the folded edge of the cotton and then flip it over to hide the velcro stitches & stitch in place.

Decorating the Front of the Bag:

Use Heat and Bond or any similar product to trace out the design you want, iron and cut out the fabric pieces and then arrange them on the front of the bag until you are happy. Iron them in place (cool iron - don't warp the block out fabric).

Then use coloured cottons to stitch the edges down (terrible photo this one, but I used small, close together zig zag edging). Now is the time to iron out any creases or add facial features etc. if you are using a fabric pen that needs ironing to set the ink (you will understand why I say this if you keep reading...)

 If you want to add a label or anything else to embellish the back, now is the time to do that too.

Adding the 'waterproof' layer'

Spread out the plastic pieces and then pin one to the wrong side of Piece A and stitch in place around all four edges - keeping close to the edge. For the back of the bag use the velcro to attache Piece B and C together and align edges and bottom corners before positioning onto the plastic, pinning and stitching all 3 layers together.

Then trim away any excess plastic.

 The back layers stitched together before trimming away excess plastic:

 Next attach the zipper to the top edge of Piece A & then Piece B. I double stitched each zipper seam to help hold the zipper in place.

Then, with the zipper open part way fold in half along the zipper, right sides together, align edges and pin. Then sew around the 3 sides, using a larger 1/2 inch seam so that you stay inside your previous seam lines. Depending on the size of your zip, you might find hand stitching the top edges easier than clunking away around the zip on your machine. (Becuase my zip was too long I also needed to cut the excess off at one end and hand stitch to secure)

Then clip edges, turn bag right side out (this is why you left the zip partly un-zipped) & you are done...unless you are then a TOTAL IDIOT like I was, and decide to set the fabric penned giraffe face using a HOT IRON. IDIOT!!!

You can guess what happened I'm sure. Table cloth melted inside the bag... stuck to itself...couldn't be pried apart...DISASTER (and a few muttered cusses/swearwords too).   Please learn from my mistake!!
I ended up having to cut out a large circle from both pieces of plastic & then managed to reline the bag without unpicking more than the second line of stitching along the zipper. Disaster averted. But pride hurt!

The Finished Product:

Freestyle

Experimenting again with some freestyle stitching in this wee singlet design.  Straight stitch around Mr Tortoise & then random twirls and circles of different coloured straight stitch over and around 3 fabric dots underneath.  Realise that ribbed material like this is not the best to use, especially as I am a bit lazy & didn't use any sort of fabric support to stop the ribbing from stretching one way & then the next.  But happy enough with the outcome overall.  Just lucky to find some time in the last week to do anything with working 4 days a week, building extensions happening around us and illness plaguing each one of us in turn.

Pretty... Cute.

I wanted to make a card with cut out birds on it.  My initial idea was to have 3 different paper patterned birds sitting on a 'wire' fashioned from silver thread.  I cut out the birds which looked great standing alone, but just couldn't get a grouping I was happy with overall. Then, flicking through my pretty card stash I found this piece of green patterned card with what could be blue branches and a glittery white flower.  With the word 'Pretty' stuck on the outside and 'Cute' on the inside, just right to sit beside a crepe paper flower on the latest baby gift. Pretty Cute.

A Stormy night, more Cards and a Baby

It was a dark and stormy night my friends, but the desire to craft overcame the fear & I braved the howling gale, the lashing rain & the flooded intersections to drive towards the Northern Lights and meet two of the girls, one looking full to bursting with an ever growing baby belly.
As much fun as we had, it didn't feel quite the same with one of the gang having moved down towards the Southern Lights to be with her boy, but those of us remaining did our best to create.

Sitting around the table we joked that we may end up being helpers in the birth of the baby hootchie-ette due the very next day, and little did we know how close that was to being fulfilled.  Not much more than 15 minutes after we left contractions began and now there is another little being for which to make little clothes and toys and cards!