Creative mending: rocket patch on little trousers

My 3 year old son wore through the knee of  his trousers but they still fit very well. I suspect this might the first of many times this happens, so I could took the opportunity to try some creative mending.

I had to open up the outside side seam as I couldn't get the leg onto my sewing machine free arm. 

I used bondaweb to attach a large patch of fabric on the inside to strengthen the knee and appliquéd a rocket shape over the worn patch.  I used straight stitch to do the flames,  the built in stitches on my machine to add some  stars and free machine embroidery to add a planet. 

The final step was to sew up the side seam  again and done! 

As both pieces of fabric I used were recycled from old trousers,  the project ticked all my boxes  -  it was  environmentally friendly,  budget friendly and fun to do.

Breadmaking of a different kind

Well, it’s been quite a few weeks since my last post. Since then, we’ve redecorated our dining room, had visitors, both been ill and I’ve been to Chicago for a conference. I have managed to get myself organised again using GTD and have progressed with my grand plan to sort out my digital photos. Maybe I’ll do some posts on these later.

In this post, I wanted to show you last weekend’s project – making bread.

I love making bread and specifically I love my breadmaker. I could bore you for hours about my breadmaker love. But this time I didn’t use the breadmaker, I used the sewing machine - I made felt bread. In fact, a felt sandwich!


It’s my niece's 3rd birthday this week and her parents have bought her a play kitchen so I’ve made her a felt sandwich as something for her to prepare in her kitchen.

I was originally inspired by this felt food on Craftster and found these patterns and instructions.

Bread
Now, I’m too lazy for the hand sewing all these patterns suggested and decided to machine stitch the bread instead. Big mistake!



I added seam allowances to the bread pieces but had terrible difficulty sewing an even width crust. I ended up unpicking the stitching twice until I gave up and hand sewed the rest. For the second slice, I pinned the crust round the corners for all I was worth and machine stitched one side and hand stitched the other. The result ws a lot better but I would still like to be able to machine stitch both sides nice and evenly. It took me over four hours just to make the two slices of bread.



Swiss cheese
Last year I read Margaret Beal’s fantastic book, Fusing Fabric. So for the Swiss cheese, I used her method of fusing the two layers of felt and cutting shapes with a soldering iron. Although I am an electronic engineer, I haven’t done any soldering in years and managed to get a bit tangled and melted the cable protection a bit! Fortunately, it is still intact and safe to use.

The cheese slice took me all of 10 mins to make and it was great to try a new technique.



Tomato slices
I then tried to use the soldering iron to cut out the fiddly tomato slices but found the edges where I’d melted the felt were too burnt and the end result didn’t look good. So, back to stitching…

Prototype soldered tomato slice

I used oneinchworld’s method but stitched the two sides together as I don’t have the needle felting kit. Also, I free machined the seeds. I’m very happy with the results but it was rather time consuming.



Lettuce
Finally, the last piece was the lettuce which was very straightforward.



So, here is the result:



We certainly had fun playing with it and despite the 10+ hours it took to make, I am now thinking of making a set for us to keep!

Bob likes messy food which I don't let him have. A felt sandwich satisfies both our requirements.

The bear tries on the sandwich for size before clambering around wearing a 'sandwich board', shouting "Golf Sale"!

Pre-loved

I popped into the local charity shop at the weekend and came back with this embroidery. I have quite backlog of things that need framing and displaying and this doesn't really go with anything else we have, but I couldn't resist. 

It's a wool embroidery on some kind of canvas. Does this type of work have a name?

There was also a companion piece which I didn't like as much, but I hope someone does and gives it a good home.

I love the colours and the stitching - very long straight stitches. I've realised that, like many pictures that appeal to me, it is made of of several coloured bands - the grass, the water and the sky. The only part I don't like is the colour of the frame.

It's clear that someone put a lot of time and effort making this and I'd love to know it's history. Who made it, when and for whom? Is it from a pattern or did they design it themself? How did it end up at a charity shop? I have a feeling that the answer to that last question is going to be a sad story.

***

Someone has been having a clearout as there were five books on embroidery for sale that I'd not seen there before. I bought three and am tempted to go back and buy the others. 

Matchbox Swap part 2

Now that Sonjaboo has received her matchbox, I can show you what I sent her. Amongst her interests, she mentioned that she liked bumblebees and writing themes. She was also keen to receive something British ( as she's in the US).

I not sure what sort of writing themes she had in mind, but I do enjoy some wordplay so I decorated the outside of the matchbox with phrases associated with bees:

The birds and the bees

 

Busy Bee

The bee's knees

Oh, beehive! (for a touch of Austin Powers!)

I was surprised at how many bee related phrases there are. Some of the ones I didn't include were:

• Mind you own Beeswax ( I thought that might be a little rude)
• Queen Bee
• A bee in your bonnet
• Make a beeline for...

I decorated the tray outer in a yellow and black stripy pattern from a magazine page - finally found a use for all the Engineer and Technology magazines I never get round to reading. 

The inside of the tray with flowers, a bee and a butterfly:

Inside I included a couple of crafted items - an embroidery of a black cat, inspired by Sonjaboo's stained glass piece

and continuing with the bee / wordplay theme, a magnetic bookmark featuring Bee Quiet and Bee Have, the bees from an old British cartoon called Stoppit and Tidyup.

For the crafts supplies, I included a couple of bottle caps featuring bees, some British stamps and a few yellow beads.

I had hoped to squeeze a few more things in but in the end it was a rather tight fit just getting these items in. If I did it again, I might make my own matchbox that I could tweak slightly to let the bottle caps fit in side by side, so there would be a bit more space.

All told, I had a lot of fun making the matchbox.

Rainbow embroidery sampler

I love my sewing machine (a Bernina activa 230PE) but I haven't really made the most of all its features. One thing I'd really like to use more is some of its decorative embroidery stitches. However, the stitch card it came with doesn't really give a full idea of what the stitches look like in use.


So, I decided to make a sampler which I can refer to when I want to select a stitch. I actually started this in November, and have been working on it in small bursts. Today, I finally finished the samplers off.

Each one is postcard sized (10 x 15cm) for easy reference and storage.

Christmas Crafting

I made a tea wallet for my mother-in-law for Christmas. It was based on this tutorial from Is it Naptime? which I modified slightly. The main change which turned out to be surprisingly tricky was adding a tab with a popper rather than a loop and button closure. Having stitched the tab inside out, I found that it was too narrow to turn. It took me three attempts to make one wide enough to turn but not too wide so that it looked wrong.

I added a raw edged appliqué of a teapot and free machine embroidered the text. The text came out pretty well, although I wouldn't usually 'join up' the capital letter when writing on paper.

My mother-in-law was pleased with the present - she often takes her own tea bags with her when out and about.

***

I used some time over the Christmas break to learn to knit. After several attempts and unravelling, I managed to knit a square. The problem I kept having was that my rows were mysteriously getting longer and shorter. This turned out to be due to me splitting the yarn. The goal is to knit a monkey which Mr Mango got me as a kit several birthdays ago. Next step, learning to increase and decrease the row length intentionally!