Cushion Covers for Mammy

Picture property of Mammy

So, home-making is not something I get to do a lot of, with living in a rented shoebox at the moment, but my mammy’s house, aka the house I grew up in, is awesome, and she is making it look fabulous now she doesn’t have me and my brother constantly making a mess!

Yes, I NEVER MOVED as a child – stayed in the same house until I moved out to go to university. It’s an awesome house, I love it. It’s on top of the cliffs, on the south coast of England – just so you can picture it, here’s a picture of the view from the front garden. Lush huh?

With the exception of mine and my brother’s rooms (which we still get to keep! Yay!), mam has a bit of a ‘beach’ theme going through the house. She’s in love with lighthouses, and the blue/white striped beachy style. I have to say, I think in someone elses hou se it would look disgustingly twee – but it’s been done subtly, and because it’s so close to the sea, it just feels right!

See, they match the beach hut ones!

So, for her birthday I made her some cushion covers – she’s slowly re-doing the living room, and had bought some HIDIOUSLY EXPENSIVE but very beautiful cushions, and wanted some more to cover her old cushions – of which I was more than happy to oblige. We went to the local fabric shop in Exmouth – which is awesome, and she chose some contrasting fabric, I then had to add some ribbon trim, because I saw it and thought it was TOO CUTE FOR WORDS. It really is. ADORABLE.

Then, that afternoon, I sewed up a few cushion covers. Mr P helped out on this one, mostly because he is a perfectionist, and therefore makes everything SUPER NEAT, which is cool. They go perfectly with the existing cushion covers, and really brightened up the room (although with the French windows looking out to the sea, it doesn’t need much brightening!)

Please excuse the super blurryness of the pictures,
 but YAY trim!

The technique I used was super easy – the covers have no fastening, they just overlap at the back to create a pocket, meaning they can be taken off easily and washed (my mammy has a dog, so the furnishings all need to be easily washable, dog hair gets EVERYWHERE, even though she’s not supposed to go on the chairs), I added the strip of trim across the middle for interest, and also because IT IS SUCH CUTE TRIM.

So yeah – I made some cushions (or cushings as I like to call them) for my mammy. She loves them :-D

Katy xxx

Failure on the First – A Whole Weekend of Failure

Do you ever have those weekends, where Saturday morning rolls around and you think ‘YEAH, I am going to get SO MUCH DONE this weekend’ well, the weekend I am about to tell you about started out like that.

I had one task on my ‘must do’ list, and then a whole bunch of other things that were on the ‘I’ll do if I have time’ list. The ‘must do’ task was to make an irish dancing skirt for my goddaughter. It was her birthday the following weekend, and it needed to be ready to be parcelled up as a present and sent off. I’d never made one before, and I was using stretch fabric, which perhaps isn’t my forte, and a twin needle, that I’d never used before either. BUT HEY. What could go wrong.

I was so confident about this self drafted pattern that I was going to do a tutorial for you guys. LOOK. AH how I now laugh at the sweet naïve me that preceeded that weekend. OH HOW I HAVE LEARNT NOW.

Failure number one was: pinking shears. They are pinkING shears, not pinkY shears. Apparently I misheard. This was the last photograph I took. Everything started to go downhill from there. I would also like to point out that the first thing I did when this happened was jam my finger in my mouth and run to the sink, because I had no idea how deep I’d cut and I was damned if I was going to bleed on my fabric! I then got Mr P to get me a plaster – I’m obsessed with plasters, I love them, it’s an unhealthy love, a truly unhealthy one.

I thought doing the majority of the sewing on the overlocker was a GREAT IDEA. Because overlockers are fab with stretch fabric, that’s what they’re best at. So I did. Forgetting of course that I was trying to put godets into a skirt is possibly not the easiest thing to do on an overlocker. I totally managed it though. Had to go over some of them a few times. And they looked a bit funny. But hey.

I then decided to do the waistband with a twin needle. Honestly, I don’t know what I was doing wrong, but the two threads kept twisting together in my machine, and all I could find online about it was the words ‘make sure your threads don’t twist together’ which is SO HELFPUL. But, I persevered, stopping every few inches. Only a skirt for a 9 year old, so it wasn’t that big, it didn’t matter so much. And I got it finished. And then I cried. IT WAS JUST SO UGLY. In retrospect, I gave it the designation of ‘looks pretty ugly on the hanger, might look alright on’. But at the time I thought my world was ending. So I sulked. And by sulked, I mean I did baking. Don’t judge me.

Baking done, I sat back down at the sewing machine. I needed something to give my goddaughter, and the ugly skirt just wasn’t going to cut it. So I decided to make her a simple patchwork tote bag to take her dancing things in, and a notebook cover. I’ve made the notebook covers before , just once or twice, and I am a MASTER at sewing these up. Seriously, I find them so quick and easy now. So, I decided to embroider a quote onto a patch on my machine, nice and quick, and then stitch it to the notebook cover. I got to the final stages of making said notebook cover, and wrapped it around the notebook only to find IT DID NOT FIT. I don’t know how. I’ve made SO MANY of these. And yet, this one didn’t work. Ugh. Failure weekend had me again.

So, I turned it into a cute little failure pouch. Which I put the ugly skirt into (I’d decided to send it to her as a prototype, as without seeing it on her, I couldn’t make any adjustments).

THE PATCHWORK TOTE WAS NOW MY ONLY HOPE. And patchwork is REALLY not my strong point. Actually patchwork is probably a bit of an overstatement at this point. Each side of the tote was made with 6 squares. That bit went FINE. I decided to line it to make it look all professional and nice, and also decided that it would be cute to put a pocket on the inside, with her name embroidered on it . Ok, so I’m a bit obsessed with the feature on my machine that means I can embroider letters… anyhow, I went to press the lining, which went fine! And then went to press the pocket down, the pocket which was made out of the same fabric as the lining, and THE IRON MELTED IT. I still have no idea how this happened. Demon Iron. Anyway, it fortunately didn’t melt it too much, and the pocket was salvageable.

Next, I went to stitch the lining into the bag. This is probably my only ‘win’ moment of the weekend. It’s less of a win, and more of an averted fail. I came within inches of sewing the lining to the outer bag completely and leaving no room to turn it right side out. BUT fortunately I realised my mistake in time, and just had to turn it through a TINY HOLE instead.

It actually looked pretty cute though. So I parcelled it all off and sent it to the birthday girl. Then I did more baking.

Happy June guys – it’s got to be better than that!

Katy x

VEGAN Victoria Sponge

 So, I made a Victoria Sponge. An Egg-free, dairy free Victoria sponge. AND IT WAS AMAZING. I got the recipe from this wonderful blog which I am totally in love with, especially the cookies, which I will likely do a post on at a later date.

But, for now, I shall discuss the cake! Now, I changed the recipe a bit, obviously I used dairy-free spread in place of butter, and soya milk in place of actual milk. I also replaced half of the milk with sparkling water, as I saw it suggested on one of the comments, and I’ve seen elsewhere that carbonated drinks are good at aerating cakes.

So, I gave it a go. Cakes aren’t really what I’m good at. I can do cookies quite well, the cakes, less so. But oh my GOODNESS this was AMAZING. Mr P was very pleasantly surprised. Very much so.

Please excuse my slightly grubby ironing board

I have but one criticism, which is more a criticism of me, than of the recipe – I didn’t take into account that dairy-free spread is so much softer than butter, and so the buttercream didn’t really work. Well, it tasted good, but when we cut into it the butter cream (mixed with the jam) leaked out of the sides and looked a LITTLE BIT LIKE BRAINS. (Please note, this was Mr P’s observation, not mine). But, it tasted SOOO GOOD. And actually, after a couple of days in the fridge the buttercream hardened quite a bit, and it worked as a functional cake.

Omnom braaaains

It lasted for 5ish days, and not because it went off, but because we ATE IT ALL. Nommy. Also I put a heart on the top, because I am a romantic, and it seemed like a fun thing to do. I have no idea what the “proper” way to do this is, but I figured I’d cut a stencil from grease-proof paper (freezer paper if you are over the pond!) and just place it on top of the cake. It worked pretty well, as you can see from my WORK OF ART.

Definitely going to make more of these. And I’m going to try out a chocolate version with some chocolate fudge icing too – I’ll let you know how that goes!

Katy x

A TINY dress (It’s so cute)

So, back in January, my cousin had a baby! This was extremely exciting as she is the first of my cousins to be having children and also because I GOT TO MAKE BABY CLOTHES. Disclaimer: I made these and photographed them back in January, BEFORE the baby was born so I could send them straight away, I have not waited until NOW to give a baby-gift.

So, I decided to make a baby blanket, and stitch the little girl’s name on (as soon as we knew what it was!) which I did do, but I also stumbled across this dress pattern and this nappy cover pattern from sewmuchado (seriously, if you are unaware of this blog, rectify that… NOW) So, I figured the only thing I could do would be to make an ADORABLE TINY OUTFIT. Seriously, every five minutes when I was making this I’d hold it up and look at it and squeal, because it is SO TINY.

Let’s talk about the nappy-cover first, the pattern is for ruffled fabric, which means that my version looks plainer, but I just used it as an accessory to go with the dress really. It’s made from polycotton. The hardest part of this was feeding the elastic through the TINY HOLES. That was stressful. I need a bodkin.

I’m not sure what fabric the dress itself is made from, as it was just some that I had in my stash. I chose it because a.) I wanted to make something in grey and pink (you might have noticed last week  I’m kinda nuts for that colour combo) and b.) it is the softest fabric I have to touch. It’s actually what I used here which was kind of weird as I was sewing the dress, whilst wearing the skirt. VERY CONFUSING. Anyway, it’s really soft to touch and I knew I wanted to use it, but when it came to cutting out the pieces, I discovered I DID NOT HAVE ENOUGH. Or rather, I didn’t have enough for the length without blocking it. So, I did what any sane person would do, and added a cute little frill on the bottom. ADORABLE.

The whole thing is just finished with overlocking – I didn’t hem the bottom of the frill, just overlocked it to keep it nice and light, as it’s such a dainty little dress. (awwww so cute!) And I added on a decorative ribbon for no reason other than it was cute – I used a nice wavy, slightly random preset stitch on my machine, as I didn’t feel anything angular would work well for baby clothes.

I can’t tell you how long this took – I was doing it simultaneously with finishing last week’s project AND the baby blanket (which is pale blue/grey with a pink trim too), however it was really quick, I do know that. Also, it took longer than it should have because of threading elastic through tiny holes and that being challenging, and making me swear a lot, and eventually giving it to Mr P who has more patience than I do and letting him do it for me.

I seriously can’t think about this outfit without smiling, I have found a new found love for making baby clothes – thankfully, I know a few other people who are expecting, so I can indulge this passion lots!