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Showing posts with label Sewing. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Sewing. Show all posts

Thursday 22 February 2024

Threading the Up-Cycle







 It always disturbs my equilibrium when I have to throw anything out. Anything. 

A pair of Mr B's discarded canvas trousers, worn at the knees, frayed at the hem and stained where random splodges of paint had caught him unawares mid-DIY - presented a special kind of problem: no one, but no one would want these bad boys. 

I noticed that the dark navy canvas really made my embroidery floss pop, and voila: problem solved! 


Textile UpCycle


All the best for now,


Bonny x












Sunday 25 April 2021

Happiness is … Auriculas in bloom, socks that match their stripes and Ric Rac on steroids!

 Happiness comes in a terracotta pot, brimming full of auriculas. It's so satisfying to compare their performance with last year, and see how they're filling out and prospering. 

Auricula
Auriculas

Sunday 11 April 2021

Things that rocked my world this week ...

 This week I've been struggling with the cold weather. I want to spend my days outside, but it's just too cold. I've got a jungle of tomato plants that are crowding my conservatory, and I'm so proud of my baby pelargoniums. Back in February I pruned back the leggy plants that had over-wintered, planted up the cuttings and - hey presto - I've got loads of baby plants. 

Sock Knitting, Lace Knitting,

Saturday 5 September 2020

5 Things to do with a dead duvet ...

 Do you feel bad about throwing things in the bin - things that you might just conceivably find a second life for?

I hate to waste things. Any things. It's my pet peeve. And one thing that always causes me particular angst is the vast expanse of a dead duvet - a duvet that, for whatever reason, you no longer want to use for its primary purpose. I am ideologically opposed to sending so much fabric off to landfill . So here's a list of what I've found to do in order to spare my conscience the wrench of binning the cast-off.







Sunday 29 March 2020

Masks



If someone had told me a year ago that I'd be staying in to sew plague masks I'd have thought they were tripping on something very potent ... but here we are a year down the line, and it's impossible to buy masks just about anywhere.

One of my besties sent me this link for an internet how-to instruct-able. The pattern is easy. I used old clothes - recycling/ upcycling is the newest, hottest look for Spring/ Summer 2020 - and a snip of garden wire to shape the bridge of the nose. For comedy value I highlighted the messiness of my top-stitching with a contrasting thread!

Anyway the link for how-to do it is here:

How to make a face mask

All the best for now,

Bonny x

Wednesday 13 February 2019

WIP Wednesday ...


I'm really looking forward to seeing the spring bulbs and, in anticipation, I'm working on a row of cheerful tulips. I've up-cycled some old bed-linen for material, drawn out my posies and I'm working in tapestry wool and stranded cotton.

Wednesday 6 February 2019

WIP Wednesday

What have you got on-the-go at the moment? I've not got a lot of knitting to show for WIP Wednesday. There's the usual collection of things that have lived in the WIP corner for a-g-e-s, and with which I have totally fallen out of love with, and am never likely to finish anytime soon - short of a miracle.



Tuesday 4 December 2018

It's coming ...

I know! I know! Shoot me now for mentioning it, but we're getting rather too close for comfort given how little Christmas shopping I've done. Eeeek! Every year I swear it'll be different next year. Next year will be the year when I finally get my act together and don't end up doing my usual demented dash for the festive finish-line.

I find it hard to get geared up for Christmas until it's officially December. It's a state of mind. I remind myself of my mum who has this tendency to not really feel like she needs to leave the house until just about the time she's supposed to arrive at wherever it is she's going to.  It is a tendency of hers that used to leave me hanging around a lot after Brownies.

Anyway I'm in my customary seasonal denial, frittering away the time with my needle. And this is what I've got to show for my head-buried-in-the-sand approach to the coming festivities:


Friday 16 November 2018

Royal School of Needlework, Hampton Court Palace, London

On Tuesday I spent a fun day at Hampton Court Palace. Now I have to confess that it takes very little enticement to get me to spend a day in such a wonderful place. However, on Tuesday, I had a very special reason for being there: I was taking part in one of the Royal School of Needlework's sampler days, which involved a tour of the Royal School's workrooms and then a workshop in their studio.



Saturday 13 October 2018

Ally Pally Knitting and Stitching Fair 2018

For all of us in the stitching community there's nothing quite like the big Ally Pally Autumn Fair. There are lots of other craft fairs, but this is the big'un, and I, for one, always feel like I'm missing something if I'm not able to go.

This year I got an early ticket for Thursday morning. I rocked up 5 minutes before the official opening time, and the place was already pretty much full to capacity already. I'm a bad girl who likes to come by car so that she can transport her swag bag (day's shopping ... wicked 😈) home with minimum muscle strain. I was able to find a space in the free car park, but only just ... .

A chum, who trolleyed in on a late ticket that afternoon (after 3 p.m. entry), told me that it was fairly civilised when she was doing the rounds, but I'd have to say it was a bit too much of a push when I was there.

Still - gripes about how many of us there were apart - it was a great morning out.


Saturday 29 September 2018

Dog Mattress

Gosh I've been away a long time. I've been crazy busy on a non-crafting project, which has slowed down progress on absolutely everything else in my life. But it's finished. Hurrah! It's over, and I feel like a huge burden has been lifted from my shoulders. It's a long story, but it's finally done and dusted, and I'm really excited about moving on to other things.

One super-quick sew that I have managed to knock out was this little mattress for the dog's bed. I measured the exact size that would fit inside his basket, added a 3 cm seam allowance all round, as I was planning on sewing in a very thick wadding, and quickly cut up some fleece that I'd bought in ages ago.


Friday 3 August 2018

Woolly All Sorts

Gosh it feels like it's been a very l-o-n-g hot summer, and we're only just into August. My garden has taken on a sub-Saharan vibe. Parched would just about sum things up right now, and with the mercury pushing up into the 30s here in London it's been hard to muster huge enthusiasm for all things woolly.

But I have been playing with some neutral dye baths to make contrasts so that my brighter colours will pop. I'd saved up a huge consignment of dried onion skins, avocado skins and stones and pomegranate skins that went into the pot last week. I added a little turmeric for golden sunshine, and came up with a very pleasing Hermes mustard yellow. And just as the bath was beginning to weaken I brewed up some walnut shells and threw them into the mix,  turning my mustard yellow into a warm, unctuous chocolate meets golden treacle colour. Would you believe me if I said I was on a strict no-sugar/ no starch diet? 😶

Anyway, banishing all thoughts of forbidden delights like sticky toffee pudding, chocolate ganache and the like ... here's what I came up with:


Friday 15 June 2018

Hagseed and Cacti

My homage to the cactus is born of the fact that it's the only houseplant that I can reliably grow. I'm so not a houseplant person: I totally lack the constancy. I'm here today, gone tomorrow and when I get back a few days after that every plant in the house has given up the ghost and gone off to live in the great green plant heaven of the ever-after. Every plant that is with the exception of my valiant cacti. Cacti and I can be relied upon to get along splendidly together. They generally survive and flourish in the barren desert of my care regime.



Wednesday 13 June 2018

Sew Sunday ...

I'm enjoying a lot of peace and quiet at the moment, perhaps rather more peace and quiet than I'm totally comfortable with. By some strange alignment of the stars Mr B and the child are both away: Mr B is the Far East with work, and Emi is in Wales on a geography trip. So it's just me and the WonderDog holding the fort.

I enjoyed it enormously for the first day or two. Whaow! I got so much done ... but now I'm finding excuses to go and visit people. I've had enough of my own company.

On Sunday we had a glorious day here in London: all blue skies and sunshine. I devoted my afternoon to sewing peacefully on the terrace.


Friday 9 March 2018

St. Patrick's Key Fob

Like just about every other Irish person I celebrate St. Patrick's Day with genuine gusto. It helps that it's such a big everyone's-invited kind of gig. For one day the whole world gets to be Irish, and I'm all for inclusivity. Let's build bridges instead of walls, and hold parties instead of wars. And if you can dance a jig or two, down a drop of the hard stuff and tell a few tall tales in our time-honoured national tradition, more power to you, I say.

The shamrock, symbol of my homeland, is one of my favourite motifs. So, inspired by St Patrick's Day, which is looming large on the near horizon I give you my latest creation, craftily made from left-over 4 ply from my Spidery Scarf, and, as such, another idea for using up your left-over sock wool.



Friday 28 July 2017

Fibre East Tomorrow ... see you there!

We're off to Fibre East tomorrow. You can find us in the Leicester Marquee. We've got our fingers crossed for nice weather.



Emi's made a Lego sewing machine to bring me luck and celebrate all the sewing I've been doing recently.

Hope to see you there!

Bonny x


Friday 7 July 2017

Ode to June ... and TGI Friday ...

Crumbs it's way too hot down here in the Big Smoke. It's been like this for ages, and for some reason all this hot, hot weather has inspired me to sew. Perhaps it's because I've felt the need of some relaxed summer dresses - the kind that fit loosely, and help keep you cool when the mercury's way up. This is what I've been up to this week:


I rustled up these summer dresses over the course of the last few days. They're all pretty easy, and made from wonderful summer cottons that I bought on the Goldhawk Road. The red one was cobbled together when I discovered that I didn't have enough of either the red or the green flowery cottons to make the entire dress, and I have to say, necessity being the mother of invention and all that, I'm really glad that my erratic fabric buying forced my hand. I'm rather pleased with the not-so-matchy contrast.

My purple dress just involved following a pattern. And, whilst it's perfect for hot, dusty summer days in Spain, it doesn't enthuse me as much as my improvised dress does.

It's sewn from a fabulous Liberty Cotton that I bought on my favourite shopping street last year. And it's an absolute delight to wear: really light and floaty. I know I'll wear it to death from here on in.

As I've sewn, and ripped, and pressed out seams and tacked up hems I've listened to the wonderful alternative version of world history that I mentioned last week. It's an epic read (or listen in my case) that runs from the days of the mighty Persian Empire to the fall of Saddam Hussein. Maybe I got so much sewing done because I was totally engrossed in the narrative.


It's been a busy old week all things told, and I didn't get around to much restrospection on what I got up to during June. I've been trying to take a review of the month just gone as each new month of the year kicks off. It went really well for January through March, but then my wagon came off the tracks as other demands on my time left little energy for retrospection of any kind.

But June deserves to be treated differently. June was a big month for me. You see Mr B, my husband, had surgery to replace the ligament of his left knee in June. It wasn't a huge deal: it was never going to kill him. But it could have turned out badly. He could have been left with a long, painful recovery, or a permanent limp. As things went he's made a splendid recovery, and I'm feeling really blessed that he will be restored to full health and will be able to do all the things that he used to do. We're tennis buddies for one thing. We both play a really rotten game of tennis: he's a bit portly and I'm as blind as a fruit bat. But that doesn't matter because we play as badly as one another, which means that we're perfectly matched. We have epic battles on court. Any decent player would destroy either or both of us in the flash of an eye, but pitted against one another we're stiff competition for each other, and every victory is hard won.

Together we ski, cycle, hike and swim. None of it is done to any great athletic level, but it's fun and it's life-affirming. It would have been sad to have lost all of this from our lives. So I'm feeling very grateful.


And I'm also feeling grateful for long summer days with nothing very pressing to do. For lazy walks in the park, the locomotive panting of the WonderDog who invariably finds the coolest, darkest corner of every room we enter, the semi-meditative delights of cross stitching, the soft berries ripening in my garden and the long stemmed beauty of my hollyhocks - I can't tell you how much I love my hollyhocks. Summer totally rocks!

All the best for a fabulous weekend,


Bonny x

Thursday 6 July 2017

T-shirt Up-cycle - a patternless pattern ...

I've been mulling over the idea of using a simple T-shirt as the beginnings of a summer dress.  I started off with a small, white vest-top from Primark for a little girl aged 3 - 4 years.  It cost me the princely sum of £1.30, and then I used bits of left-over lawn cottons from other projects to make the skirt, which cost me nothing. What do you think of the result?



Just read on for my pattern-less pattern:


Tuesday 4 July 2017

Pink Clematis Pin Cushion ... how-to

I have to say these tapestry pin cushions have become a bit of a habit ...
This is my latest creation:





I've worked this design half cross-stitch on a 10 mesh interlock needlepoint canvas using 4 ply tapestry wool.

Here is my stitch-pattern:


I started from the black-lined square in the centre, and counted stitches from there to fill in the other colours. I finished off the white background in dark green thread.

When I'd finished the tapestry I trimmed the canvas to 1 cm of the stitch work, cut out a square of the same dimensions in short-pile velvet for the back. I found a dusty pink velvet at my local fabric store, Ealing Fabrics, that was perfect for the job. And, as luck would have it, the lovely lady behind the counter was able to pull out an upholstery trim that was a great match for the backing velvet.


Having overlocked the edges of the velvet I sewed it to the tapestry, right side to right side, around 3 of the sides of the square that they created. Then I turned the work so that the right sides were out, and the worked seams were inside. I stuffed the cushion with some toy stuffing and sewed up the final side of the square.


Now the only thing left to do was attach the upholstery trim around the edge. This type of trim is known as gimp braid, and it's got a marked tendency to unravel. I tried to end-stitch it, overlocking the ends to keep them intact, but my efforts were a bit of a failure. The only way in which I could keep this braid together was by securing the ends with a fabric glue. Using a paintbrush I dabbed some fabric glue, front and back, on the cut ends. The glue dried clear, so it wasn't very noticeable where the fabric had been treated. I sewed the braid around the cushion using an invisible stitch, taking small stitches from the wrong side of the braid, and sewing those to the cushion, pulling the thread taut after each stitch to pull the braid against the edge of the cushion. When I got right round to where I'd started I finished off the trim with a little bit of fabric glue so that it overlapped slightly, and sat snugly on top of where it started. 

All the best for now,

Bonny x



Wednesday 14 June 2017

Stitching for stress-relief ...

Gosh it's been a strange old week. Emi has been away on his school trip to Picardy, leaving me with a lot of time on my hands to get on with other things. Mr B had got quite excited about the idea of a child-free spell when we could wine and dine and carry-on like people with no great amount of responsibility to tie them down. But then his surgeon telephoned to tell him that the clinic could take him in for his knee op yesterday - bang in the middle of our hedonistic plans. He ummed and ahed a bit, and wondered whether they could possibly do it on Friday instead (the child is due back tomorrow evening). But common sense caught up with him and he duly went under the knife yesterday afternoon.

And, happily, it looks like the surgery was a great success.

In the meantime I've spent a lot of time hanging around waiting for the next thing to happen: trying to jolly him along as he anxiously waited for his slot in theatre, sitting quietly with him whilst he slept off the after-affects of the anaesthetic, keeping him company when he had to over-night in the clinic and didn't have anyone else to talk to. And, as is my way, I brought along some cross-stitch to help with the stress of worrying and the boredom of waiting. In situations like this, when I can't concentrate on anything too involved, I find that the simple, colour-guided process of cross-stitch is hugely helpful. *Breathe and stitch. Stitch again. Take another breath*. Repeat from * to * for as long as the agony lasts. I can just about cope with hospitals, and waiting for a loved one in surgery downstairs, if I remember to breathe and stitch ...

So after all that angst, this is where I've got to:


All the best for now,

Bonny x