Gathering pace

I mentioned in my last post my bonkers cushion - well, here it is. It was created in a 3 hour slot when the daughters were at preschool.
I dash home, race up the stairs, stand around panicking slightly, race back downstairs, make a quick cuppa, race, actually no walk sensibly since I am carrying a cuppa, back upstairs and try to calm myself down. A makey morning is a race against time and I am wont to wreck it through indecision and the sheer pressure of trying to get A Whole Thing Done whilst the clock counts down my hours, tick tock, in the corner.
I always turn to my books - I have mentioned before that I turn blank when presented with a blank canvas - I don't get ideas rushing at me, no - tumbleweed bounces slowly past, dust settles, a lizard meanders gently past, grasshoppers chirrup idly in the mental grasses and a big voice in my head goes...
"Errmmmm......"
So you see, this is the most difficult bit. There in front of me stands a large selection of fabrics, in all manner of sizes, and in oddly labelled boxes, such as "One side at least 8 inches but these ain't no fat quarter" and "Tiny delicate florals" and "Strippy bits and sort of 6 inches-ish bits"; I have all the kit I might predictably need, apart perhaps from some little understood 'interfacing' fabric (what exactly is that stuff? What is it?), and yet I dance from foot to foot waiting for an idea.
My problem is I want to make everything, and as I said in Tartan it up, I also lack confidence in combining pattern and colour, so things don't jump out at me and go "OH! Hey! You! Check me out, grab that stripy fella there - no, not the purple - the turquoise, yes, and ooooh that red floral, yes yes there, and wouldn't we just look AMAZING in an apron/teatowel combo! Wooo-hoooo!" My fabrics are all rather more demure and well-behaved, and they sit politely waiting for me to make a decision.
I found a pattern for a lovely cushion with romantically gathered squares of fabric in Anna Maria Horner's Seams to Me: 24 New Reasons to Love Sewing (which is a fabulous book from which I have already made two or three things including a Piece of Clothing for a daughter - more on that later too) and decided this was exactly the thing.
I was trying to find something to make for my poor friend Sam. I say poor, because she had a birthday in early May, which occasion I have still not marked with a gift. This is quite appalling you'll agree, and another incentive to set to and get cracking with a sewing project in my 3 hours.
I assembled my fabrics, and worked very quickly once I got going on it but I didn't exactly follow the pattern, as such, sort of....
and we all know what happens when I don't follow patterns.
My creations end up either a Total Disaster (see Gift Horse), Frankly A Bit on the Duff Side, or more commonly, Completely Bonkers. Now I love this cushion but it has fallen resolutely on the side of Completely Bonkers. So bonkers in fact, that I squinted at it and said, no, I just can't give that as a present, it's taken leave of its senses, look.
You start with rectangles of fabric, carefully measured. Let Anna Maria do the work for you here people, hm? Don't start with a square, because there is a reason why they are rectangles. (Learn Catherine! Learn from your mistakes! Again, see Gift Horse). You sew the long sides of your rectangle and then you gather gently, so that you end up with a square. You then arrange your fabrics so that they are in a chequerboard formation, with each gathered edge corresponding neatly with a straight edge - you following? Here's a little sketch:-
See? Then you can just start sewing 'em together and bob's your uncle, a bit of tweaking maybe, but with care it shouldn't take you too long at all should it?
However, of course, I started off with fabric in squares. And what happens when you gather one side? It becomes shorter...and what happens when you try and make a chequerboard out of unmatching length sides?
Here's a little sketch:-
Ah...whoops...
Darn it.
And no, Clever Clogs, don't sit there saying, well it looks like they might all tesselate together - I tried it, they didn't. Nope, they didn't fit. Ooh I felt foolish.
Anyway, so I ended up, would you believe, pleating the daft too-long side so it would fit the nice sewn gathered side. You can see the pinned pleats here. Ridiculous. And extremely time-consuming, folding and tucking.
Silly woman. I also gathered them far too much. When they were all sitting there half sewn together they looked like a load of cups. In fact they were strewn about the sewing table like the bras of a rather buxom lady.
However, although definitely bonkers, I am very fond of it. And I promise I am making Sam a birthday present as we speak. It is not remotely pleated, but it is gathering pace.

Tartan it up

Last time I went down to my mum's she overhauled her scraps stash by thrusting lots of bits of it at me. My mother is a little older than me, and has therefore collected perhaps a little more fabric than me in her time, so in went probably a whole generation's worth of little remnants. Little bits of stuff from dresses she'd made for me, both girl and grown-up(ish), leftover quilting bits, and whole little sections of patchwork, which she held up puzzlingly, saying "Well, I can't remember what I was making this for...but I certainly won't use it for anything, so here..."
Come hither, little remnants, come to daughter!
"There - you can stick that on a tea-cosy; applique this onto a cushion; stick this on a quilt border, and bob's your uncle", she was saying, flinging things at me.
They've been sitting there nagging me, these little half-made things. I look at them, biting my lip and wondering how I can use them (I am not good at this beginning bit of the making process) and so I tackled one the other day. Having made a completely bonkers cushion the day before, (I shall elucidate in another post) and worked out the envelopey foldy cushion backy thing (is that its proper name I do wonder?), I rolled my sleeves up and got stuck into turning a log cabin piece into a cushion cover. There are some lovely old floral fabrics in here - gorgeous, but in these days of bright and gaudy, it looked to me a little too insipid as it was.Now, it's times like this that I stand staring at my fabrics, and feel a bit daunted, because it's not easy, this fabric mixing business - I live forever in fear of things 'not going'. (Don't get me wrong, I don't literally quake in my boots during the night-time, when one oughtn't at all to be wearing boots, shivering with terror as two clashing fabrics soft furnish themselves into my nightmares; what I mean is that I have, as I'm sure do many, a lack of confidence about putting together two patterns you'd think shouldn't go, but which then look great, magically picking each other up and blow me down, who'd have thought it. You know what I mean.) Anyway, I rummaged about and found lots of bits of fabric which sort of went, but didn't cast a magic spell, or bits which just looked tired, or bits which which were plain and dull and frankly boring.
And then I found the tartan.
Which is quite bonkers, but I have decided tartan is the new, um, well, the new Greatest Go-er Ever. It is so bonkers it goes with everything, specially this red one, which is a Stewart tartan, and manages to achieve exactly what I was after - it picks up all the colours and brightens them, whilst simultaneously not actually going with anything at all. And now, rather than being too light pink and too light blue to go in my red and blue scheme, it fits like a kilt.

Of course, pumped up with new-found pride in my fabric matching, I again stood staring at my fabrics, wondering what to make the back from. I have many fabrics picked up from charity shops which don't fall into the Amazing Vintage Fabric category. They are simply jolly good quality lengths of fabric for two quid which were not to be missed. But they ain't gonna win an award for being simply the most gorgeous thing ever. And I was determined to work some magic using them because otherwise, why did I buy them. They're never going to be the centrepiece of a quilt. The backs of things is precisely where these fabrics must come into their own. They're not centre-stage, they've got to stoicly stand in the wings.
Enter my next magic ingredient - ribbon. Somehow, I managed to make these two fabrics look good together, and it's all in the ribbon - imagine the ribbon isn't there and actually those fabrics look weird and un....errm, well just un-great. Ok, maybe you're turning your nose up and squinting and saying, er, hello Catherine, where's your glasses, they still look weird.
But I like 'em.
And I especially like that I didn't use anything new at all - all this is from my stash. Which, if I were to give this as a gift, which I'm not because I seem to have become rather mean, would be a very good thrift gift, and would have involved no new poisoning of cotton growers or chucking of packaging into landfill, which is what this is really all about. My dining room sofa can sit happy in the knowledge that it is not a recipient of an environmentally unfriendly new addition to itself.
So, a big fat round of applause for tartan and ribbon please - go on, find a piece and shove it in something.

Sewing Gone to Pot

Well. I have done very little sewing. My poor sewing machine is gathering dust. What with 10 days of viral tonsillitis and then nursemaiding a husband with the same vile bug (I have decided it is Piggy Fever, or whatever its name is. H1N1 Influenza A I think, in fact...) any spare time I have has gone to pot. Other priorities crowded in - most notably a shady border desperately in need of soil improvement, awaiting its occupants - naughty plants that climbed all by themselves into my trolley at the plant nursery, or be-stole themselves from my in-laws' garden, or threw themselves at me at a village fete stall. Those ones usurped the daughters and rode three squashed in together (a polygonum, a centranthus, and a delphinium, since you ask) in the pushchair, straps on and everything, much to the enormous disgruntlement of an ice-cream covered, fun-overdosed, octopus face-painted two and a half year old. These three and the other plants cannot sit in pots all summer, so I have been hacking away at my heavy clay soil like a coal miner. Some lumps of 'soil' (I use this term loosely) are so huge and hard and rock-like that I half expect some diamonds to come flying out. Not so - rather an old Action Man arm, a toy car wheel, sharp flints, old bent nails, and many bits of old pots. And not enough worms by a long way. Get in there, you worms, where are you?
A n y w a y....all of which very frenetic activity has kept me away from sewing completely. So no gifts of any sort to show off here. However, casting my eye desperately around for an idea to blog about, I landed upon my teapots o' salad.
Aren't these the nicest teapots? They are lamentably without lids, which do rather seem to come a-cropper in my house, much to my sorrow, and after failed attempts to mend them I realised there was nothing for it but a bit of re-use. So out I went into the garden and with the daughters' help, spooned in compost and sowed some salad seeds. And just this week they have really taken off, and grown like billy-o. Now, you could get yourself down a charity shop, and look out for beautiful old teapots, fill them with soil, put the seeds in and give them as a gift. Bonkers, but certainly unusual, and best of all, edible. You could either give them like this, all grown, if you planned a bit, or let the recipient watch them grow themselves, on their own window ledge. In this one is a mixed packet of salad leaves - I believe mizuna, mustard, and erm, I'm afraid I can't remember. But any garden centre will be able to sell you a nice packet of mixed salady seeds.
What I really like is watering them - and what do you think I do? That's right, I put the water down the spout so the roots can suck it up, and they seem to like that a lot. Now, how neat is that? It's a perfect plant pot, is a teapot.