Yo Cushy

Well, in a bizarre twist of fate I now have a back-log of three, yes I say three, THREE presents to tell you about. I have on several occasions allowed the daughters into the Room of Sharpity, otherwise known as my sewing room, to create unknown havoc in a corner so I can get on with some sewing.
You see, I'm no night-owl. Come eight-thirty at night I'm yawning. Come nine I'm wondering how to climb the stairs. So evenings being the only time I could sew unmolested was beginning to take its toll on the holdalls under my eyes, (as if 5 years of sleep deprivation hasn't done enough). Towards the end of the holidays (now that's a massive contradiction in terms isn't it? Ain't no holiday in my opinion) I had thrown all ambition to tidiness or order to the winds in an attempt to hold on to my disappearing sanity, and was living in a toy splattered hell-hole of mess and dirt.
I gave up.
I let the daughters do whatever the heck they wanted while I tried to get on with some stitchery. Hetty was playing with the pin-cushion and it's jolly bead-headed occupants. Isla was snipping old bits of fabric with the pinking shears. They are, I should remind you, 3 (just gone) and 4 an'arf respectively. The husb would have freaked if he'd seen them with these weapons, and even I wondered at my blase attitude to the sharpness of their implements.
But what's a stitcher to do? Birthdays don't just stop happening because we have children. Indeed they merely add to the list, the pesky creatures.So, this means I at least got a couple of little fixes over the hols, and by stepping over the mounting debris of strewn toys squintingly, and walking around with my eyes half-shut I just pretended the house was tidy, rather than freaking out at the horror show of chaos left after abandoning two children to their own devices for an hour.

Now then. Yo-yos. Ooh these are niiiiiice! They're a bit twee, yes, but in the right fabrics, they make a nice bit of decor for a cushion. I bought a dinky little gadget which is very simple and quick to use, and sat and made the 13 you see there on the cushion in one evening. I was watching some cookery programme on the gogglebox about making your money go further - starting off with a baseline dish on Day 1 which seemed to take ages but formed the basis of the rest of the meals for that week; you know, cook a massive salmon one day, then fishcakes the next day, then gravadlax the next, then thai prawn mawhatsit the next, then with sushi and tiny vegetable wraps the next and so on. Jolly good idea that. But cooking is my nemesis, and Nigella's no-respeck quick cuisine my saviour. If something takes me more than 3.5 minutes to prepare I'm almost grizzling. My cooking has to be thus: lob it in a dish, slosh some ridiculous and expensive foreign-sounding sauce like nam pla or sherry vinegar or lime juice or sweet chilli or some other drizzly thing on it, cover in herbs and of course Maldon salt (what else, one simply mustn't use yer ordinary salt) and throw in an oven. Then eat with lentils or cannellini beans from a tin cooked in 30 seconds flat with cheat chilli from a jar and cheat garlic from a jar.
Shoddy, eh?

A...n...y...w...a...y....yes, so, yo-yos. So they're nice and fun, and they look lovely with a button in the middle, which I used to attach them to the cushion panel. A very simple cushion cover recipe this, from Sewing in No Time, by Emma Hardy. I have to say, if you buy one fabric recipe book - it's got to be that one. The fabric, with the stripe and bobble on it, was from a bag of remnants, bought from a rather pricey interior design shop in Teddington for, I believe, tuppence ha'penny. Here the cushion is modelled by my rather serious looking assistant daughters. Assistant daughter? Is that like if a daughter is off work one day there is an assistant to take over the messing?And hey, I don't mean to blow my own trumpet, but Yo Cushy?! The title of this post? I'm sorry, but isn't that genius?
Maybe not so professional drawing your attention to it, but I am, I tell you, a-smirking.

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.