Monthly Archives: December 2017

Glowing Spooky Spidery Bat

I actually made this bat back in August but I had to wait until now to share this post, because it was a Christmas present. Using the tried-and-tested BeeZeeArt bat pattern, I got on much better sewing the head gusset and feet than I did with my starry bat.

Strictly speaking, the spiders are a little large for the wings, as it’s only the spiders and strand they’re dangling from, which glow in the dark.

But as a gift for a friend who likes Halloween and bats, it should work really well. The dark “minky” fabric means the spiders seem to glow even better than the stars do on my blue bat.

Fingerless Gloves Inspiration

Have you seen the 12 days of Christmas discounts and freebies over at Winterwear Designs? One pattern in particular caught my eye – the Alpine Fingerless Gloves are exactly what I’ve been trying to find. Unfortunately the eczema on my hands is so bad at the moment that I can’t sew anything, but I couldn’t resist planning a few pairs of these gloves!

The Alpine gloves are designed to be made from stretchy fabric, so they could look fantastic in sweatshirt fabric, or fleece.

  1.  Lucky Cards Sweatshirt Fabric – Minerva Crafts
  2.  Aztec Stripe Ponte – Minerva Crafts
  3.  Forest Animals Fleece – Minerva Crafts
  4.  Bugs Sweatshirt Fabric – Minerva Crafts

And for Spring, when my hands still need covering, but fleece might be too warm, a couple of pairs in jersey might be ideal.

    1.  Floral Print Stretch Mesh Jersey – Minerva Crafts
    2.  Rainbow Geometric Stripe Print Jersey – Minerva Crafts
    3.  Blue Butterfly Meadow – Fabric Land
    4.  Zoo Cotton Mix Jersey – Abakhan

Maybe if I’m lucky, Santa will take the hint and leave me some stretchy fabric under the tree, so i can make one (or five) pairs of these Alpine Fingerless Gloves in the new year!

Halifax Funnel Neck

After my success with the Halifax Hoodie, I thought I would use up some oddments of sweatshirt fabric on another Halifax*.

I had just enough of the spotty and red fabric left over to make view D this time, but I kept the thumbhole cuff idea as that will save me needing to wear gloves!

I don’t normally wear funnel necks, so this was going to be a total experiment and a learning curve on how to fold the funnel to make it work properly. After reading the instructions through a couple of times, I folded the fabric the right way, and even inserting the eyelets went smoother than before!

If I want to be really picky, I could actually have made the funnel neck a little higher, so it would be cover my nose on a chilly day! But for a first attempt at a funnel neck, it’s come out surprisingly well.

If I’d thought things out a little better on the colour blocking, I would’ve used grey for the cuffs, probably grey for the pocket with the red on the edge, and maybe even red for the funnel. But that might have looked a bit too crazy!

 


* affiliate link

Pattern: Halifax Hoodie by Hey June Handmade*
Fabric: Fashion Fabrics
Trim: Sew n Sew

 

Fake Fur Ideas

There’s nothing better for inspiration than a rummage through a fabric shop. On this occasion, I found two soft long-pile fake fur fabrics. They were more like 1/3 to 1/2 of the standard width, but at £8 a metre, I knew that 50cm of each would be enough to make a few small bears.

The red is quite a bright intense shade, which looks plain until it catches the light at a certain angle, when you can see an almost silvery shade to some of the fur strands.

The forest green is a more muted shade compared to the red, but the two tone look with the silvery tips caught my eye in the shop.

I will admit I normally wouldn’t pick green fabric, but this was too sleek and soft to pass up! It should definitely make a bear that you can’t resist running your hands through its fur.

Happy December 1st

The weather here certainly thinks it’s winter already – to say it’s “chilly” outside would be an understatement! But it makes the first day of Advent seem even more seasonal. And what commonly goes with Advent? Yep, you guessed it, a chocolate advent calendar. I spotted the fabric panel for this calendar in my local Hobbycraft store (unfortunately they didn’t stock it online). Priced at £8 for a metre, I thought it was better value than some others I’d seen online…. but when I was told I could have one panel (50cm) for £4, that was one of the quickest decisions I’ve made to purchase anything!

The fabric came with a printed panel, complete with marked and numbered squares, plus all the individual printed pockets.

I added a piece of 2oz wadding to the back of the panel, and stitched through the edge of the pocket markings, just to hold the wadding in place.

The instructions say to fold over the pocket edges before attaching them to the calendar panel, but I found that way too fiddly to get a neat finish. So I improvised and added a polycotton backing to the pocket pieces, which also helps to make them sturdier.

That was quite easy to do – just place both fabric pieces right sides together, sew down one side, along the base and up the other side, Turn the pocket the right way out, fold the very top edges of both fabrics towards the inside, then top stitch that top part to close it up completely. Then the pocket can just be sewn on as normal.

I decided to stitch the pocket pieces on using white thread, as I didn’t want to try colour matching the blue of the sky, and thought that black (like the markings on the panel) would be a bit too heavy.

But how do you get the calendar to hang? When I cut some plain white polycotton for the backing, I added a couple of inches more in height than I needed, and folded that back over itself to make a tunnel. Recycling a sturdy straight plastic tube ‘handle’ from an old broken bag, I threaded some red and white ribbon through it, to allow it to hang from the door.

At this point, it was almost finished, but there were still raw edges around the entire thing, so some basic white bias binding was the perfect finishing touch. I did have to be creative and leave a gap for the ribbon to stick out, but you don’t notice that unless you look too closely!

All I need to do now, is get more chocolates to fill the pockets – the packet of Heros I used only contained 19 chocolates (and 6 of those were ones nobody in my family likes), so we’re still a little short!


Advent Calendar panel: Hobbycraft