Evil zips - the battle continues

Hubby recently had a meetng up north and so stayed with my sister and her boyfriend near Birmingham for the night.  On hearing he was coming to stay my sister immediately requested that I send up a boxy pouch for her.  This gave me one evening to make one, complete it and pack it into hubby's overnight bag.  I considered saying no momentarily, then I remembered she gave me her car and figured I'd better crack on...

She was pleased, which is always a relief when I give somebody something I have made.  I'm not sure what she'll use it for, make-up perhaps, or knowing my sister chicken feed! 

I am really enjoying making these little pouches, though I admit my method of working with zips is still rather haphazard.  I have been making it up as I go along and when it comes to sewing in the zip using my zipper foot I am sure I am doing something wrong.  My process always involves me attempting to shift the bulky "pull" part of the zip out of the way of the zipper foot, sometimes it's really fiddly and I use my stitch-ripper to pull the zip out of the way.  Unfortunately this led to said stitch-ripper meeting a rather untimely end...

Guess that's why it's called a "stitch-ripper" and not "zip-puller" then.  Ahem.

Nevertheless I managed to produce two more little pouches this afternoon, in a desperate bid to get some creativity out of my system and to relax myself in what is turning out to be possibly one of the worst couple of months of my life so far.  Sometimes I wonder when the crap will stop happening.  In the meantime though there is always sewing to keep me sane (ish). 

Lined with one of my favourite organic cottons - from Gossypium.  When I looked recently they weren't doing this in blue anymore, which is a shame as I always thought I might get around to making some pillowcases from it some day.

This one is extra dinky!

So zips and I still have a way to go before we reach a happy union.  My next challenge is to be a zippered bag!  Oh yes, I am branching out.  I designed a big bow design with a lined front pocket, here's a sneaky peak...

More on this soon, as soon as I have finished wrestling my latest zip past that darned zipper foot, there must be an easier method than this.. :)

More boxy pouches

Help!  I am obsessed with creating the perfect boxy pouch!  I dream of seam free, glitch free, non wonky pouches.  And I have come pretty damn close in the last couple of days thanks to this brilliant tutorial.

I am most proud of this little lovely...

It came out so well.  No glitches!

The lining is so perfect...

...that you could turn it inside out...

So exciting.  This one is destined for South Africa for my Secret Post Club partner this month (yes, I am a bit tardy)

I made myself one too, longer and thinner like a pencil case...

I made the lining and a tab with some of the fabric I received from Parallel Botany aaaaaages ago, I am so pleased to finally start using some of it...

For the outside I used one of my favourite organic fabrics...

It is organic cotton, printed with a flower which reads "organic cotton" (well dur).  I get it from here and I will be writing more about my love of organic fabrics soon!

Right, time to continue my obsessive production line of boxy pouches...

£25 Giveaway winner!

For the crafty homebody blogger the biggest sin
must be a post with no pictures in,
I hope you'll forgive me for leaving them out
I hope you don't whine, or stamp or pout.
So to make up for being picture free
I am blogging in rhyme as you can see....

Well ok, I am not going to write an entire post in rhyme, don't worry!  But I do I hope you excuse the lack of pictures though, and the tardiness of my announcement of the winner, life has got in the way the last few days, long story.

So without further ado as they say, the winner is...

Mrs Shilts!  Fellow crafty person and devotee of the boxy pouch.

I used a random number generator thingy, numbered all the comments 1 through to 12 and, well, randomly generated...

Congratulations Mrs Shilts!  I will get the people at CSN stores to email you your £25 voucher straight away so you can get spending!  Thanks to everybody who entered and to those of you who I shamelessly bribed to follow me :)

Photos will return once more,
of this fact you can sure.
So it just remains to say,
farewell 'til another day.
("No more rhyming now I mean it...
...anybody wanna peanut?")

(First person to name that film wins a boxy pouch!)

x

£25 voucher giveaway!

In what has been a truly awful week for reasons I don't have the energy to go into, and I wouldn't want to tarnish my lovely sunny blog with tales of woe and hardship anyway, there has been a little ray of sunshine - the lovely people at CSN Stores have given me a £25 voucher to give away to one of my readers!  Plus the opportunity to review one of their products on this blog.  Very exciting all round.

CSN Stores has several lovely online stores where you can find everything from ceiling lights to cookware, cake stands to furniture, so you'll have plenty of choice when it comes to spending your winnings.

Personally I am tempted by the traditional, yet digital (joy!), scales...

And very tempted by the cake stands...

And maybe when the baby arrives we could toast the new arrival with a colourful glass full of bubbly...

For your chance to win the £25 voucher just leave me a comment on this post telling me your favourite thing to bake, comments muct be left by 5pm on Monday 19th July!  How simple is that!  I'll use a random name generator to pick a winner (spam will be removed first!)  For an extra chance to win please follow this blog and leave me an extra comment to tell me you have done so, if you already do then leave me an extra comment to tell me so! 

I'll announce the winners on Monday night.  Good luck everyone!

Edited to add: Please ensure you leave me your email address when entering so I can contact you with your voucher straight away should you win!

Harvest and old lace

I think I may have mentioned before that I am not a summer person.  I like duvets and cosiness, christmas, hibernating and frosty starts.  I don't cope well with heat under normal circumstances let alone when I'm pregnant.  Summer is not my season, I feel down in summer in a way that most people do in the darker months, again not helped by the pregnancy hormones nor the challenges our family is currently facing.

That said, there are some advantages to summer, which I make sure I take time to appreciate.  A harvest of veg in the garden starting to appear, sweetcorn...

...and peas...

Not to mention the tomatoes, the lettuce and the herbs all bursting of their various pots.  July is also a good time to plant carrots, which we shall be doing tomorrow ahead of the rain due on Monday.

The bursts of colour are also very welcome...

...as is the opportunity for a little late afternoon reading in the garden...

The hot sun today was extremely handy for drying out old lace...

Bought at Spitalfields antiques market and washed gently this morning in a jam jar filled with warm distilled water and bicarbonate of soda, this cleans and gets rid of the musty smell.  The sun has the additional benefit of being a natural bleaching agent, it helps to lighten the old dull colour to a brighter antique effect.

This lace is going to be used as part of a rather large, daunting and long-overdue project, more of which will be revealed soon (hopefully!)

So much as I long to see the first leaf fall from the tree in the garden to signal the start of autumn I can appreciate the joys of summer for a little longer :)

xx

Boxy pouchyliness!

Having drooled over Gretchen's lovely boxy pouches a while back she directed me here to her original post where she was starting her off on the journey to boxy pouchy perfection.  This led me to this tutorial and voila!  My very own boxy pouch!

I want to make one for a friend as a small thank-you so my first go is a trial run to see how the pattern works.  It's rather easy to do and the finished result is incredibly cute, it's just so dinky...

There are a couple of bits I'd like to amend though.  I'm not sure if I have the stitchy know-how just yet but I want to add a tag below the zip, to give a place to grip when opening and closing.

I lined it with a contrasting red heart fabric which I love...

But I want to sort out the raw edges that are on show...

I'm not entirely sure how to sort this bit out, but it'll bother me until I do! 

However my prototype is still really cool and very handy for holding spare cotton reels and bits and pieces...

Plus it gave me the opportunity to tackle another zip, I am rather afraid of zips.

x

Shopping bags

I started to play with my blog to make it pretty and better for photographs (they always seem to look so small) and...well...to put it mildly I ballsed it up.

So now I'm grumpy and will require at least two kit-kats in order to calm down.

To distract myself from my irritation how about I share with you some of my latest creations?  I have been a busy sewing bee this weekend.  I promised my mum you see that I would make a bag for her friend, to hold a bunch of pressies and form part of the overall gift, then promptly forgot all about it.  So when mum reminded me on Saturday morning I whizzed into action.

I sewed two bags.  One in a salvaged rose print fabric and organic blue cotton...

Lined in organic light moss green cotton...

 Finished with a little tag....

The second bag is made with hemp and a stripy purple organic cotton...

I made it with longer handles than usual so it can be carried as a shoulder bag.  I was rather pleased that my mum picked the first bag, as I am keeping this one!

It's just the right size for all my bits and bobs and the odd choccie bar or two, and it's such a glorious purpley colour.  Can you see a glimpse of kitkat..I mean...baby bump above?  At nearly 19 weeks now I am hoping I might start actually looking pregnant soon!

A day off with hubby

Yesterday we went to Whitstable, just the two of us.  It was our first day alone together doing something just for the sake of it in over four years.

It was one of those kind of days where everything falls into place and the universe seemed to be telling us, "you deserve a good day".  The sun shone, the skies were a constant blue, there was always a chair to be found in the shade, or a cafe when we needed a drink, the perfect place for lunch, the perfect parking spot in the cheapest carpark.

We took with us one gremlin and two bunnies all packaged up and ready for Toy Society drops.  It was hubby's first hands-on experience of toy dropping and we had a great time surreptitiously leaving them around Whitstable.

One on the steps on the beach by the Neptune pub...

One on a bench on the beach looking out to sea...

 And one by the church on the High Street, see if you can spot it!...

We had Kent apple juice and scones, we mooched around the shops without hurrying, stopped to buy toffee crumble in the old fashioned sweet shop, and strolled through the fish market.

We walked along the seafront, all the way from the oyster company restaurant on the beach to the end of the beach huts, something we can never too with little legs in tow!

It was the perfect day out from the stresses of reality.  Thanks Whitstable xx

Oh, and in case it all seems too romantic, we did stop at John Lewis on the way home to buy a new hoover!  Well, we have been married seven years... :)