I love sewing, but I haven’t done any for a while. Not for any good reason really, work getting in the way, sewing machine inexplicably won’t go backwards, ran out of thread on the bobbin, those kind of non-excuses.
But this week I’ve had a bit of a flurry of enthusiasm for it, and the trusty sewing machine has been pressed into service again. A couple of functional things first, chopping up an old towel to make face cloths, that kind of thing.
But then I spied these sheets.
I found the pink one in a charity shop years ago, and I’d never seen anything like it. What a fun pattern! How very jolly! I snapped it up, and made a not-very-flattering (but ever such fun) skirt out of it.
There it is, hiding under that enormous cake.
Anyway, there’s plenty of the pink stuff left, and a few months ago I came across a brown one. Obviously I snapped that up too.
Then, just a couple of weeks ago, on our holidays, a purple one appeared! I just absolutely couldn’t resist, and added it to the staggeringly huge pile of things-bought-second-hand-in-Orkney-that-I-just-couldn’t-do-without (along with the typewriter and obsolete polaroid camera – more on those another day).
And so, with three cheerily patterned sheets, and a friend with a baby who needed a present, I started thinking about sewing again…
I suppose what I had in the back of my mind was something like this. Although obviously that’s far more professionally made and mine is a complete botch job.
A jolly botch job though!
As usual, I didn’t measure anything, just made sure all the squares were vaguely the same size, used another old (plain) sheet for the middle, and used the edging of the sheets for the binding (more difficult than it sounds, and there’s a couple of bits I’ve got to go back and sew over again).
The back doesn’t match at all – this is another giant piece of fabric from a charity shop, cotton this time (rather than the polycotton mix of the sheets). Excellent brown-and-orange colour scheme though, which clashes nicely with the front – always a bonus!
So there we have it – one picnic blanket/throw, whizzed up over a day or two, with only a tiny bit of swearing and a whole load of hopping up and down with glee at the fabulously swirly patterns. I’m going to have to get this one in the post straight away, before I decide I just *need* to keep it for myself. There’s plenty of all of the fabric left, so I might just make another one, we’ll see…
Anyway, that’s my enthusiasm for sewing well and truly back! My lovely friend is coming round for a craft evening tonight, so I’ll have to see what I can rustle up – we usually end up mending things rather than making new things, but I think tonight might be the night for a new little project (not that I haven’t got about 17 projects on the go already, of course, but somehow it’s always more fun to start a new one, don’t you think?
a cheerful living adventure 