Strawberry notebooks

These are for the children's teachers.  Who doesn't love a nice notebook? 

The notebooks are from Muji.  They have thin card covers, and are crying out for decoration.  They would look beautiful with pen and ink drawings on them, but I cannot draw so I put fabric on them instead.

I first came across the idea of decorating notebooks with fabric in the excellent Last-Minute Patchwork and Quilted Gifts by Joelle Hoverson.  She uses a zigzag stitch to attach random shapes of scrap fabric to the smallest size of Moleskine cahiers.  I made some like this to give as Christmas presents a few years ago.

I like the original ones, but this time I wanted a clearer design so I went for a simple, summery strawberry instead (strawberries being about the only thing I can successfully draw).  I cut out the facric, held it steady with a few dabs of glue stick, and then sewed it with a plain running stitch.

They are very satisfying to make, and have a low effort-to-prettiness ratio, which is always good at the end of a school term.

There is just one more day to go for us.  Just one more day.  I cannot wait.

The inevitability of fruit picking

There is a cycle of inevitability about my visits to the PYO farm.

I love the idea of marching around the fields, picking punnet after punnet full of glorious, jewelled fruit .

I bring the children with me, and forget how fast and efficient they are at picking fruit.  They are no longer toddlers who spend five minutes looking under every strawberry leaf for caterpillars. These days they can strip a blackcurrant bush of it's fruit before you can say 'Ribena'.

I loose all sense of perspective as I stand in a massive farm, with fruit bushes, trees and neat rows of vegetables stretching away literally as far as the eye can see.

My trolley full of punnets and bags looks really quite modest in this context.

I get back home, unload the boxes of fruit, and realise that I have got carried away at the PYO farm.  Again.  This happens every year.

I stay up until gone midnight, scaring myself witless with boiling sugar - jamming and canning all the fruit.

The next morning I look at the stash of jars, piled onto the top shelf in the back kitchen and feel so proud of myself.  Here is a collection of summer fruit which will see us through the winter very happily.

I'll definitely be back again next year to repeat this cycle all over again.  You can find some of my previous years' adventures at the PYO and in jamming here, here, here and here.

This year's statistics:

Purchased

• 2 big punnets strawberries
• 1 big punnet plums
• 1 small punnet raspberries
• 1 small punnet blackberries
• 1 small punnet blackcurrants
• 1 huge bag French beans
• 3 courgettes
• 1 pot of honey

Made

• 1 enormous plum crumble
• 1 blackcurrant and almond cake
• 10 pots strawberry jam
• 8 pots blackcurrant and blackberry jam
• 4 large jars of stewed plums
• 1 enormous strawberry and almond crumble

And we still have 1 punnet of strawberries and 1 punnet of raspberries, keeping cool and available for greedy scoffing whenever we like.  That's the best bit.

Continuing with colour

Silverpebble's Splash of Colour project has started something here I think.  All the sewing I've done this week has been saturated with colour.

I've made two brightly coloured treats for the shop. 

First came a notebook cover, using what may be my last piece of this gorgeous Phillip Jacobs floral fabric.  It holds a Muji or a Moleskine notebook and has a little pocket on the front for a couple of pens or pencils.  If I still worked in the City I would so LOVE to take this into meetings as a zingy counterpoint to all the standard-issue office stationery. 

I've also made a patchwork cushion in one of my all-time-favourite colour combinations of bright red and pastel blue.  It has a touch of pink ricrac too, because I never need much of an excuse to add ricrac.

I used a dark green polka dot cotton for the back of the cushion and added a little patch of the Cath Kidston strawberry fabric which I'd included on the front.  I really love the blanket stitch settings on my machine, which I've used here, because I always found appliqueing with a zigzag stitch a very knotty and messy business.

I have a real cushion obsession at the moment. 

Since finishing C's birthday Swiss cushion, I've finally got round to remaking the cushion covers that I sewed for O when I was pregnant with her, nearly nine years ago.  I hadn't learnt about the envelope back closure back then and they were fastened with a giant flap and some very unsatisfactory velcro.  I've been desperate to re-make them and O finally agreed but instructed me to "keep them saggy" because that's how she likes them.

Despite the small blow to my pride this caused, I did as instructed and kept them "saggy".  I unpicked the covers, tutted at the shoddy understanding of seam allowances I had nine years ago, and re-made them with a few small additions of other panels of matching fabric, and some ricrac.

The cushions originally had the red-and-blue gingham on one side and the red-and-blue paisley on the other (both Ikea fabrics).  Because I added in some extra panels, I had a little of both fabrics leftover after re-modelling the cushions.  I used some of the gingham on the (puffy, not saggy!) cushion for the shop and with the very last scraps of the leftovers I made O a small patchwork quilt for her Clothkits dolls.

This corner of her bedroom now has all the colour I could wish for on a grey November day.  The Clothkits gang are all tucked up under their quilts, O's strawberry quilt is folded up on the bed, and the cushions are all lined up against the wall.  It looks like a cosy pink, red and blue fabric nest!

Strawberries for my girl - finally

I had to stay up until 2:30am to finish hand stitching the binding last night - but it is finally done.

O's strawberry quilt.  Yes, you probably though it was done a long time ago.  It should have been.  I've written about it here and here and I realise now, looking at these links, that I started it nearly eighteen months ago!  I've made three other quilts in the time that this one has been on the go.

I don't know why it has been so slow.  O has been very patient, and has never nagged me to get on with it (although perhaps she should have done).  She just hugged me and wrapped herself up in it this morning when I gave it to her.

Some details for all you statistics and quilt fans out there:

• The pattern was adapted from one in Material Obsession.  I love that book - and the second one in their series too.
• The fabric for the squares is a mixture of Cath Kidston, Ikea, old skirt fabric from Boden and H&M, Kaffe Fassett, Tanya Whelan, Alexander Henry, and perhaps a couple of others. 
• The border around each panel and on the bindings is TA Dot by Michael Miller.  I love this and used it for the binding on the quilt I made for myself too.
• The main fabric on the back is made from an Anna Maria Horner flannel fabric - the Diamond Mine pattern in Sweet Pink.  I love this cotton flannel - it is extremely soft and cosy.  I'll definitely be using it again.
• The stripe on the back is made up from scraps of all the tops, skirts and cushions I have made for O over the years.  I'm glad I put this in to break up the sugary pinkness and add a few more memories.
• It is vast - the only place I can photograph it properly is hung on our front railings.  The neighbours came out to exclaim and coo when I pegged it up and started snapping this morning.

And I am a pro at mitred corners now.  Even when I have to do them in the early hours of the morning.

Milkshake, chocolate and jam

We're nearly done with the back garden cherry glut.  There are just a few left on the tree now - so dark that they are almost black; teasingly dripping sugary juice directly into the hens' run on the ground below.  The children and I went to our favourite PYO very early on Saturday morning and picked six baskets of strawberries and bought a couple of big boxes of gooseberries as well - creating our very own strawberry and gooseberry glut instead.

Everyone had their own ideas of what do do with all this fruit.  Cam made endless strawberry milkshakes all weekend - about ten big, juicy strawberries, a large dollop of vanilla ice cream and half a pint of milk, all blitzed up in my blender and then gulped down, while lying prone on the sofa watching the tennis. 

Livvy wanted to make strawberries dipped in chocolate.

She's now tall enough to be able to stand at the stove to cook, so I showed her how to melt the chocolate over a pan of water, and then dip the strawberries in the chocolate and gently lay them down on the greasproof paper.  She loves the fact that she is now tall enough to cook by herself, and wants to do it all the time.

And I knew that most of the rest of the strawberries would end up as jam.  I made the jam yesterday afternoon - as the temperatures climbed relentlessly upwards. I was tired, hot, headachey and sticky by the end of the evening.  As I cleaned up the kitchen and all the jam making kit, I never wanted to see another strawberry again.

But when I saw all the pots of jam (all eighteen of them!) gleaming in the sunshine this morning I was delighted.

Livvy's right.  Strawberry jam rocks.

Hand quilting - the best part

After a back-breaking couple of hours spent moving furniture around, taping enormous pieces of fabric to the floor and then pinning it all together, the really good part of making a quilt can start. 

The long weeks of hand quilting are the part I like the best. A chance to curl up on the comfiest, saggiest chair with a big quilt on my lap, and sew by hand while G and I listen to some new music, or work our way through a backlog of old films or tv series we've missed from LOVEFiLM.

For this quilt I've gone back to using the Heirloom Premium Cotton wadding I bought by accident for Cam's quilt.  It makes for a weightier, denser quilt than the Quilters Dream Poly I used for my first quilt, and the quick-slow quilt I made for myself earlier this year.  I would recommend both waddings, but I prefer the Heirloom one.  I dithered over the backing fabric for this quilt for a while and eventually plumped for an Anna Maria Horner print in flannel, which I bought from The Fabric Farm's Etsy shop.  The fabric is of a very high quality, which has been the case for all the Anna Maria Horner fabrics I've bought.  It is stunningly soft, not too thick, and doesn't set my teeth on edge like some flannel and fleece fabrics do (or is that just me?).

And of course Livvy is very excited to see her quilt coming one step closer to completion.  She has been very patient.

Spring colour in the garden

For probably the first time in the eleven years we have lived in this house, the garden is a riot of spring colour.  Turns out all I needed was a wet winter, a sunny spring, and to spend a few quid on geraniums and wallflowers.  Super easy.  I rather like gardening now.

A strawberry top

There are plenty of good online patterns and tutorials for clothes for babies and toddlers, and many of the sewing books I own have some lovely clothes patterns for this age too, but I find that there are not many patterns for older children - pre-teens and teenagers. (The exception to this is Oliver + S whose current patterns go up to age 8, and whose new spring-summer patterns are going to go up to age 12).

I really want to make O a wardrobe of pretty summer dressees, skirts and tops this year - and I particularly want to make some of her school summer dresses, because the ones I buy never fit her properly and always look so sack-like and unflattering.

So I decided to go old-school and buy some traditional dress patterns.  I bought a few but the one I've made first is Simplicity 2986.  As always with traditional paper patterns from the big manufacturers, you have to work hard to think past the strange fabrics and trims and odd sketches they always put on the front of the packet, and imagine your own version made with fabrics you like.

This pattern is very versatile:

• it makes a dress or a top,
• in five sizes,
• with two choices of yoke - a square or round neck
• and two choices of sleeve - a little capped sleeve or straight elbow-length one
• it is positively begging for embellishment with ribbon, buttons, ricrac or ruffles.

For the first version, I've made O a top, with the square yoke and capped sleeves.

The yoke is where most of the pretty detail in this pattern lies.  There are pintucks on the front of the yoke, and the front and the back of the top are then gathered to fit the yoke.  Gathers and pintucks require concentration and patience, but aren't difficult, and look much more impressive than the skill required would suggest.

The capped sleeves are the only other part of the design that requires a little fiddling and patience.  I've made gathered capped sleeves before on dolls' clothes, and that was much worse because of the tiny scale required for dolls' clothes.  The way I tackle sleeves is to pin carefully, then tack everything together by hand (with bright contrasting thread) and only then machine sew it all together before snipping out the tacking stitches.

I finished the hem with ribbon, which is a marvellous technique I discovered on the Oliver + S Lazy Days Skirt pattern.

Because this was a first attempt at this top - almost a muslin version - I just used whatever fabric I had to hand.  This is a strawberry printed cotton from Cath Kidston, and is not particularly suitable for dressmaking because it is a little thick and stiff. 

It looks so sweet though, and O does love her strawberries.  The school dress regulation gingham fabric is on order from Doughtys and I think it will drape better than this quilting weight cotton because it is a thinner fabric with a little bit of polyester mixed in.  When I've  saved up some money (ie. fed the children on nothing but jacket potatoes for a week) I will be ordering a whole pile of the Anna Maria Horner voile fabrics from Etsy to make some more summer tops for both O and me.

In the meantime though, both O and I are delighted with this little strawberry top.  The sun has come out just in time to enjoy it properly!

Busy, busy

You might not see me around here for a while.

The children picked so many plums and strawberries today...

...and I bought so much jam sugar...

...that I'm going to be kept busy for a very long time.