An eye pillow and two kinds of patience

So, the three day weekend was gloriously sunny and I revelled in idling. Reading, lolling, eating cherries in the shade of a tree and the warmth of the sun; soundtracked with traffic hum and kids shrieks and pigeons' cooing. Lovely.

I didn't make the skirt I thought I might (see last post) as I couldn't find any fabric in my stash big enough. I did however get round to the Imitation Larabar Project, which went smashingly - photos to follow.

This though is a project from a couple of weeks back. I had seen instructions to make a yoga eye pillow on a yoga teacher's blog (sorry I can't remember which one!) ages ago, and it seemed to me just the thing for a) my current level of sewing skills and b) the scraps of silk I had left.

It's a really really simple project, though I still managed to end up with something a little less than perfect... I was reflecting the other day how there are two kinds of patience. People often say to me about knitting that they wouldn't be patient enough to knit. And I always think it bizarre because to me there's no patience to knitting. You can just throw yourself in and get on with it. To sew, on the other hand, you have to measure, you have to press, you have to trim and measure again and press again and so on and so forth. This kind of patience - the patience of doing something properly - I am just not good at. The knitting patience - the kind that just requires an ability to be happily absorbed in a simple repetitive task - I am very good at. I have always been quite happy to get absorbed in simple repetitive tasks.

Anyway, I'm off on a tangent. Back to the eye pillow. You can do a simple one where you just stitch all bar 1" of a rectangle (about 8" x 4"), fill it and finish the gap by hand neatly tucking the edges in, but I think doing an inner bag and an outer case is better. Less chance of filling leakage, easier to be neater, and also allows you to wash the cover.

The filling is equal parts linseed and rice. Lavender is recommended, but I don't really love lavender so I tried adding lime leaves and dried mint. It smelled lovely the first time I tried it but I don't notice any scent now so this was fairly pointless in retrospect.

So, the first step is to sew two rectangles together, leaving a 1-2" gap on one short edge. The next is to funnel in your mixture until it's about 3/4 fill. Then, sew the gap closed.

For the cover I added 1/2" all round to the measurements and an extra 2" to the length of one piece. This extra bit gets folded over first, then the two bits sewed together along the other three sides (so there is a little flap on the right side when you turn it inside out).

The inner bag now fits nicely inside the outer, and the flap can be flipped over to hold it secure (you can't see it on this photo as it's on the other side).

We have enough room in our flat to roll out a yoga mat so I practice at home fairly regularly and it is really nice to have a nice cool, silky heavy eye pillow to aid rest at the end of practice. It helps encourage me to actually rest, rather than just jump up and make a slice of toast or watch TV. Nice.

And what do you think of the new title banner btw??? I'm experimenting...

Bank Holiday Weekend Projects

I keep seeing things I want to make, and as there's a three-day weekend right ahead it's perfect timing for a small project or two!

First, it was this funky little bracelet from Scavenging which brought a smile to my face. I like the idea of turning a credit card into jewellery, it just appeals. And it looks pretty smart too. I don't own a drill, but next time one of my cards expires I'll be looking into it.

Then, these cute patterns caught my eye over at Heart of Light. I particularly like the tunic-style one - can see it being the kind of dress you wear all summer.

However, as I've found out with my first slightly-too-ambitious sewing project I probably ought to start with something a little simpler. Which was why I was pleased to come across a step-by-step guide - with photos! (how can I possibly go wrong with this?!) to a simple circle skirt on Burda style.

And finally, I tried Lara bars for the first time recently. Pretty good, I thought - tasty, filling, but not too much so, not too sweet, nice simple list of ingredients. BUT, super expensive for a small snack. So, I started musing on how one would recreate one. The aforementioned simple list of ingredients seemed to predispose the snack to guestimated copying.

Luckily, others had trodden the same thought process before me. Delighted to find out the always-wonderful Clotilde of Chocolate and Zucchini, and the new-to-me Enlightened Cooking, had already done the experimenting part and come up with some recipes. Chocolate and Zucchini's here and Enlightened Cooking's here. I am definitely definitely going to be stocking up on bulk fruit and nuts and trying these out for next week's lunchboxes. Yum!

Happy (long) weekend to you all!

Photos: bracelet from Scavenging; pattern from Simplicity; skirt from Burda Style; bars from Enlightened Cooking

sewing project one

So it was a sunny day a few weeks back, and I was walking round Chalk farm and stumbled across a sewing shop. A brief browse and friendly chat with the proprietess later and I emerged with a paper pattern and a plan. Only chink in the plan - no sewing machine.

I'd noticed years ago a little shop selling used and new sewing machines, just down the road in Camden. So, fired up with the plan, I hopped on the tube and lo! the shop was still there so I entered and had a little chat about sewing machines.

I almost purchased a second hand toyota, a bulky new looking thing. And then I saw this in the window - a similar model to the machine my Mum got for her 21st birthday which is still running perfectly today.

I asked after it, and the helpful sewing machine shop man told me elna was like the rolls royce of sewing machines. Swiss made, and very reliable. I fell in love. I bought it!

The shop, by the way, was still run by the son of the man who established it, way back in 1936. It was lovely and cosy and they were happy to stay open half an hour after closing time to give me a demo and to find all the pieces and chat about the shop. A truly lovely shopping experience.

Anyway, I got home and I looked at the pattern and it was like trying to read Arabic, so I put it away again and waited until the weekend before last, when I was heading home.

My mum isn't a prolific seamstress but she made her own lime green suit to wear to her first interview, she made all our ballet costumes when we were little, and I remember her in home-sewn clothkits clothes back in the 80s. She knows what she's doing...

And she has this fine sewing stash!

I cut my pattern out of newspaper in case it went wrong, and because I thought if I cut it out I wouldn't be able to use it again. Not sure why I thought this, now I think about it a little more rationally, but there we go. It was quite a lot of work and I started to get disheartened. It had looked like a simple pattern to me and I'd had this lovely idea in my head that I'd just 'whip it up' in an afternoon....

Fabric cut, the sewing began, as did the arguments. I enlisted help, then stroppily refused it as the logics of the pattern frustratingly eluded me. I tried my hardest to be patient, but it is not something I am skilled at when it comes to making things - I kind of want to Just Get Going!

But I was a good girl, and I did lots of pressing of seams, and pressing of this and that (you can see here though where I neglected to cover up my gathering stitches - oops!)

Two days, and a lot of wonky sewing later....

...I finally ended up with something (almost!) ready to wear. So, it still needs a zip, and the bodice doesn't sit quite right. I also can't decide whether to make it a short dress or a long top (it's shown folded under here). I have however, kind of suceeded! Woo!

But now I realise what I thought was a simple pattern really wasn't that simple, and think I need to start off a little easier, really build up the basics.

So, if anyone has any recommendations for good sites with free basic patterns on, good books which will be a reference easy enough to understand for a complete novice, please pass my way!...

finished! the crocheted scarf

I decided this year to try really hard to make handmade gifts for most of my friends and family's birthdays. I've tried in the past and never really got the planning thing down, starting projects two weeks before a big date and abandoing them eight months later...



Anyway, this was the first project - a crocheted scarf for my mum, following a pattern in one of the Rowan catalogues and made with Rowan's kidsilk haze, which I did vow never to use again as it's so fiddly, but it does make nice and delicate yet snuggly things.



I only just learned crochet, and find it really addictive, even more so than knitting. There's a very comforting rhythm about needlecrafts. I think it's like a heartbeat.



I was pretty pleased with the final outcome. It's a tiny bit doily-esque, but not so much when you scrunch it all up. Also, fitting that my first crochet project goes to my mum, who was the one to teach me, last Christmas or whenever. I just hope she does get some use out of it!



Here's some pics of me modelling it:

a cushion cover

I'll tell you about the cushion cover I made a couple of weeks back. Not because it's an exemplar cushion cover - it certainly isn't! - but just because it makes me kind of pleased to see it each day.

I went to Bangladesh a month or so ago, to visit a friend, L, who works out there. (And I loved it, beautiful green and crazy country.)

Anyway, whilst I was there, L had a dress dropped off by Mr Ali the dressmaker. You pay for the fabric and the labour, so the offcuts of fabric get dropped off too as part of the parcel, and L offered the shiny gold and red silk leftovers to me (god I wish people in London would dress as brightly as they do in Bangladesh; it would cheer things up so much!).

Previously I'd been using a cushion cover which my older sister K had made in a school textiles class, back in about 1993. Now, whilst this was obviously a superb example of scatter dye and machine-sewed patchwork, I must admit to a hankering to replace it. Still, I really couldn't bring myself to spend money on a new cushion cover when this one did the job perfectly well.

But with my shiny silk being just about the perfect size, it seemed time to indulge in a little house vanity and set off on an afternoon craft project.





I cut out a square and folded it in half to make a rectangle, which I pinned in to a smaller square, big enough to fit the cushion (double strength as it was really quite thin. This helped with edges as well.)



Not owning a sewing machine, I took up needle and thread and did my neatest backstitch all the way round two of the open edges.






I turned it inside out, and magically enough, it looked like a cushion cover!








At the moment I just tuck the open edge in like this, though I'm going to scout around for a spare button to fix in the middle.



And here it is in all its glory.

PS - fear not, the old cushion cover wasn't just chucked in the bin. It's in the fabric box, where it can be back-up lest the silky one fails, or from where it may be taken to be used in another craft project or as a cleaning cloth.

PPS - I was yarn shopping in Liberty the other day and happened across these super cushions whilst waiting for the lift - they don't have a picture on their website but they had an embroidered cityscape of the city of London on. And I was thinking, 'I could do that', which is probably nonsense as I've never really embroidered, not since 4th year juniors when Mrs Allen let us sew pictures of Victorian houses whilst she read the afternoon story, but still, it's another idea I'll file under possible projects I think...