Christmas goodies

Last week at the last meeting of patchwork and quilters at Drayton we made a Reindeer. Mine looks a little funny, not as good as the other ladies but it was still fun to make!

I also made some little tree ornaments in the form of snowmen and gingerbread men. I made four of each for the charity sale at sew simple this Saturday. Not long now until Christmas!

Grab and go project bag

I decided to use up some of the yarn I had been spinning. However, some of my earlier efforts were not very even so I decided to make a felted bag. I used a mixture of different sheep wool. These included Wensleydale, texel, whiteface woodland, Dorset horn and some unknown fleece that I learnt to spin with at Norfolk yarn. 

The pattern I used was Grab and go pattern from etsy. However, I used an 8mm crochet hook instead. It looked absolutely massive before I felted it! It was about 1 meter across!! I used about 500g of yarn that was about an Aran / chunky weight. This was much more than the pattern suggested as I used a larger hook and yarn. I felted it in the washing machine at 40 degrees on a short wash ( about 40 min), but I ended up washing it another two times before I was happy with the felting. I think it was because the bag was so large! After felting it was less than half the original size. The pattern states to use eyelets, however, I ended up taking them out.

Here are some images... 

Cushion cover with stripes and buttons

I wanted to use some alpaca fleece that was not good enough for spinning. So I thought I would fill a cushion with it. The cover is made from a piece of linen fabric that I got as an off cut from a upholstery shop. I used one of the many stitches on my new Pfaff quilt expression 4.2 sewing machine and added a few buttons from my rather large stash of buttons. I was very pleased with the overlock stitch on the pfaff, brilliant for finishing off the linen fabric that is so prone to fraying. I made a sleeve out of calico and stuffed it with alpaca fleece before i sewed it up by hand. I placed this inside the cover so that i could remove the cover for washing. Anyway enough of my rambling here it is....