The other day, I was sorting through my box of shame. The plastic bin where unfinished projects go to die. I found half of an oven mitt that I had apparently started, one mouth piece and the quilted fabric that was supposed to be the other half. So I decided to put it together.
Similar to my other mitts, it’s a sock puppet style, rather than a claw. I’m using it blue side out, with the cacti as the lining. However, I decided to make a loop at the yellow side too, since I recently had to ‘inside out’ one of my other mitts because I burnt the cotton off it. That one now has an improvised loop to get it on my hook. Adding an extra loop during the sewing together doesn’t take much extra thought and might be useful in the future.
I’m very happy with my new mitt. I keep misplacing the other two, so a third one should hopefully leave me even less likely to burn myself!
If you’re grumpy and you know it, wear this sweater.
In May 2020 with Covid still locking everything down, the local market stall that sells pre-cut lengths of fabric, decided to do some online auctions. That meant that they showed their fabrics in front of a camera and people could buy those from their website. So I took that opportunity to purchase some fabric. Now without being able to touch fabric, I’m apparently not very good at picking out things that I want to use. I think this is one of the first lengths that I’ve actually sewn up from that batch. Since I was in a fairly prickly mood at the time with corona and other stuff, this cactus fabric really spoke to me. However, when it arrived, it was not as thick as I expected it to be, so it took a while for me to decide on a project.
After the batwing top partial success, I wanted to try a batwing with sleeves that covered all of my arms. So I set out to find another pattern and settled on the one from Sew Different. When comparing the shapes, this Sew Different one was fair bit wider and with deeper ‘wings’ – it was also a size L so that wasn’t too surprising. I decided to adjust it a little so that it would 1. fit on my fabric and 2. wouldn’t be quite as wide. I basically scooped the wings up a little so that it was less exaggerated and made it narrower at the bottom. I could also get away with shortening the sleeves a little as I was doing bands anyway.
The fabric is not as thick and warm as I would normally like, but I thought that with the summer heating up, it would be good to have a thinner sweater. It went together smoothly and actually is quite nice to wear. I might end up with a few more items with similar shapes, either in fabric or in knit.
Little humans slowly grow up, and one I know had a birthday in January. As usual, I wanted to make a thing. I’d decided on a play mat of some sort, preferably with a road grid on it, so that cars could race along. After weeks of scouring the fabric shops online for a fabric that had good, wide roads on it, I decided that it was impossible. So I went back to one of the fabric shops I’ve frequented the last few months that sells coupons (shorter lengths of pre-cut fabrics that are generally leftovers) because I’d been in love with a cactus printed linen for the longest time. There were some other fabrics that really tickled my fancy. A geometric pattern on some ochre cotton, smaller cacti on ochre, dinosaurs with umbrellas etc. (I may have developed an ochre obsession at one point).
The playmat was going to have both of the cactus prints, one for the ‘front’ and one for the ‘back’. There was also some dark blue cotton that I bought for the drawstring casing. You see, I found this Toy Bag & Play Mat tutorial by Fabric Mill, which I decided to almost entirely disregard, but I liked the standing edge on the drawstring casing a lot. I did want a contrasting one so that it was clear where the edge was.
Once the fabrics arrived in my house and were laundered, I set out to make a play mat/bag. I cut out the largest circle possible from both of the fabrics. Then layered them with some quilt batting and sewed lines every 10 cm in a grid pattern to keep the fabrics together. This was quite the ordeal but I did manage to make the entire thing in a day, so I guess it wasn’t too awful. After that, it was trimmed to size, the edge sewn and zigzagged down. Then the casing was added, this was the most annoying part of the entire project. I cut it 7.5 cm wide as per the instructions, which was not wide enough for my version because my seam allowance was larger. So I ended up cutting more strips and attaching them, having to unpick at least 8 sections because I sewed over folds in the first strip. Very frustrating. Once it was finally all attached correctly, it was sewed down and then the edge was closed. I didn’t have a cord, but the last bit of the project: ‘adding a cord and sewing a closure’ was only a few minute job so I’m counting it as a one day project.
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