A Happy couple of new friends for a new baby

With the recent wonderful news of my friends brand new baby, I really wanted to make something for her.

Over the weekend I stitched up a couple of bright and patterny little friends who are now on their way to baby, who I hope will love them forever.

These are one of my favourites to make for charity and friends. The Hector the alien type giraffes from the Softies book that I adore!

Softies Penguin books.

A Stitched Message

Over the past couple of weeks I started sewing something for someone who was going through a bit of a tough time health wise. I thought greeting cards or flowers were boring, and I wanted to make something while we were waiting to hear about test results and surgery to keep my hands busy and my mind off the waiting! I wasn't able to do a whole lot of sewing, just a bit here and there mainly when I couldn't concentrate on study.
I didn't really know what I was going to make. I thought maybe I'd make a fabric card, or a postcard at first, but then it evolved.
I pulled various bits of scrap fabric out that I had kept from other projects because of the floral patterns. I always figured the flowers would be useful as appliques or even as inspiration for embroidery one day.
So I fiddled around cutting out the various flowers in all sorts of combinations then ironed them onto some gingham using the fusible webbing stuff.

I thought ok, I have a roll of the batting in my cupboard so I sandwiched it between two pieces of yellow gingham and I pulled out the darning foot for the machine, dropped the feed-dog and stitched around and around the flowers using red and yellow, orange, blue and pink threads. I really like how the in-between bits puffed up between the rows of stitch.
I then decided to write a message on a second piece of gingham, batting and gingham sandwiched.
At this stage I still wasn't sure if I was making a fabric card!
I hand wrote the message using the fabric pen and then used the same coloured threads from the flower side to stitch over the words and a fabric heart.
Then came a binding nightmare involving me, an iron and the #$%^& binding tool that didn't work!...and eventually just became my scorched fingers folding, holding ironing.

I stitched the binding all the way around the front, flowered panel first, then sandwiched the back panel on, realising it looked like an oven mitt, I decided it was now going to be a pillow instead!

I stitched almost all the way around the back of the binding leaving it attached to the machine with the needle down, while I quickly filled the inside with stuffing, then continued the stitch along the binding.

I quickly snapped these pics with my phone before it went off to deliver it's message and hopefully cheer someone's day.

Missing Photos

OK, so recently the service storing all my photos has disappeared forever, so I know there are images missing all over the place on the blog.
I'm attempting to fix them up. Hopefully it'll look better soon.
It's my fault I had plenty of warning to move them over, I just missed a whole heap of images!! So some are working fine, some are missing. I'll go over old blog posts and add the pics back in but I can only do one or two at a time.

In other news, I'm really angry a UK sewing magazine subscription purchased til December (my christmas pressie the past few years) hasn't sent me the past 3 magazines, has gone bankrupt and been bought by another company, changed it's name and still I havent received a new mag!

I'd been planning to not renew the subscription again anyway because the magazine had turned to absolute rubbish, pages and pages and pages of advertising and very little interesting content.

I think i'll just buy books on Amazon rather than bother with magazine subscriptions in future.

I can't end on a good note, the past couple of weeks have just been awful. Uni work is out of control. Much bad news in our family in many ways effecting many people and nothing I can talk about. Just one of those periods of time you wish you'd never answered the phone and weren't told and could live in a blissful ignorance bubble instead.