A birthday present for my eldest daughter

As Sam loves a cup of tea, I thought that a tea cosy would be a great birthday present. This is a Jolly Red kit and has taken me quite a few months to complete. I still have to turn it into a cosy, of course.

We are off the The Cheap Shop, in Tiptree on Thursday where I will get some backing material, the appropriate sewing thread, some suitably coloured braid and some oven glove filler. Then I will have to hand sew it all together. I tried to machine sew it last time and it doesn't really work.

Here is the finished tapestry.

Next Project Completed

My youngest - Debbie - asked what I wanted for Xmas. I said a tapestry kit for a cushion, so we agreed that she would pick and pay for a tapestry and I would make it for her new flat.

She chose a 13 x 13" cushion that has a London Tourist content.

It has taken me since Christmas to complete this cushion - mainly because I find sewing a constant colour quite boring so I kept putting off those bits. However it is complete now - and also has a major new innovation for me in my sewing progress. As a 12 count (12 x 12 stitches to the square inch) there are 24,336 stitches in the completed cushion!

The major innovation is that, instead of machine sewing the edges and then leaving a gap for the filling - said gap to require hand stitching to close, I chose to install a zip! First off I bought a zip to fit but soon realised that the way forward was to use a 'continuous' zip; i.e. it comes on a roll and you buy it by the foot. I then worked out how to fit it and the following photos show the result.

I think that this has come out very neatly and am very pleased with the final result. I just hope that Debbie is just as pleased as I am.

Valerie has finally finished Winnie the Pooh

Valerie has been working on this for well over a year and has finally finished her marathon task.

It is very large and very colourful. It will make a great nursery floor covering.

We now need to trim it and iron binding on all the way around it will be ready for the floor somehwre.

Tea Cosy Finished

But not the way I thought.

It proved too difficult for me to sew up the cosy using the machine. I took it all apart to start again.

In the process, it turned out that I had cut the back pieces out incorrectly so I had to throw them away. This left me with not enough material so I went back to Franklins in Ipswich to get some more!

I decided that the only way to go was to hand sew because of the bulk of the braid getting in the way of the sewing machine. So, everything you see is hand sewn. It is finally finished. Not quite as tidy in the dark corners as I would wish but Valerie is very pleased with it, which is all that really matters to me. Oh,and Valerie didn't want a hanging loop if you wonder why that is missing!

First steps in the Cosy Make Up

Always start out with a stupid mistake. This wakes you up - or maybe you have to make two mistakes!

Firstly I cut out the reverse of the tapestry side. The straightening process didn't quite produce a perfectly square item but it really doesn't matter that much.  Except that I had the tapestry the wrong way round  when cutting out the reverse so the pieces only matched if the pattern side of the reverse was inside! Fortunately, I noticed that and then cut out the other two pieces and got all three correct. - Error 1. Then I pinned up the tapestry side of the cosy - and pinned it with the back of the tapestry against the front side of the backing. This would have resulted in the reverse side being on the outside - not good! Error 2. Here is the photo of that:

I have to correct that.

Here is the other side of the cosy - correctly pinned with the outer side to the inside. For the non-sewers amongst you, you sew it up in reverse on three sides and then turn it out - put the backing in - and then sew up the remaining side by hand.

 

Lastly, so that I can sew a correct shape for the non-tapestry side of the cosy, I needed a paper template of the exact size of the cosy itself (without the outer sewing edge. I did this by putting a sheet of paper under the tapestry side (picture up) and then went around the outline with a pin. This left a line of holes on the paper which I joined up and cut!

This now gives me a template to draw around. The line so produced with give me a sewing line.

Well here we go!

Tapestry Blocking works

Well, here is a before andafter. As you can see, the process has worked.

All I have to do now is to sew the thing up - gulp!

Tapestry Blocking

Blocking is the name for straightening out a tapestry. I have never tried this before so it will be interesting to see how it pans out.

Step 1. Dampen down the tapestry - Valerie is horrified that I just ran it under some warm water coming from the kitchen tap! I then dried off the excess carefully.
Step 2. Lay out a right angle on a board.
Step 3. Pin two sides to the right angle.
Step 4. Slowly tease - pull - the tapestry into shape and pin it as square as it will go.
Step 5. Repeat at daily intervals until it is in the right shape.

I am using some cable staples to pin this down because they how the material fine but have a loop to get hold of when you want to pull them out.

As you can see, it is already much straighter than it was. I think it will need another go on Sunday and it should be Ok then to start putting the cosy together.