Unwisely small patchwork

First, let me show off my reupholstered stool. Before on the left in all its orange glory, after on the right, now pale turquoise to match the decor.

The wood has had four coats of a dark-coloured wax. It’s nothing like as dark as the mahogany furniture in that room, or the varnish that was on it before, but I chickened out of applying a stain in case I didn’t like the resulting colour and couldn’t remove it.

First ever upholstery job completed, I’m seriously considering tackling the early 20th Century chair behind it in the photos, which has a pincushion seat as well as an upholstered back panel. But I haven’t even checked whether there’s enough of the bargain velvet left yet, I didn’t realise at first that the back panel has to be double sided because you see it from behind the chair as well as in front. I’ve borrowed a book on traditional upholstery from the library and I’m studying it while I decide what to do.

Mini patchwork

While working on the stool I noticed that my pincushion has seen better days. I must have made it 15-20 years ago and it’s getting very threadbare. Time for a replacement.

I Googled “pincushion projects” and flicked through the photos until my eye fell on a patchwork one called Granny’s Pins.  It’s made of small squares – how hard could that be? When I was making face masks for local care homes and domiciliary care providers in 2020 I kept a few of the resulting small scraps of cotton fabric, the ones that were so pretty I couldn’t bear to throw them away. The squares needed for this pincushion are only 1½”x1½”, small enough to be able to cut several from even tiny pieces of fabric.

Of course, what I failed to consider in my haste to make a pretty-but-thrifty pincushion was, the smaller the patchwork pieces, the more accurately they need to be cut and stitched. A 3mm (1/8”) error in the seam joining two large pieces isn’t going to be nearly as obvious as when the finished size of each piece is meant to be a 1” square. But being an inexperienced patchworker, this didn’t occur to me until I compared squares I’d cut from different fabrics and found they were by no means all exactly the same size.

I was put off patchwork as a child by being made to do traditional English hexagonal patchwork at school. Each fabric hexagon first had to have its 6 seam allowances folded over the edges of a smaller paper hexagon, and tacked in place through the paper. Then the pieces were laboriously assembled by slip-stitching the edges together by hand, before removing the tacking and the paper hexagons at the end and stitching the whole thing onto a backing. The biggest thing I ever made was a teapot stand and I hated the whole fiddly, long-winded process.

It wasn’t until I was in my 30s that I discovered that patchwork doesn’t have to be like that. As is my wont, I leapt in with both feet and pieced together a large quilt as my first machine-made patchwork project. Piecing it was fine, but I hadn’t thought about how I was going to quilt it. That was nearly 30 years ago and I still haven’t finished it. It was going to be a lockdown project but I never got around to it. One of these days …

With the pincushion I’ve gone to the opposite extreme – too small to be sensible rather than too big. But at least it doesn’t have to be quilted.

Patchwork foot and ruler

To make this mini-patchwork I used two things that I’ve had for years and never before had the need for. Firstly, this quilter’s ruler that I bought in the much-missed Bonds haberdashery on a whim. I knew that they were normally quite expensive so I snapped this one up when I saw it, I think it cost me £1. It’s not the most sophisticated quilting ruler, but it’s got a ¼” grid marked on it, which is all you really need. Once I’d remembered that I had it somewhere, and had then found it and put it to use with a cutting mat and roller cutter, my 1½” squares were a lot more accurate.

The second item is a ¼” patchwork foot for my sewing machine. As I started to use it, I gradually realised how all the marks on it can be used to stitch perfect ¼” seams that start and stop in the right places. It makes piecing patchwork quite pleasurable.

It seems that patchwork has not yet gone metric, which is fine by me. I usually sew in inches because the numbers are smaller and therefore easier to remember.

My pincushion is now stuffed and ready for use. In fact, I made a second one to use up all the extra squares I ended up with. I’ve filled them with ground walnut shells, which are apparently ideal for pincushions because they are just gritty enough to keep the pins clean and also ever so slightly lubricating, which prevents rust. We have an abundance of them because my dear husband bought a few kilos to use for sandblasting – if you can call it sandblasting when it doesn’t involve sand. Walnut shells are less aggressive than sand or emery, and were supposed to get our stainless steel saucepans clean without damaging the polished finish. They didn’t, the pans are as black as ever on the outside after 40 years of use. We gave some of the ground shells to a friend to use as stuffing for a draught excluder – they are reassuringly heavy – but there are still plenty left for pincushions.

Accidental upholstery

Last week a friend said she was going to drive over to Scraptastic, the scrap store in Shipley, to buy some craft packs for a grandchild’s birthday party, and did I want to come? I jumped at the chance.

Scraptastic charges £2 for a basketful of stuff, all of which has been acquired as waste from manufacturers, retailers and occasionally members of the public. It’s a small shop with the waste materials displayed on shelves, each of which has a number on it to denote how many of that item can be put into your basket. But there are also individually priced items which are outside of the basket system. On this visit I didn’t find anything much that interested me on the shelves, mainly because it’s not long since I stocked up at another scrap store at Sunny Bank Mills with similar stuff. So I had a rummage through the individually priced bins while my friend was choosing which of the kids’ craft packs to buy.

In a bin of folded-up furnishing fabric remnants my eye fell on some beautiful pale turquoise velvet, because I recognised the colour as being the same as the wallpaper and soft furnishings in our spare bedroom. There’s a dressing table stool in that room that was in my childhood bedroom and was recovered in orange velvet by my mother some 30 years ago.

The orange is completely the wrong colour for the room it’s now in and I’ve long had the intention to recover it some day. Our dear departed cat used to sneak into that bedroom and curl up in velvety softness on the stool, which meant there were pulls in the pile and the cover really should have been replaced long ago.

I pulled out the bundle of fabric and looked for its price. The price tag was blank but others in the same bin were priced at £2. I asked a shop assistant if it was also £2 and she said no, it was in the wrong bin. My heart sank a little as I waited for her to tell me that it was actually much more expensive, but to my delight she said it should have been in the 50p bin! Needless to say, I bought it.

When I got it home and opened it out I saw that my 50p had bought 1.4 metres of a heavy, quality velvet. There is enough not only for the stool, but also for two antique chairs in the spare bedroom that were also upholstered by my mother many years ago, this time in traditional tapestry fabric which is very faded.

Now, although my late mother learned upholstery at evening classes for several years, I’d already left home by that time and she never had the opportunity to pass her upholstery skills on to me. I am an upholstery novice, bar a one-day course in loose covers I once attended. But the dressing table stool has a drop-in seat and my mother always said that was the easiest type of seat to recover, so how hard could it be? And when I’d only spent 50p on the fabric, I didn’t have much to lose if my unplanned, accidental foray into upholstery went horribly wrong.

A few days ago, having gently washed the bargain fabric because I found footprints on the back of it, I set to work stripping off the old cover. I carefully removed all the tacks without damaging them, because I don’t have any others and I planned to reuse them.

Underneath the outer cover I found a linen cover cloth over foam. My mother always used traditional upholstery techniques on her antique furniture, but she used foam on mass-produced modern furniture like this 1960s stool. The foam looked in good condition, as did the white linen cover cloth on the top and the black linen one underneath, but I gave both fabrics a wash.

I used a YouTube video posted by J A Milton as my guidance, Traditional Drop In Seat Part 3. However, I mostly used staples to attach the velvet, with just a few tacks at the corners. And I hand stitched the corners on the top side because they were sewn before, and also stitched on the underside cover cloth again instead of tacking it down into the frame like in the video.

For the sewing I needed to use a curved needle, which fortunately I already had because I use them for bike pannier repairs.

I’ve also stripped the orangey coloured varnish from the stool, a time-consuming job even with a powered sander because of all the curves. The antique furniture in the bedroom is much darker and my original plan was to stain the stool to match, but now I’m not so sure. The pale, bare wood looks quite good with the pale turquoise fabric. I’ve got some dark wax polish which I might use instead, at least that should be removable if I decide it’s a mistake.

Finished baby hoodie

I’ve finished the baby jacket that’s destined for a charity sale.

I’m not at all sorry to have finished with this giant cone of yarn which was horrible to knit. I’ve passed it on to another member of my knitting group, but before doing so I wound off enough yarn to finish the hood, and of course I kept back far too much. I shall have to knit a hat with what’s left.

Mrs Peacock Yarns

Finishing one knitting project makes room for the next one. I’ve been contemplating what to do with this rather lovely skein of hand-dyed sock yarn sent to me by family in New Zealand. It’s self-striping, and while a stripy pair of socks is a definite possibility, I feel the need to explore a few other options before I dive in. After all, people don’t really notice socks, and this beautiful yarn deserves to be seen.

Looking at other knitters’ projects on Ravelry, the stripes in this colourway will be quite narrow. I thought of knitting a hat instead, which will result in even narrower stripes. With 100g of 4-ply there should be plenty for a fold-up at the bottom to give a double layer over the ears.

A self-striping yarn with fairly short colour changes, like this one, might be suitable for some sort of slipped stitch pattern. A slipped stitch in one colour will show up well in a round of the other colour. I’ve always wanted to try two-colour slipped stitch single cables, where the colour changes every round. In the rounds of the background colour some stitches from the previous round are slipped, then those stitches are worked as travelling 1-stitch cables in the next, foreground-colour round. The effect is of delicate cables in the foreground colour moving across a background of narrow (1-round) stripes of both colours.

To start the design process I’ve worked the beginning of a hat using the small amounts of pale green and pale blue acrylic left over from all the sideways baby hats I knitted recently. I’ve almost run out of yarn and will have to start again with different yarns that will go further. The idea is that the two cables in each segment of the hat will come together and cross before widening again and crossing over the cables from the adjacent segments once the crown increases have been completed. Then I’ll have to find something interesting for them to do for the rest of the hat.

A summery bottle bag

We were invited to dinner one evening last week and I scratched my head as to what we might take by way of a small present, in addition to the usual flowers, wine or chocolates. We’d already settled on a bottle of wine, and it occurred to me that it might be nice to make a pretty gift bag for it that could be re-used.

I found a piece of embroidered linen. It was probably intended for summer curtains, but it looked like it would make an equally summery bag for a bottle of wine. I ran it up quickly with overlocked seams and a generous hem at the top opening with a drawcord. Too late, I realised that it would have been a lot easier making the buttonholes for the drawcord when the fabric was still flat, but I somehow managed to get one side of the tube under the foot of my sewing machine and stitch the buttonholes without catching in any fabric from the opposite side.

I’m pleased with the result, and it went down well with the recipients. The drawcord is of the double-wrap, continuous loop variety, which means it’s sufficiently secure to use as a handle to carry a bottle to a picnic or just into the garden. But as well as being practical, the bag is pretty enough to be used to serve the wine from, perhaps in a blind tasting.

More ‘giant cone’ knitting

I’ve finished the two-colour segmented hat, which will be the last of this baby size.

I don’t like it as much as the delineated-segment variety I made before. And I messed up the grafted join (at 10 o’clock in the photo) because the first rows worked on the provisionally cast-on stitches were short rows, meaning that I had to put ‘double stitches’ (from the German Short Rows) back onto a needle from waste yarn and that was tricky.

When I get chance I’ll work up a pattern for larger sizes, up to large adult.

With the garter stitch hats off my needles, I’ve started another baby hoodie. This is using the giant ball of pink/white/peach bouclé yarn that’s been donated to my knitting group for charity projects. It’s thicker than the DK that the Bernat pattern (Show Your Stripes) is written for, which means I’ve had to adapt it. Fortunately it contains no shaping, apart from a few increases in the hood, which makes the job easy.

Cuff-to-cuff: sleeve on the left, front at the top, back at the bottom

A crocheted baby blanket

I’ve finished my first project using the giant cone of bouclé peach/white/pink yarn, a small baby blanket.

I hated crocheting it, I couldn’t see where I was meant to be inserting my hook amongst all the fluffiness, and when I did force my hook through the unyielding mess it generally split the yarn. The shell pattern I’d unwisely chosen (following Naztazia’s Large Shell Stitch instructions) is of the variety where the hook often has to be inserted into a stitch rather than into a chain loop, which would have been much easier. Nothing wrong with the pattern, just my choice of yarn for it. Definitely not one of my better pieces of work, but maybe someone will take pity on it and buy it from my friend’s charity stall.

I’ll knit with this yarn the next time, that might be better. And I’ll keep it simple with plain stocking stitch or garter stich, there’s no point in trying to do anything fancy in such a fluffy yarn. Maybe another cuff-to-cuff baby jacket like the one I’ve recently finished, again for a charity sale, once I’ve got my current project off the needles.

The current project is a new version of the sideways baby hats I’ve been knitting. I don’t have enough of the bottle green, lime green or pale blue yarns left to make another that is predominantly one colour with the segments delineated in a contrast. Instead, I’m aiming to make one with the 6 segments alternating between the two greens, but I’m not too sure how to do it.

The delineated version has the first and last full-length rows of each segment in the contrasting colour, but that won’t work for segments that are wholly in different colours.

I’m trying to deal with that by starting with a short row instead of a full one. I won’t know whether it has worked until I’ve knitted all 6 segments and am ready to graft them together.

Free motion appliqué

I first saw examples of free motion appliqué in a café that had hand-made items for sale, quite a few years ago now. I borrowed a book from the library, Poppy Treffry’s “Freehand Machine Embroidery”, and gave it a go. It was a disaster, I kept breaking needles when I tried the free motion technique and never got as far as starting a project.

Then, a year or two later, I had a go at free motion quilting on the Brother stand at the Harrogate Knitting and Stitching Show. That was more successful, and I put it down to the fact that I was using a dedicated quilting machine with all the right kit and a prepared sandwich of fabric and wadding layers. When I tried to replicate the set-up at home, on my ordinary sewing machine, I broke a load more needles and gave up.

Last week I was idly watching YouTube videos on sewing projects, as you do, and up came one on free motion machine embroidery. But instead of using a thick padded sandwich of fabric to practise free-motion movements on, the tutor was using a single layer of fabric stretched very tightly in an embroidery ring. I tried it and – success! My movements weren’t very fluid or even, but I was able to stitch without breaking a single needle.

I don’t have any particular desire to quilt at present, but I did still fancy making something that involved free motion appliqué. I traced a line drawing of a VW Beetle off my laptop screen and transferred it to a piece of 100% cotton curtain lining by holding it up to a window and tracing again, using a washable felt-tip pen. Then I fitted it into the embroidery hoop and free-motion stitched over the lines before washing the ink away. This was the result.

I missed a bit down at bottom left, but I was quite happy. With hindsight, or more experience, I wouldn’t have chosen a design that has closed loops which aren’t joined to anything else, like the tyres and the windows, because that means the thread has to be secured neatly and cut several times.

The next step was to cut out a car shape, windows and wheels from scraps of fabric, trace the stitching lines onto them and stick them onto another piece of curtain lining using bonding powder.

Again, I was fairly happy with the result – no broken needles.

But the lines looked wobbly and amateurish. I noticed that most of the free motion appliqué examples I was looking at online used black thread, whereas I’d chosen yellow to tone with the car fabrics. After washing out the red ink I decided to go over my yellow stitching with black.

Immediately it looked better.

My stitching was no more accurate, but having it in black made it look more deliberate, like it was meant to be a bit wonky and scribble-ish. I felt I was ready to give it a try for real. I got out some coral-coloured cotton to use as the background fabric and chose the window and wheel colours more carefully than I’d done for my test pieces. I traced the stitching lines onto the fabric using felt-tip colours close in tone to the fabrics, thinking that it might not be necessary to wash them out afterwards. After cutting them out I applied PVA carefully to the cut edges with a small paintbrush to stop them fraying. Then I bonded the appliqué pieces and stitched in black, going over each line several times.

I’ve missed a bit at the rear of the car again, but because the line is in green on the green printed fabric, it’s not obvious. I made the sample up into a zipped pouch with a lining and wadding between the fabric layers. Now I’m wondering what else I can make with appliquéd decoration on it.

I’m so pleased that I’ve finally got the hang of this technique, and with no special materials or tools, just the darning foot that came with my sewing machine, an old embroidery hoop, kids’ felt-tip pens, PVA glue and bonding powder. If you don’t have any bonding powder (the stuff you sprinkle on and then fuse with a hot iron to stick fabric to fabric) or Bondaweb-type sheet material, you probably have some fusible hemming tape you could use for small appliqué designs.

I think – maybe – the reason I didn’t have any success in the past with quilt-like fabric sandwiches was that my darning foot is not the spring loaded type. But who knows? Now I’ve found what works for me I shall stick with it.