Liberty boxes

You know sometimes the more you make the more fired up you get?  I think I'm going through a bit of that at the moment.  It's fun while it lasts!

Anyway, I was looking at the crazy patchwork scrap fabric I showed how to make yesterday and thought how lovely it might look as a box, so I covered a sturdy chocolate box with pink tissue paper, and glued a panel to the top.  I used the same glue (white glue, which dries clear) to 'varnish' the whole box.

Then, as I was having a good time and putting off doing some hoovering I made another little box.  This one uses one of my Liberty origami brooches to decorate the lid and is going to contain a Christmas present.

Then I was quite pleased and had to take lots of pretentious photographs!

How to store and use really tiny scraps, and another way to make crazy patchwork

Over the last few months I have sewn a few projects using Liberty and was left with some very small scraps, none much over an inch at the widest, and some only a cm or so in width, so impossible to seam.

If you are like me and can't bear to throw this kind of thing away one way of using it up is to transform your tub of tangled bits into one piece of fabric which can be used in various projects.  You can do this using a method of crazy patchwork.

It is different to the 'spiral method' I used to make panels for my bags, and uses a foundation cloth, so as well as your scraps you need some cloth for your foundation (eg fine cotton sheeting), some Pellon/ Bondaweb/ WonderUnder, and threads.

Cut a piece of Bondaweb the same size as your foundation fabric, place your Bondaweb on your fabric rough (glue) side down, iron and then remove the backing paper to leave a layer of glue on your foundation fabric.  (Hang on to the backing paper for the moment.)

Now start to lay out your scraps on your foundation fabric, butting them up together or overlapping them just a bit if necessary.  You won't have to worry about seams and you don't have to lay them out in any particular order - you can be quite relaxed about it; it's a bit like crazy paving.  Just don't leave any gaps.

When you have covered your backing fabric with scraps you can use the piece of paper you peeled away (obviously now glueless) to protect your iron from any stray glue round the edges while you bond the scraps to the backing fabric.  I keep these bits of paper in my work tub - they come in handy.

You'll end up with this.

Now go over all the overlapped or butting edges with a small zigzag stitch or blanket stitch or whatever you fancy - again, you can be quite relaxed about it, crossing over pieces and reversing over your own stitching to follow another edge unless you are a perfectionist which I'm generally not.  You might see some lines of stitching below where I have crossed a piece of fabric and then kept going just in order to avoid having to lift the needle to stop and start another line.

Now you have your lovely, scrappy fabric which you can treat like any other.   First of all it is easier to keep in the cupboard without getting in a mess.  Then you can cut selectively from it and use pieces for applique - it is easy to cut as it is stabilised by the backing.  Or you can use larger pieces to make pouches or pincushions.  Of course you can also join panels together for bigger projects.

I used some of mine this week to make a table mat just for me.  It was inspired by Larisa's mats, which in turn were inspired by the Komebukuro bags and pouch I made.  I really like that about blogging!

[If you don't have Bondaweb but happen to have a can of spray baste you can spray your foundation fabric and fix your scraps to it that way - omit the ironing!]

How to make a Komebukuro Bag - Part 1 Liberty Patchwork exteriors

I have got round to sorting the process photos I took when making my Komebukuro bags (here and here) and thought I would post a bit of a how-to in case anyone was curious. [edited to add links, sorry!]

These bags (originally made to contain rice) are quilted so they have a bit of structure to them, and being square and flat bottomed sit nicely on the floor or on a shelf when full.  I made the larger one above - great for knitting wools or a crochet project perhaps - and the smaller one below which could happily contain a stack of fat quarters.

The construction of the bag is quite straightforward, and you could make up the exterior in any way you like and to any size you want so I don't include measurements but just show how I constructed my two versions, with instructions for assembling the bag in another post.   If anything is unclear, or if you find it difficult to work out your own measurements, please do let me know.

East Meets West - Liberty Komebukuro Bag

Over the last couple of posts I've shared pics of a work in progress.  This project started a while back when Ali offered some of her beautiful Liberty fabric to anyone who would like to try out a particular idea, and I wrote asking for a Maxi Scrap Pack.  I'd been thinking for a while about a bag I wanted to make, and here it is!  (Sorry for the picture heavy post.)

My bag was inspired by an interest in Japanese textiles and embroidery (a shout-out to Cynthia who fuelled this interest with her fascinating posts from Japan).

In particular I'm interested in boro and its relationship to English crazy patchwork in the way they both aim to use scraps of fabric to make a larger piece of usable cloth.   Boro fabrics are often stitched using a large sashiko running stitch and English crazy patchwork is often embellished using a variety of decorative stitches.

I thought it would be fun to unite two cultures in a Japanese style komebukuro bag (traditionally used to carry rice) made using English crazy patchwork panels made of Liberty tana lawn.

I used some of the stitches on my new sewing machine to embellish the crazy patchwork, and running stitches in different shades of Perle 8 to quilt the 'sashing' which was made with Essex Yarn Dyed Linen.  Each side has a different colour of quilting (thanks commenters on my last post:-)

It has a cotton lining made using some Dorothy from the Liberty Bloomsbury range, which I was lucky to get in my Stitch Gathering goodie bag.

I didn't want to use it all, so I supplemented part of it with some plain cotton at the bottom.

The tabs are made of red grosgrain ribbon.

A piece of yellow ribbon pulls the tabs together.

I had difficulty photographing it in a way that does it justice and wish I had finished it at the weekend where the jewel-like colours of the Liberty would have looked lovely in this setting!

Thanks to my local B&B for the use of their garden instead:-)  Passers by on their way to the bus stop must have wondered what the idiot lying on the patio was doing.

I'm really happy with this bag and I think the Liberty goes beautifully with linen but it also teams up well with Klona, or Oakshott and I'm in the middle of making two smaller bags pairing it with different fabrics.

You'll find a tutorial for one way of making a komebukuro bag on the Oakshott website but the process I used was different and I'll post about it, and another alternative method, soon.

Thank you Ali, for the luxury of an opportunity to experiment!

New Machine

I thought I'd tell you a bit more about my new machine.  It's a JL (John Lewis) 330 - essentially a Janome and takes Janome parts.  As an exercise in getting to know know it I've finished off the crazy patchwork piece I started at the Stitch Gathering. I am now quite smitten with this technique as well as the new machine.

Apart from the price, which was in the right bracket, it has a few features I was especially looking for.  One is the ability to press a button and start or end sewing with the needle in the up or down position - no more cranking the wheel, and easy pivoting turning when changing direction on a corner.  It also has an automatic thread lock button, so you can sew a few stitches when starting or ending a line, which will save me a huge amount of faffing around pulling through threads and tieing them off.  If you set the thread lock button when using a decorative stitch the machine waits until it has completed a stitch before tying off - clever.  Add to this a sensitive food pedal which allows you to crawl along almost stitch by stitch, and a speed over-ride dial which means you can set the top speed you want to go at.  Perfect.

It has a bewildering array of button holes which I am unlikely to ever use, but I like the blanket stitch for applique.  I also love the fact that the bobbin is located under a clear hatch so you can see how full it is.

Yes, you will have to excuse the laundry drying in the background.

I also tried out some of the decorative stitches - you can see here a scallop, feather, and bobble (can't remember its name:-)) stitch and you can just make out in the smaller cream triangle that there are some little star stitches.  These can be sewed in a row, but using auto thread lock meant I was able to do one at a time and use it as a tying stitch.

I tried a bit of quarter inch quilting on the cream silk, and on the slippery wine-coloured lining fabric and it sews a lovely line - this might sound odd, but it was a revelation to me because my old sewing machine used to throw in the odd wobbly stitch, I don't know why.

So anyway, I have tested it, and have finished something!  Weyhey! I really loved making this, though hand-stitching any of it, as we did at the Gathering, doesn't work for me as I seem to be incapable of stitching in a straight line without introducing puckers.  I would probably use a foundation cloth too, especially with a fine fabric like Liberty, and an all Liberty crazy patchwork project is what I'm on to next.