Poorly Baby = not much crafting going on October 3, 2009

Poor old Esme is ill.

We’re all had bouts of what I think is piggy flu (the SWINE-POCALYPSE strikes again) over the last fortnight and Esme has been snuffling like a good’un for most of that time.

When we popped into All the Fun of the Fair yesterday, I noticed she was looking a little peaky. Picked her up for a cuddle and, right in the middle of our chat with Melody about pricing, she hurled all over me. It was pretty spectacular. She looked like she was choking on it and everything.

Cleaned her up, took her home, checked her temp which was up up UP. Dosed her up with paracetamol (ahhh, baby crack) and she rested on and off all evening, mostly in my lap. Whimpered and howled anytime I tried to move.

About half past midnight I decided to check her temp again as the waves of heat coming off her were getting more than a little volcanic. Sure enough her fever was up to just over 40 degrees celsius.  Had to wake Jake and Orlaith up and take an exotic family trip for four to the hospital.

Luckily she hasn’t got any sign of a secondary infection ( my Dad was hinting about pneumonia. Yikes) and they said just to dose her up with paracetamol and try and keep her temperature down. We got home about 3am. Both the girls were really wound up and excited by the whole thing so it took ages to get them to sleep.

And the little toad is fine today. She’s still running a fair old temperature but she’s busy running and climbing around the house, beating up her sister and stealing all my craft stuff. She’s currently scaling the sofa with a glint in her eyes that tells me she’s after my box of pins – safely (hah) tucked away at the back of my craft table.

So little to no actual crafting going on round here today. But you know what, that’s quite all right :->

Mixed Bag September 26, 2009

Today was a real mixture of things. Some sad family stuff that I won’t go into here and some awesome family stuff, namely a fabulous party at Jake’s cousin’s house for her 21st. (Happy Birthday again Kay, if you’re reading this!)

And randomly, Jake’s cousins happen to be friends with the very lovely RebaJane who makes the most incredibly intricate jewellery, from crocheted and knitted wire. Just stunning.

We hadn’t met before but we had a lovely chat about all things crafty and she showed me the book that she’s just been featured in. I gawped in amazement at some of her pieces because really, I can’t imagine how much time and skill it must take to make something so delicate.

And she is also a cupcake fan, so we scoffed the most GINORMOUS vegan cupcakes in the world – made by Jake’s cousins and his aunt. Sadly I didn’t have my camera in my hand and I was too busy munching to take pictures anyway, but these cupcakes were works of art in their own right. Amazingly fluffy vegan buttercream icing – mine never looks that good – and sprinkled with cute colourful sugar shapes.

All in all, not a bad day. And yes, the littl’uns wore their dresses and were universally admired. I felt proud and ever so slightly smug all afternoon :->

How to make your own binding September 23, 2009

Okay, tutorial number two: making blanket binding. Again, it’s easier to do than to write about, so please bear with me as I am really new at this whole teaching of technical skills thing.

Pick and Mix

The first step is to choose your fabric. You want something that will make a coherent whole with your blanket or quilt’s colours and patterns. Contrast is good, clash is bad.

I’ve chosen to use some of the IKEA fabrics that Alex and I picked up on our trek last week.

Candy stripes and hippos

Because they’re all from the same kid’s range (by Eva Lundgreen, apparently), the colours blend well together and they’re just so… cheery.

Decide on a width and a length of strip. I like mine wide but I tend to vary the length a little. Sometimes I will cut a strip that will be the length of one whole side of the blanket, sometimes I do lots of shorter strips to get a really stripy effect. It’s up to your taste, you might like your binding all in one colour and very thin. That’s the beauty of making your own!

However you choose to do your strips, you will need to make a template. I just used the first strip that I cut out and then laid it on the fabric and cut round it. You’ll soon have a nice little stack of strips ready to sew. Like so:

A pile of strips

Next step is to iron everything in sight. You really should press the strips before you sew them, it’ll flatten out any creases and give you a chance to check everything is straight and smooth.

Joining

Once you have your stack-o-strips ready to go, you need to join them together into one long strip.

Place two strips right sides together, facing inwards. You can pin them if you want to, I generally don’t just because the strips aren’t that huge and I’m using a non-slippery fabric. If you’re working with something that tends to slide, use pins. It’ll save you many tears.

Backstitching the strips together.

The sprawling backside of backstitch.

The smooth neat side of the backstitch seam

Backstitch was the first stitch I ever learned how to do. My mum taught me when I was 6 or 7. You can kind of get an idea of how the needle should go through the fabric from the pictures.

Keep joining the strips together until you have a lovely long chain like this:

A nice chain of strips, all ready to be ironed

Preparing the strips for binding

The next step is to get out your trusty iron and irioning board. Trust me on this, the ironing is key for good binding.

First you need to press all the little seams you’ve just made. You can press them open:

Pressing the seam open

or press them flat and to one side:

Pressing seams flat and to the side

It doesn’t really matter for this project which method you choose. But if you press them to the side, make sure that you press them all to the same side. E.g all to the right or all to the left. Be consistent, it looks tidier that way.

Turn, turn, turn

Now you’re ready to turn the edges under, ready to sew the binding to the blanket. Again, you want to use your iron for this, it holds the folded under bits in place like magic. You want to fold at least 2.5 cms of fabric in, so that you get a nice margin at each edge. When you stitch the binding in place on the blanket/quilt/whatever, you will be sewing these folds in place, effectively hemming the binding.   Finally, fold the whole thing in half, length ways and iron a nice crease down the middle. And you’re ready to fit your binding to your blanket/quilt.

See, nice smooth edges.

Turning the Corner

You’ve made your binding, now you just need to fit it to your blanket.  I’ll show you how I did mine.

First lay out and pin your blanket. You want to make sure that sucker is not going to move while you’re fiddling with it because the last thing you want is for this to happen:

Look at those wrinkles. Sigh. Mother pucker.

This was my first attempt at making a blankie for a very long time and I forgot the cardinal rule of pin, pin and pin some more.

Once you’ve got your main fabric pieces laid out and pinned as you want them, you need to sandwich the raw edges of the blanket between the layers of your binding. Like this:

Mmmm fabric sandwich.

The crease that you ironed down the centre of your binding strip should sit along the raw edge of your blanket, dividing your binding strip precisely in half, half to the front of the blanket, half to the back.

Next you’re going to turn and mitre the corners. This is so much easier than it sounds, but I only just figured out how to do it the other night. It makes a really nice sharp looking corner.

Make a right angle fold in the fabricThen pinch and fold the other side

Smooth it down and you've made a mitred corner.Nice, crisp corner, pinned and ready for stitching.

Work your way around three sides of your blanket. The fourth side is where you will join together the two ends of your binding strip to finish off the final corner. Make sure each end overlaps the edge of the blanket by a good few centimetres. You want to leave enough room to be able to put in your mitre, even after you’ve joined the ends together.

Pin the ends, right sides together, then back stitch just as you did when you first started making your binding strips. Fold the edges back under, then mitre the corner as shown in the pictures above. Pin in place.

Pinned and ready to be sewn up

Tah dah! Now all you have to do is choose what kind of thread and stitch you want to do and you’re ready to finish your blanket.

And when it is all sewn up it should look like this:

All done

Red Letter Day and My Creative Space September 17, 2009

Today has been a fabulous day!

Alex and I had tea with my friend Sara from preschool. She is an artist making linoprints, among other things and she also sells lovely appliqueed tshirts. She had a stand at the recent Tea and Make in Forest Hill. We sat in one of the local cafes, Oscar’s, and had tea, cake and chatted all things crafty. Alex and I did some sewing and some beading while we were there.

Which is where our first attempt at the My Creative Space game comes in. We took some pics and I thought since it was Thursday we might join in the game.

You can see a stack of sewn and unsewn bibs, my little pouch full of thread,  a bunch of kids’ books to keep the sprogs from rioting and a certain wee owl who came out to meet Sara. Plus the ever important tea and cake.

We brought Owly along to join us for a cup of tea while we showed our stuff off to Sara and picked her brains about things like craft markets and so forth. It’s definitely helpful to have some one to ask for feedback on your stuff and also who can give advice on stuff like pricing and markets. Plus, Sara said she might pop along next week to join us for our Thursday morning crafting sessions. Lovely!

Crafting at Oscar’s

Owly at Oscar’s

Skellies at Oscar’s

Fabric palooza!

Post craft-stravaganza we went over to Ikea out at Croydon and bought a bunch of gorgeous kids’ prints. Loads of jungle animals, stripes, cows, all sorts. Lovely and bright. We also bought a bunch of fleece and terry towelling. Alex is stress testing the terry towelling in the washing machine this evening and we’ll see how it goes with regard to things like the dye running and shrinkage. We thought it might be nice for backing the bibs. The fleece is suitable for blankets and so on and is in really bold colours, lots of stripes and so on. It’s all down at Alex’s hence no photos. Perhaps anon.

Got home to discover a package from the wonderful Fabric Rehab had arrived. Some snazzy prints I ordered a few days ago for making blankies.

Fabric palooza!

I particularly love the apple owls and the night owls.  Super cute!

Add to that the fact that I sold my Pirate Dinosaur wrist cuff today, we took a commission for some jewellery and when I got home we had made two more jewellery sales on Etsy and today has been absolutely genius!

I am completely knackered but feeling really excited. Now I have to go get creative with some pasta and sauce.

A general round up of the weekend’s crafty goodness. September 13, 2009

For starters, Friday was the iKnit Weekender.

We headed over to West London-  heady climes for us Southerners. (Hey, we live here, we’re allowed to claim it for our own. And anyway, you can’t get much further South than where we’re really from.) Wandered around for a while trying to find the Horticultural Halls and eventually succumbed and asked for directions, which we then passed on to the other equally confused looking ladies we saw in the streets, avidly clutching their bright yellow tickets.

Once inside we stroked all the pretties. And I have to say, the pretties were many. The range of stalls was amazing, loads of independant dyers, small sellers, notions people etc. Lovely to see so many creative people all in one place. BUt sad to say, we came away largely empty handed, apart from these little guys:

BUTTONS!

We spent about half an hour lurking around the stall of the lovely people from Textile Garden. They just had so many gorgeous buttons. In the end the teeny wee owls sold it for us. Well, for me. The scotty dogs and bee hives got Alex.

They are intended to find their way onto some new bits for the shop, so I guess they may find their way to one of you, one of these days. I thought they’d be perfect for bibs or for gloves or wrist cuffs. All manner of fine applications.

But that was it for us. No other purchases. We wandered about, said hi to some people we knew, pawed a few cute bits and bobs (like the sheepy banks at the Herdy stall. Baa.) and then left. Unfettered by giant bags of yarn.

It felt odd leaving with out yarn. I don’t think I’ve ever left a knitting show without at least one random mildly insane purchase. But there was just nothing there that I had to have. Plus, what I didn’t spend on yarn, I can now spend on fabric.

I don’t think it’s that our love of all things yarny is waning. The socks, mittens, jumper and cardigan that I’m working on at the moment all attest to that, as does Alex’s giant sock yarn blanket of doom. It’s just, we’ve learned restraint. And I think that’s a good thing.

Now, as to crafting, I have had a little mini-hiatus over the weekend as I have had relatives visiting. But Alex informs me she has been busily chopping up various pieces of fabric, ready for me to quilt together as baby blankets. She kidnapped my bib template on Friday and a whole sackload of cute material, so there’ll be bibs galore at some point.I love making bibs. The moment when you turn them inside out and iron them is just super satisfying.

The only crafting I did over the weekend was a few rows on my extremely lurid pink and green socks. I’ve been working on them for a while, but with all the sewing I’ve been doing I just haven’t had time to knit. I completed the first sock the other day and am just rounding the third pattern repeat on the second. It was nice to have a little knitting time last night, instead of feeling like I need to be busting my needles and pins out and tacking things together. I don’t want crafting to feel like a chore. That kind of defeats the object.

Speaking of objects, this evening I’ve been stitching together a few of these:

I really enjoy making them. You cut tear drops of coordinating material and stitch them together to make  a pinwheel flower shape.

They have quite a few applications. You can stitch them onto things like pillow cases, bags, tshirts and so forth. Or you can make them into potholders – use plenty of wadding if you’re going to do that and DO NOT use acrylic, it will melt because – and I can’t stress this enough – it is PLASTIC and therefore not heat resistant.

I will probably turn them into toys of some kind. Either balls or maybe some more mobiles. I made a cute one a while back, with a Japanese doll (sarubobo) parachuting from it.

Whatever I do with them, it’s fun just tinkering about with them, playing with colours, size, number of patches. Not thinking too hard about the purpose, just enjoying the making.

Welcome to our feathery corner of cyberspace September 4, 2009

Since this is our first post, I guess we should introduce ourselves.

We are Sarah and Alex, two Australians living in glamorous South London, making the world a softer, cosier, more handmade place, one tiny item at a time.

All that introduction nonsense aside, we’re really very excited to welcome you to the official launch of our fabulous new venture: The Bothered Owl.

A while back we decided that we weren’t busy enough with our various offspring (Sarah), Masters dissertation (Alex) and general day to day lives and that we needed something new to focus our creative energies on. And let’s face it, to hopefully manage to turn our crafty endeavours into cashy money with which to buy more yarnand fabric.

So for the last few months whilst Alex finished off her dissertation, Sarah has been sewing up a storm and Alex has been firing up her handy dandy drill, transforming lego pieces into gorgeous earrings and pendants. Plans are afoot for things like baby blankets, hair grips, change mats, pencil cases, loads more jewellery and general hand made goodness.  We both knit too so there may even be some teeny weeny mittens at some point (perhaps even grown up size ones. But we don’t want to spoil you…)

We plan on keeping a record of our adventure here and we’re also on Twitter and Facebook, should you feel a burning need to keep track of what we’re up to. You can buy our stuff on Etsy and we’re in the process of sorting out Folksy, Misi and Ebay accounts too.

So welcome, we hope you will enjoy reading our tales of crafting and heck, maybe you’ll even buy and enjoy some of the wee items we come up with. Hopefully it will be a fun ride for all concerned.