Summer sew project

Over the last few days, my sewing machine has been silent, I've been feeling listless, after a flurry of deadlines and frantic activity suddenly I had no projects on the go and nothing was inspiring me... I was trying to hide it but days were passing and nothing was getting done.


When I get like this I have learnt to just go with it and see where it takes me and yesterday afternoon I found myself Googling 'crafts for charity'. After about 2 hours of contemplating lovely crafts I can't really do and great charities which were not really 'speaking' to me, I realised the answer was in a charity I came across months ago, called Dress a Girl Around the World.

It goes like this - people who sew are asked to make dresses for girls living in poverty in the developing world. Can you believe there are little girls who do not have a single dress? Some sewers make bags, hairbands, puppets and dolls to accompany the dresses which I think is such a lovely touch. When I read more, I suddenly realised the time was right for me to get involved. You know that whoosh when you realise that everything has been leading up to something and suddenly now is the time?


We try so hard to be green in our house but the girls and I are as guilty as most of us of buying clothes which we hardly ever end up wearing - that in a world where there are girls who do not have a single dress? To somehow compensate for the wickedness of this habit,I have tended to hold on to all the perfect, cotton clothes 'to upcycle'.


Trouble is, and this is shaming, the pile grows quicker that I can make sleep pillows, cushions, bags or whatever I'm into.


But the reason for my restlessness was obvious - this project was calling me and I had to rediscover it!


Yesterday I emailed Louise from the lovely blog Sew Scrumptious, who runs the UK branch of the charity and now all systems are go.

Check this blog for how I get on and a link to the charity (their website is down as I write).

Check Louise's blog for more info, including patterns and how to donate.

It's over and I really mean it this time

It's the right thing to do, I mean, isn't it? There's nothing else I can realistically make from the stuff to the left of the pic, is there?


Just don't ask how long it has taken me to come to this decision or how much I have draaaaagged out this final item, made from a charity shop pair of jeans nearly two months ago.


I tried to be experimental with the stitching, some was ok, some not as you can see from these pics.

With this one, I started without any idea of what I would end up with and now I'm triumphantly describing it to my family as my patchwork placemat for all those solitary, week-day lunches.

In case you were wondering, I found that solitary scrap to the top left, as I was finishing of and couldn't resist sewing it in, like a lonely tear.


Tbh, I vere wildly between thinking 'it's quite rubbish' to 'shows some promise'.

You may call it cheating but I dreamt up this jeans challenge so I think I'm allowed to introduce the shiny, lumpy bright green fabric which I think were part of a set of vintage curtains I have been hoarding for years.

Yes moving on is hard but always easier when you have started itching to revisit a few ideas from the past as well as embark on a variation on a theme.


After trying to steal the sleepy sheep pillow, Becky has asked for a pig pillow, I have just found the perfect fabric for a herbal bath idea and realised that the next challenge is to use up as much as I can from an upcycled sundress.


To as they say, 'take your mind off it, love'.

Saying it with flowers

Stringy, tight, thrifty, call it what you will but I was determined to use the scraps left over from my project to make stuff from a pair of charity shop jeans. The pile of denim oddments may have looked unpromising and, given the time this has taken me, was  labour intensive, to say the least.

Quite early on, it became obvious that the flower shapes and sizes would have to be different and that developed into the main joy of this project, picking up a scrap and working out how to work it!

It was fun to plunder my stitch bank and quite a challenge to bring in enough variation to keep it interesting, as opposed to messy.

So here they are from a variety of angles on my kitchen worktop...

.....with close ups of some of my favourites...

.....this (below) has to be a contender ...

Not a bad transformation for a pile of scraps! Trouble is, there are some leftovers and guess what, they are not in the bin yet.