sewing Archives - Page 16 of 42

Fabric craft basket

My mystery afghan and blackwork map have a new home!

I’ve mentioned that I was thinking I’d buy a large basket for this purpose. The local co-ops stock fair trade woven baskets, and some are quite large. They are lovely but I couldn’t seem to settle on one – none of them had colors or patterns I was in love with. Meanwhile, I realized that sewing a lining for the basket, as I planned to do to prevent snags and add pockets, would be nearly as much work as simply sewing a basket.

I bought fabric before designing the pattern and so ended up with a yard and a half of each of two home dec fabrics: a patterned “outdoor” fabric and a solid cotton duck. I could have gotten by with 3/4 of a yard of each, as it turns out, so I’ll have to find another use for the rest.

Staring at the yardstick led me to write down a pattern for a 9″x18″x12″ basket, but I started thinking that was maybe excessive, and calculated out a smaller one as well. To check, I made a paper “basket” that was 8.5″ by 16″ by 11″, with no bottom, and decided that was quite large enough, so I went with the 8″x16″x12″ version of my design (it doesn’t sound like a major change, but the difference is a shoebox plus a kleenex box worth of space). For sturdiness, the basket has an inner layer of thin fleece from my stash – all these sorts of projects seem to use batting for interfacing, so that’s what I was going for.

The basket is twice as big in one direction than the other partially so it will sit alongside pieces of furniture with a lower profile, but also so that it could have some large flat pockets on the inside, for printed-out patterns. I knew I wanted a large flat pocket for the afghan pattern and a large slightly non-flat pocket for the blackwork pattern and hooped map-in-progress. I decided to add a pocket for my crochet hook, and as long as I was at it, some shorter pockets for this and that (embroidery floss, stitch markers, etc). The tall thin hook pocket is flat and the shorter, squarer pockets are not. The shorter pockets also snap to the basket lining at the top, to keep those little odds and ends in place.

flat pockets on the interior of the fabric basket

darted pockets on the interior of the fabric basket

So I wouldn’t have to deal with turning down the edges at the top and capturing the fleece and what have you, I bound the top of the basket with bias tape (more extra wide double fold, baby).

The sewing was time consuming (mostly because of pocket construction) and not everything is as flawless as I might hope, but I’ll show you how I made it later in the week. Flaws and all, I am quite pleased with how this came out, and I expect it will come in handy many times in the future. It would be a nice bag for car travel as well as projects.

Now I’m eyeing my threadbare purse…

Dish glove keeper

My husband wears gloves when he washes dishes, and we needed a place to put them in between. Long ago I crocheted him a sort of strap, a loop that hangs from the oven door handle, and he put the gloves through the loop for holding. However, that didn’t work so well (though we kept it for probably close to two years). The gloves would regularly fall out and the strap didn’t contain their wet grossness, so I got an unpleasant fwap in the leg numerous times.

I had in my stash some pieces of a dollar store mesh laundry bag that I bought eight years ago for aeration in a gym bag (I don’t think I ever showed it to you, since it was before the blog; see the bottom of this post for photos). Finally I made a new holder with it.

I laboriously zigzagged the piece into a tube (it kept getting sucked into the machine) and then folded it so the seam was center back. Bias tape (extra wide double fold, my favorite kind) across the bottom and around the top, and then in a hanging loop. Simple and quick.

Finally, as promised, a few pictures of the gym bag. Click to embiggen (as always) and un-crop.

Dressing up the basement

The basement has a tiny little window that I have intended to make a curtain for since moving in over seven years ago. A week or two ago I happened upon some fun cat fabric at the Sew-op, and I made the curtain last night. Pardon the crummy photos; I tried three times for decent ones to no avail.

You can see Miff Miffler and the bassist monster up there.

The curtain is lined with white muslin and held up by a tension rod that came with the house. Because the cat fabric was super fray-prone and shifty, I cut a rectangle from the muslin, pinned it onto a piece of cat fabric that was larger than necessary, and stitched them together around the perimeter before trimming the cat fabric to size.

For good measure, here’s a before picture and a shot of what the cat fabric actually looks like. The cardboard came out of some wall calendars, and was in there for privacy.