Adventures into Sewing

It's been a while since our last update here, and I'm going back a bit to update things. My Christmas present from A and J this year was...

                               

A sewing machine! A lovely dinky little one from John Lewis. Isn't it sweet? I wonder whether I should name him/her... is it normal to name sewing machines?

I was home for a few days around Christmas, and this seemed the perfect time to try it out - I do know how to sew, but have always been very under confident machine sewing. Hand sewing? Fine - I've done quite a lot of it, involving various sorts of embroidery and cross stitch. (Although I still can't get the hang of French knots!) But machine sewing? It's sort of bee a scary block for me - my little experience has been at school, which was fine although uninteresting, and on Alison's machine, which was unsuccessful and terrifying! 

Fortunately, my little machine came up trumps. It isn't fancy, like these digital ones with all kinds of amazing stitches, but it sews and doesn't get stuck and has quite enough stitches to be getting on with.

Mr Father Christmas had given me some beautiful material squares, so I decided my first project would be a patchwork cot blanket for baby A, the daughter of one of J's ex-colleagues.

Using a rather nice Liberty sewing book I got last year from Christmas, I decided on a simple brick pattern.

                  

I started my cutting up all the beautiful material:

                   

Isn't it a lovely selection? Part of me didn't want to use it because then it would be gone! But that's such a stupid reason that I managed to cut it up, and started sewing. It was so much easier than I thought... 

                         

Ta-da! Dont the colours all look so wonderful? I love it. Then came the slightly harder part of sewing it to the backing, and using quilting. J was sent out on a mission to find wadding at the nearest Dunelm Mill shop and came up trumps. For my first quilt, I wasn't able to do 'real' quilting, so I made single knots through the layers at every other corner instead. Not the proper way to do things! But, for my first foray into machine sewing, I have to admit that it hasn't come out half badly. Would you like to see?

                    

Isn't it lovely? The dark blue backing fabric was taken from A's material box. R, J's ex-colleague, and baby A seemed to like it. Do you want to see it again?

Okay...just one more.

                           

Small, but satisfactory. 

Stay tuned for my next adventures in the world of machine stitching!

Xx