Friday Night with Friends for August

Many thanks to Cheryll for getting us all togeher again yesterday. Pop over to Cheryll's blog here to see who else took part. I shall making some visits later today.

It was 40 degrees here yesterday afternoon and so I shut up the front of the house early on and settled down to work on my Red Manor House BOM. The final part of the BOM arrived last Saturday and I have been working steadily during the week on making lots of Flying Geese. This is where I was at when I started out yesterday afternoon

and this is where I was several hours later!

I now need to make eight dark blue Flying Geese to make the centre X at the middle of each side and then they can be added to the quilt. Not far to go now!

During the evenings I have been working on the applique on my tablecloth. The vine and basic leaves are all sewn down now along one side of my cloth.

Not easy to get the lighting right but you get the idea.

Trawling through my inbox recently I came across a link to a pattern I had bought back during lockdown. No idea how I found the pattern, anyway, as it happens it was a timely find and of course I set about instantly making a Zip Up Tray Pouch

I soon realised that the finished pouch was considerably larger than it looks in the picture



To me that looks like a pencil case whereas opened out it is 11" x 7" x 4". What I actually wanted was something square so it was quite easy to downsize the pattern so that the opened tray is 7" square.

Next problem - no opened ended zips in my stash! Never mind I thought - I will just add a tab and button, much easier than fiddling with a zip too.

To stiffen the box double sided heavyweight fusible interfacing is needed but I dont have any of that. I do however have some heavyweight pelmet vilene that is fusible on one side so I decided to go with it. Although double sided fusible would probably have made the end pieces easier to put together, I found it worked well and with the unfused side inside it means I have a looser lining which I quite like.

So here is my finished box

The lovely linen spot on the outside has been in my stash for some time waiting for its moment to shine! The contrasting fabric is a pretty butterfly print.

Everything went swimmingly until I got to hand stitching the binding down to the end pieces. I think it took me as long as putting the rest together! It may be that my pelmet vilene is stiffer than the suggested stiffener but I still think it would be difficult. In the end I was stab stitching through to the edge of the binding on the front of the box using tiny stitches.

Should I ever decide to make another of these - at the moment, highly unlikely! - I would use 1/4" seams on the two ends. I find those 3/8" seams bulky. And I would used doubled over bias binding rather than her single as I think it is stronger.

Well, it is marginally cooler today. I am off to make some more Flying Geese. Have a good week.