Thursday 13 November 2014

...A Little More Sewing.

I meant to do this ages ago but Life (in general) and Holiday plans got in the way and I figured that visiting Hubbie's parents and mine in our hometown while the commemoration of 100 years since the first fleet of soldiers to fight in the First World War sailed from our port and then spending a week with our daughter in Brisbane was probably more important than cobbling together a short spiel about another crafty do-dad of mine.

Needless to say, both weeks were wonderful. But now we're home.

Before we left I'd been experimenting with gifts to make for family instead of buying everything...unfortunately we have a lot of men in our family. It's relatively easy coming up with a gift I can make for the women in the family but I don't think there's a man in the world who wants a tatted lace doily or a knitted garment in the middle of the Australian summer!

So I just concentrated on our Mothers. Both knit a fair amount, both for personal pleasure and for charity and I thought a knitting roll to store their knitting needles and oddments in would be a good idea. So I looked around Pinterest and found a lovely tutorial by Made By Loulabelle for a simple but pretty roll. And I had all the material on hand so I drew up the template and started.

The first one was a bit rough but I got better as I tried to take time and not rush them as I tend to do with sewing projects. I made up 3 rolls, digging through my boxes of fabric. It's astonishing how you can have a lot of fabrics but never just the right colours to blend nicely together while offering a bit of contrast. I needed a solid or semi-solid, a small print and a large print. Was much harder to find than I ever thought it would be!

But the final result were well worth the effort.

The First Knitting Needle Roll
 I learnt with the first roll that the decorative ribbon I chose wasn't a great choice. It isn't double sided and the back of the ribbon doesn't look as good as the front. But everything else worked really well.
Second Knitting Needle Roll
So with the second all I changed was to make the ribbon from the bias binding I used around the edges and that worked fine.
Third Knitting Needle Roll
So my final one I used up all the pinkest stuff I could find and made up one overloaded with devastating cuteness. I love how cheerfully bright it is and although some of the stitching is a little dodgy I'm still quite happy with this.

Actually, I'm happy with all of them and I'm looking forward to being able to gift these to people I know will appreciate the time and effort I've put into them.  And it wasn't so difficult getting the sewing machine out even though I had to pack it up again when I was finished. Our house is too small at the moment to leave anything like that out. I feel like I've achieved something worthwhile and it might be the first Christmas I'm almost prepared for before December.

But let's not get too hasty! Now to recuperate from all the travel and try and get my bearings...

I'll have more later. Don;t know what. I'm at a bit of a puzzle at the moment with crochet, cross-stitch and knitting all cluttering around me.  I'll clear my head eventually!

See you all later!
Dx