Sew happy :-)

Earlier this year I inherited this lovely sewing machine from one of my mother in laws friends, but I had to wait until recently to receive it as it was waiting for me up in Yorkshire. During that time I've been doing a little sewing machine reading so that I'll at least know some of the basic techniques in theory before I start.

One book that I found really helpful for this is "Bend the rules sewing" which for a newbie like myself is great as it goes through all the basics in a clear and friendly way.

I've also been drooling over "Little stitches for little ones" and "Stitched in time" so now I have huge ambitions for what I want to make but I'm slightly daunted by just how lovely all these projects look and I'm pretty sure that I'm not going to be up to that level of sewing for a good while yet!

For my first sewing machine project I wanted to keep things simple and use fabric that I didn't mind making a mess of. So I cut up an old duvet cover to make a basic drawstring bag which I could fill with my little boy's dirty laundry.

This bag in the photo on the left is my completed bag and took about 6 hours to make (mostly because I completely messed up my first attempt and had to start over - that's what happens when you start sewing before thinking through what you need to do). The hardest parts were doing the casing for the drawstring at the top in a neat way that didn't leave any raw fabric edges, and making the cord itself from a much folded and ironed spare strip of duvet cover fabric.

I'm very happy with how it turned out though the bag does seem a tiny bit bigger than it probably needed to be it does the job.

In other craft related news which I had forgotten to mention until now; I've just started receiving this little craftzine which was a Mother's day present from my lovely husband. After being very disappointed that O'Reilly Craft magazine stopped being published I started scouting around for a different craft related mag that I could subscribe to. I found a mention of this one (Mixtape)on one of the blogs that I follow and I thought I would give it a try - and I'm very glad that I did! This is a lovely little magazine that comes all the way from Australia and is the work of a husband and wife team. The articles are well written and I found them all interesting, and the layout used throughout the mag is just lovely. So if you haven't heard of this craftzine before it really is worth a look - I personally feel that it is 10 times better than the O'Reilly Craft magazine and I can't wait for the next issue to arrive.