I bought a few meters of linen fabric last year with the intention of finally getting around to making a full double bed sized quilt, but like many well-meaning plans… this changed.
Instead I made half of a quilt, decided to rebrand this to myself as a whole (half-sized) quilt, made a shirt, made a Tudor-inspired comfort blanket for my dog, made a patchwork lounging jacket for my dog and spent a lot of time during all of these makes thinking long and hard about how I’m choosing to spend my time.
But anyway, let’s chop this fabric up and see how many things we can make out of it…
Here’s the end-of-bed quilt I ended up making. I started off really loving the process of making the patchwork blocks for this (the design is called Courthouse Steps) and spent a couple of meditative hours each evening making three new blocks. This went happily along until one evening I sewed my blocks with the wrong seam allowance (after leaving a different presser foot on my sewing machine and failing to realise), had a big sulk, threw everything into a dark corner and did not return to the quilt for a few weeks.
Once I calmed down and returned to it I realised that what I had so far wasn’t so bad after all, though the thought of doing twice as much all over again was just too boring for words. I cut my losses and ended up with a smaller (but kind of more versatile) quilt than planned.
One day I’ll finally make a full sized quilt, but before then I need to figure out how to find the happy medium between planning and improvising with quilt making so that I can end up with something I like and not get sick of it in the process.
Seeing as my quilt plans had downsized rather a lot I was left with meters of extra fabric to play with, and wanting to improve my shirt making skills I thought I'd try sewing the Cornell shirt by Elbe Textiles.
The pattern is great and clearly written - though this didn’t stop me from making and re-making almost every detail of this shirt at least twice (I think the front placket and collar both went on and came off three whole times). It was worth all the unpicking though, I now know to always hand-sew a small rounded collar and I have a new linen shirt to waft throught the warming London weather in.
During all this making I’ve been dreading my dog Peanut’s planned leg surgery (for a genetic condition called luxating patella). In an attempt at stress displacement I wanted to make her a little comfort blanket to tragically curl up on while she recovers (which takes 6-ish long weeks).
I’ve been looking at lots of Tudor portraits and really wanted to make something inspired by the textiles on display in them. (Anyone who knows Peanut in real life will know this is only fitting). After sketching lots of designs and feeling unhappy with all of them I rediscovered the Roberts-Wood Cera bag pattern, which uses fabric scraps to create a beautiful 3D bow patchwork design.
This pattern definitely hit the Tudor-inspired spot, and I love that sewing other people’s patterns allows me to inhabit someone else’s creativity for a while and make something I would never be able to envision and fabricate on my own. All the pieces of this patchwork come together so cleverly and I can’t wait to try piecing together more Roberts-Wood designs (like these spectacular trousers).
The fabric scrap pile was gradually shrinking after all these projects, but somehow there’s still always more to use up…
With a lot of linen strips and pieces left over (plus those three abandoned patchwork blocks which I sewed wrong) the only sensible thing to do was to salvage them and make a wee jacket for my poor shivering dog (see below for her scarred and very shaved back leg).
Yes I probably have lost my mind at this point, but looking after her post-surgery is the closest thing to being back in lockdown, so anything goes in this flat right now.
If you can believe it there’s still even more of this fabric left (I really did think I was going to make a very big quilt) so expect a part two of this newsletter before very long.
In the meantime, thank you so much for reading and let me know in the comments if there’s anything you’d like to see more of around here.
The tudor blanket!! I don't think you ever need to question how you spend your time, it's all beautiful <3
Beautiful colours on that quilt! And peanut looks splendid in her jacket. Inspiring me to go stare at my fabric scraps and maybe do some sewing this year.