Firstly - thank you so much for all the lovely comments on my last post listing UK online fabric shops - for those of you who subscribe through bloglines, for some reason it cut half the post off, so if you click through to the actual post, you may find a great many more shops listed than were visible in bloglines.
Anyway, kimono. About a year ago I started getting requests to make kimonos in a wider range of sizes (they currently cover UK sizes 6 -10) - an idea which I found overwhelming due to never having graded a pattern before...which bits would need to be bigger or smaller...does one just increase all the pattern pieces or make adjustments only to certain areas? So many baffling questions that I simply said no, as I couldn't bear the idea of sending it off to someone and them finding it too big...or more distressingly too small - I didn't want to be responsible for anyone's bad dressing room day.
Anyway, I finally met with someone persuasive enough, and more importantly, local enough that they were happy to stop by for any necessary fitting and adjustments, to finally begin drafting a kimono pattern in a larger size - this one will fit UK sizes 14-16...(which leaves me with a 10-12 gap in my range...perhaps I will brave that one day too). Anyway, the girl in question picked out this scrummy Denyse Schmidt print, which is perfect for a kimono as Denyse's fabrics tend to feel a little lighter, with more of a sheen to them than standard cottons.
When the girl in question visited and tried on the pink kimono in a smaller size there were things I wouldn't have instantly thought of that needed adjusting...for instance, as well as the belt needing to be longer, it also needed to be deeper. I loved finding out what details it is that makes a garment look 'right' on whoever is wearing it. Anyway, after many days worth of strokey-beard moments the final fitting revealed that, apart from needing to shorten the arm length a little, all ended up fitting perfectly and I felt so relieved that I hadn't just cut up 5 metres of Denyse Schmidt on a misadventure that would have no hope of ever fitting man or beast, let alone the lovely songstress in question (for she is a singer).
Sticking with the garment theme, Dylon emailed me recently very kindly asking if I'd like to try any of their dyes. I'd already been eyeing their Wash & Dye range, which dispenses with the need to buy vast quantities of salt and simply lets you...yes, wash and dye...as with a normal wash cycle. Anyway, I have a small sub-wardrobe of brown cords as it amazes me quite what different personalities brown cords can have, some slouchy, some a little more foxy...one pair simply can't meet every chestnut-hued corduroy mood or occasion. Anyway, my most beloved pair had become washed out, faded, tattered and slightly more lo-fi than I ever intended them to look.
I think when Dylon first contacted me they may have meant that I use the dyes for crafting purposes, but as these trousers being wearable are essential to my general equilibrium and are worn on especially happy sewing days (and that isn't meant flippantly...sewing always seems to go right when coming from a starting point of feeling happy in one's 'strides' - this is my Papa's bizarre term for trousers, which is actually a far superior word and one which I would use all the time if I thought anyone would understand what I was talking about), these were the things that instantly sprang to mind as 'dying candidates'. So anyway, the dye came, not in a box, but in a thick black sachet bearing a chestnut brown leaf in exactly the shade of 'final trouser' that I was hoping for. I know from previous experience that the more garments you put in the wash, the more thinly the dye is spread and, to me, it seems the colour tends to be more natural and less of a block-colour this way, so I added an old pair of camel-coloured gardening cords into the machine as a sacrificial lamb.
Below is the final result - I couldn't quite believe the change - they look like new, but still slightly vintagey and the colour is perfect. They really are the most scrummy colour and I feel that I've fallen in love with them all over again. Hurrah! Thank you, Dylon.
Today, amongst other things, I have been planning out Dinosaur-boy's quilt that I'm hoping to make him for Christmas. He has long bemoaned his lack of snugly handmade warmth and I couldn't bear letting one more present-giving occasion whizz past without giving him this. He appreciates handmade things just as much as Zebra-girl and treats them differently to shop-bought lovelies, which makes me feel even sadder that he hasn't already got a quilt.
Partly the delay has been in never quite managing to find the right fabrics - Dinosaur-boy's room is incredibly tiny and so for this reason I've tried to keep the colours to cream, white and pale blue to make the room feel airy and light. I longed for something that fitted in with this scheme, but that was more boyish and with more longevity than a baby-blue gingham, which was the only thing that sprang to mind when I'd thought about it in the past. So how happy I was when I spotted the new Monaluna Mingle range of fabrics, which goes perfectly with the older Robert Kaufman 'apples' print. I also have very particular ideas about quilting this time too - the quilts that I've loved recently have all had straight quilt lines running horizontally across them, which somehow gives such a different effect to the chequerboard look that I went for with my last quilt. I can't wait to get started...which was why I paid a little extra for speedy delivery...and why I will be spending tomorrow with the doorbell next to the sewing machine, and perhaps even checking that the doorbell is working properly every half hour until it actually rings. Yes, waiting for fabric to arrive takes me back to waiting for a boy to call as a teenager. I wonder what my teenage self would have thought to that...actually, I'm sure she would have loved it.
A couple of posts ago I talked about the ever-growing list of UK online fabric shops that I had in my email drafts folder and promised to share it with you. Well the time has come: part of me wants to keep it to myself in case you stampede them and buy up all the fabric loveliness leaving none of it for me...but my better self (yes, it was a battle, but she won out! 
UK online fabric loveliness:
This is not a definitive list of every UK online fabric shop...rather a cherry-picked one of those selling the fabrics that I really want to sew with myself: so those that include a selection of the modern-vintage floral loveliness of Heather Bailey & Amy Butler, the Japanese minimal 
I should also say that I haven't shopped in every single one of the shops mentioned and so can't attest to the level of customer service they might provide, but those that I (or Mr Teacakes, for he is responsible for snuffling out my of the above-listed shops in the quest for my birthday and Christmas presents) have shopped with have been loveliness itself: packages have arrived speedily and wrapped in beautiful tissue and ribbon, the fabric perfectly cut and smelling just as new fabric should (yes, it does have a smell and I breath it in like an 
I always feel a little pained by doing shop updates on my blog, for the whole 'selling' side of things (as in door-to-door 
I also decided to make some more hair accessories boards - I have changed the design of them since the first one I made (which is now nearly 18 months ago...time has gone so fast!).
As both herself and Mr 
Catching up on some blogs on Sunday evening 
I find that in the run-up to a fair I feel that I've never made quite enough and so am constantly pushing myself to make more and thinking 'oh gosh...and I really ought to make a few of those too'. Whereas, in my shop I fill it with the things that I'd want to buy and for custom orders I love thinking about what the recipient might find most lovely, with a fair I lose all my confidence and spend much of my sewing time trying to imagine what might sell well in those few hours that my things are on display for and my thoughts on second-guessing what this well-selling item might be fly around my head wildly making me feel quite dizzy...and because I don't normally think in such a 
What's so funny about this feeling of needing to make more is that when we arrived at 10am and attempted to arrange our combined stock onto the table, we realised that we had an 
Anyway, moving swiftly on, I am delighted to have a tutorial of mine featured in the winter edition of the online 
I also appear (I'm sorry, I shall go to ground shortly, I promise) in the rather wonderful 
Anyway, I will be taking these 
I have, however, also managed to sandwich in making more framed fabric pictures, a couple of hair accessories boards, a batch of teabag holders. It's amazing what you can do when you have a deadline for making things...however, like Eeyore, I am feeling apprehensive about the fair. The one that I did one rain-soaked evening last December in a tiny country village was fairly dire and so with this as my only past-experience I feel convinced that fairs (for me, at least) may well be doomed ventures. However, what was unexpectedly lovely about last year was that I then had the most enormous amount of stock for my shop...something which I rarely find the time to make...so I'm focusing on that as a possible good outcome. But even more so, a day with my 
Before I go, I wanted to tell those of you that aren't on their mailing list that Jo & Fran of UK-based 
So what a shame then that I ruined the whole bag by making some hideously thick piping for it and then installing a 
I phoned a dear friend (who is incapacitated having just broken various body parts while cycling DOWN a hill as fast as her legs would turn the pedals...even she doesn't know why she chose to do this, but it just makes me love her all the more and makes me think of the 
Anyway, even more exciting than bags, stockings or cats is that we are off to meet a new baby this weekend - my sister-in-law has just had the most gorgeous little boy and the smaller Teacakes are beside themselves with what 
I've recently felt (well a month or so ago...because there's a slight time-lag in my blogging at the moment) that I had so many ideas bubbling away in the background that I wasn't giving any time to that I just might go into melt-down if I didn't get them stitched and out of my head. With custom orders and trying to make stock for the craft fair (intermingled with going to spinning classes and the gym, which may seem like a self-indulgent way to spend time, but really my days are so sedentary that it began to seem a necessity if I was to have a hope of seeing my 33rd birthday) there didn't seem to be time in the week to set aside vast chunks of it for more experimental stitching that might be less likely to sell.
So one very wet and rainy weekend, the lovely Mr Teacakes let me spend two entire days and nights (yes, it was a this-is-so-much-fun-I-can't-waste-time-sleeping sort of affair) cutting out small bits of fabric, while he and the children pottered about playing board games and watching videos together and 
It took me hours to decide on fabrics...I have the most enormous pile of wheel-shaped rejects, which was a piece over which I seemed to become particularly indecisive. I framed the final picture in white.
My next picture is of a girl on a swing. I think there's something inexplicably lovely about swings, both to children and adults and I know that Zebra-girl loves them (although more recently I just experience horrible vertigo-like feelings whenever I go on one, which I feel so annoyed about)...if only our own tree was strong enough to hang one from. This feels both spring-like and wintry to me, depending on whether you think of the background as sky or falling snow.
This was the picture that I ended up being most pleased with, as I really like the colours.
And because I really love her hair...and would quite like to have hair like that myself occasionally.
I tried each one hung on our own walls to see how they looked...to do this I had to take down one of our existing pictures and was greeted by forgotten evidence that it was me who had hung that picture, as the wall behind is covered in failed attempts to get the nail in properly. Oh dear. Picture changeover was done while Mr Teacakes was out of the room.
And finally, I've felt desperate to do something involving a hot air balloon for well over two years, so it was with complete happiness that I cut out the pieces for the balloon. I decided that this one needed to be a little more boyish and so I changed my thread to silver and stuck to bold primary colours.
There is a little grey cat peeping over the edge of the basket, although dinosaur-boy assumed that this was a wolf. I think I like the idea of a wolf in a hot air balloon floating over the tree tops and roofs tops even more, so I'm sticking with his interpretation.
Wishing you a lovely weekend. 
Long time readers of my blog may remember that my sister, Laura, edited an anthology of poems 
Ordered into sections by the different ways in which we might experience love ranging from Suddenly, Secretly, Nearly and Tentatively, through Haplessly, Incurably, Impatiently and Passionately, to Greedily, From a distance, With a vow and Happily ever after. Stopping at The morning after, Treacherously, Bitterly and Indifferently, in between. My list omits so many other thoughtfully titled ways in which we might feel the ups and downs of love.
She has included 
Just as beautifully bound and almost as lovely, my sister sent me this wonderful edition of Pride & Prejudice last month. After hearing her talk about Austen novels and recalling my own love of 
In the same way that one can see how a cliche becomes a cliche because of its very 
I love the 
I particularly loved the ones where fabric was used in a more unconventional way - like 
The projects which use fabric more conventionally range from .JPG)
The magpie in me is loving these shiny hoops, also from 
Arriving home I was all ready to get back to work and had a long list of things that I wanted to do...which all suddenly became impossible once we found that our 
What have you been up to? x
Anyway, the pencil case (which used the zipper foot, walking foot, quarter inch foot, open toe applique foot, and a standard foot...horay...I find that so thrilling, but have no idea why) looks like this and sat in a box for some time quite forgotten about, until someone spotted its 
Oh walking foot, how do I love thee, let me count the ways...
So here are the pencil cases all lined up and ready to go...the zip colours make me think of rolls of refreshers, so soft, 
The above was something of a 
I'm sure if I'd not had a deadline to work to I could have spent several hours drafting and redrafting a peg bag pattern, but as I only had 1.5 hours to draft and make it, it put an end to any such procrastination and dilly-dallying and made me uncommonly decisive. It was one of those wonderful days when the bias-binding behaved so well that it was almost as if it had bound itself and I'm now dreaming up projects just for the excuse of using more of it.
The kimono is now nearly finished (the making of it having been punctuated by several smaller projects as well as the peg bag) and I have several bags to share just as soon as I'm sure that they have been received. Below is a custom order for an 
I was particularly delighted to find a Jennifer 
Anyway, it's now hideously rainy, so I am planning an afternoon of cosy, central-heated stitching finishing up a few orders and then tomorrow will perhaps venture outside to buy some wool suiting for a dress that I'm about to start work on - I'm most excited about this - it will be my sister's Christmas present and, having become more attached to my 
I found it difficult to source my most coveted shades of velvet in the vast quantities that I required them in (that's the problem with possessing colour charts for a range...once you know what's out there you can no longer be happy with the standard shades that your local haberdasher's stocks)...but with an much amended and then 
The weaving took longer than I'd imagined it might, but it was nice to have a rare piece of lap work to do while I had a friend over for the day...a scientific sort of friend who, after watching me weave for nearly three hours, pointed out a much simpler way of doing it which involves throwing alternate ribbons up and then simply placing the horizontal ribbon down and then laying the alternate ribbons back over it...something I never would have thought of, but which delighted me no end.
Second time around I seemed to weave a little quicker though and I used my 
And here's some colour:
And then for my Mama (for I started a cake for her myself, but soon saw that there is a very good reason as to why cakes are left to Mr Teacakes in our house) he made this rocking horse (the relevance being that she loves rocking horses). He had just two hours to make and ice the entire cake and in the rush, and under my awful guidance, we chose colours that, in retrospect, are more suitable for a newborn than a 60 year old. How we howled with laughter when we stood back and realised this just moments before we had to leave with the finished cake for her birthday lunch.
Luckily, she liked the idea of being reborn for cake purposes.
In amongst all the birthday celebrations I seemed to lose the ability to sleep and buzzed about the house sometimes for almost the entire night trying as quietly as one can to clean out every kitchen cupboard and reorganise pots and pans. It was a truly productive week and I realised that one would be capable of mammoth amounts if only one didn't need to sleep. But 
Such a long time seems to have passed since my last post, that the summer and all its loveliness and then the feelings of elation as the first signs of autumn began to appear, now seem a long time ago...rather than the two weeks that's actually gone by.
And now, oddly, this green stitching on a pink background is what gives me the most pleasure when I use my makeup bag each morning...which makes me think that contrast stitching may make an intentional appearance on more of my shop things...and also makes me think that sewing for one's self 
One of our holiday highlights was seeing this gorgeous Saddleback pig. At the start of a walk on a very rainy day we came upon a farm yard and as we approached, about twenty of these gorgeous little piglets came rushing towards us snorting adorably and pushing their snouts through the fence toward us. The curly tails, the coarse hair, the sad, but twinkly eyes...all four of us were quite taken with their utter perfection and the thought of seeing them at the end of our walk propelled us up and down a mountain more quickly than on any other day.
We climbed a mountain a day for the first four days of our visit to the Lake District...but on the fifth day I woke and had to confess to Mr Teacakes that the idea of putting on my muddy walking boots for another day of walking actually made me feel physically sick. As I had far surpassed his expectations of how many days of mud stalking I would actually happily participate in, he was more than willing to leave me at our lovely cottage for the day. I had gone truly believing that I might find my inner country girl lurking within....(although 
The night before we left home I started to feel incredibly twitchy about the prospect of a whole week without my sewing machine, and so found myself wedging embroidery hoops and linen into my over-packed bag. I spent some time embroidering these rows of dresses, but actually, I disappointed myself yet again, by realising that it's not hand-sewing that makes my heart sing - it is the pattern drawing, fabric-picking, hum of the sewing machine and hours spent making edges and lines marry up perfectly that makes me feel truly happy.
So this weekend we had another mini-holiday. One of our lovely friends was celebrating her birthday and we decided to stay in London overnight for her birthday party. A quick search on 
A couple of weeks ago the birthday girl's boyfriend had contacted me to ask if I would make a kimono for him to give to her - it's so flattering when someone wants to give something that I make as a birthday gift, so I was delighted. He chose this Sister Boom fabric from a selection that I had four metres of (which wasn't a very large selection), which I was really pleased about as it has an enormous repeat pattern, which means that there was more fun to be had in making it work so that the pattern ran centrally down the back...small things like that make me feel so much happier when working with an enormous volume of material which naturally allows less room for paying attention to tiny details.
After a lovely evening with a few too many mojitos we pottered over (actually we didn't potter at all, we jumped in a taxi as we discovered that you really need to start the day unstrenuously after a late night of rum drinking) to 
Anyway, we finally have some glorious weather, so we are off to a friend's house today to make the most of it. Wishing you a lovely week. x
Meet Elephant & Bear. After my recent 
They have been made to go in the little Teacake's holiday bags (bags of treats opened an hour into the long journey). Each one has a little pocket on the bib of their clothing, which I'm hoping might eventually double as a 
They both have bendy, 
After studying how some of the Teacakes own shop-bought bears were made up and looking in books, I felt as though I'd had a small breakthrough with the comprehension of 
One final thing before the creatures and I depart though: Thank you so much for the overwhelmingly enthusiastic response to the 
The Tabitha Bag pattern is finally finished and I want to thank you so much for all your suggestions and ideas about what makes a good pattern...they gave me so much more direction and confidence about the best way for me to do it.
I've absolutely loved writing and designing this pattern - so thank you to the lovelies that nudged me to do it.
These thread colours are making me feel so happy at the moment. My thread rack is opposite our bed and from early morning the sun shines brightly through our unlined curtains (black-out curtains seem to make me wake feeling bleary), giving me time to mentally sort them from my pillow...these five seemed to me to be the most exquisitely vibrant colours - sometimes it's hard to believe that a 
They've ended up temporarily on Dinosaur-boy's boat for these photos...I don't know where they're going...
It, and several others, will be finding their way into my shop at some point over the next week or so...but time seems to be going sneakily fast now and I can't quite believe that on Friday my little Teacakes will be at home for seven weeks...there is so much to do before then and my dream of having my hair cut and taking the cats to the vets before the Teacakes are with me all day seems most unlikely to actually end up happening....which will mean waiting seven more weeks for a haircut because the place that I go to is in a wonderful, 
So while I'm thinking of pattern writing, I'd really love to hear your thoughts on a couple of things. What do you like in a pattern: diagrams or lots of photographs? Bullet-pointed 
Sorry for so many samey pictures...sometimes the light seems just too good to not take a whole series of photos of the same thing...but then picking which ones to blog can lead to indecision...so much quicker to just put them all up there!
So it was something of a relief to be sewing something entirely more sober later in the week.
The inky blues and blacks and muted sages in this fabric made a more 
I love this minty lining, but I mustn't think on that too long. Do you see? My life is perpetually 
I've noticed that all my bag pictures tend to be taken either on my cupboard doors, or next to my sewing books. I am limited in that I am terrified of taking them out of my sewing room into territory that may be home to the odd cat hair, and so a pattern has emerged in my limited 
And then after a spate of Tabitha bags, this bag below is based on the 
It took many emails of outfit photos and colour swatches to find just the right shade of olive and lime to go with her outfit, and actually when the chosen fabric eventually arrived I was utterly shocked by the colour of it - the fabric swatches that we had been looking at on the 
In a fit of wildness I thought I'd put this one onto a chair to photograph. The little sash on the chair is a matching band for the lady's hat, and below is the inside of her bag...the dash of cream seems to do much to tone down the intensity of this print.
Anyway, back in May I blogged about 
I had other things that I was planning to show you today...but they were yellow and 
Thank you so much, lovely blog readers, for your restorative comments on my hedgehog crisis last week - you said so much to cheer me and your suggestions for 
Drawing a pattern for a hedgehog foxed me for longer than I might have imagined...but then I suppose it would - I don't often venture into the 
How seamlessly a failed 
But luckily for them, in the same way that a man's make-up free face never seems to look pasty and washed-out, a man with his pockets full of keys, money, phones and all the other 
The other man requested that his should have a Velcro flap to keep the iPhone securely in place. I like to believe that this is because he is planning on doing cartwheels and handstands and other things that might potentially cause his iPhone to go leaping wildly from his pocket.
While I was making these I noted down the need to research whether some sort of hand-held miniature sewing machine exists...there are some things that are just too small to fit onto the arm of the sewing machine and it took a frustratingly long time to find a way around this problem.
Somehow nearly two weeks have passed since my last post and I'm having a where-to-start sort of moment because I have so many things to blog about. But it's Sunday, the sunshine is unbelievably zingy, and I am feeling a little weary after a family game of 
But they were too delicious not to unfold and gaze upon properly and then put into colour order. Which could be done with wild abandon when I realised that no amount of folding and refolding could recapture how perfectly aligned they'd been.
And then for some local loveliness: there are not often things that make me gasp with delight in my nearest sewing shops...so imagine my excitement to walk in and find myself faced with these stacks of Arcadia fat quarters filling the 
With a custom order for a couple of pencil rolls to make up, I finally found myself prompted into action on redesigning them before I made a new batch last week. My mother, who is the font of both wonderful frippery and downright practicality, had long ago told me that, despite the opportunities for 
However, not everyone has a dog and it will only be a fraction of pencil roll purchasers who have hopes that their roll might be dual-purposed in this way....which is why I have heeded my mother's wise advice and redesigned my rolls to have 
And how could one not go 
And one of those sweet little houses and trees found their way onto the front of one of the pencil roll holders - I would have loved this when I was small. It reminds me of some yellow and red hair bobbles that I had that were made from a plasticised fabric and featured a hot 
Some of these will find their way into my shop within the next week...which I feel I can now say with much relief, having lost my shop (and email - horrors!) for 24 hours due to strange server problems. But it's over now, and I can breathe again. How oddly attached one becomes to one's website - it feels like an extension of myself and for it not to be there felt tantamount to suddenly being told that my ear lobe had gone missing. Mr Teacake tells me that despite the fact that I pay nothing for his web services, I am somehow more demanding than any of his real clients. 
Happy tulips...
Anyway, there is so much more to tell, but not quite enough time to tell it in, so I shall leave you with this photograph of the wonderful 
A couple of weekends ago I was photographing the roses when Mr Teacakes came and stood beside me. Before I could turn to look at him properly I caught a glimpse of our shadows on the lawn and let out a delighted squeal, for in my somewhat wild imagination, we temporarily looked like a 
Anyway, with making your own fun in mind, I have meant to blog about these 
Inside the bag are a random and rather jaunty collection of fabric shapes and you are invited to use them to fashion your own monster. This is right in so many ways - for by its very definition, a monster is a creature of the imagination that can look any way you might conjure it to be, and so they were able to set about positioning their fabrics with gusto, actively eschewing two symmetrically placed eyes or a properly placed jumper. Fabric shapes were traded, possible combinations giggled over and finally, fantastical one-eyed, 
This week I seem to have sewed at a snail's pace and am staggered at my own lack of productivity - how did it take two whole days to make six pencil rolls? I think it may be the distractingly lovely presence of Mr Teacakes working in the same room in between hospital appointments. SQUEAMISH READERS: PLEASE STOP HERE. One of Mr Teacake's games of football ended in disaster last week when he collided with the goal keeper as he went to shoot and broke his finger. His appointment with the hand specialist this week confirmed that he has broken his knuckle and finger very badly and will need an operation to have metal pins put in it, in the hope that he will recover the use of it. This is no small thing for him when his job designing websites relies on him being able to click a mouse all day and his guitar requires that he is in possession of all his fingers.
Firstly, welcome to anyone who is 
I have been finishing off some custom orders for t-shirts today, as well as making some more bibs up for my shop...which is good, because yesterday I achieved virtually nothing as it was so lovely and 
I took this photo during a four-hour long 
Half-term has been whizzing by and after the 
I've also made this co-ordinating tissue holder and herb teabag holder that are heading off to New York soon. Once finished I happened to put them down next to the new bag that you may remember I'd blogged about making in my last post...I love it when one stumbles quite unintentionally across 
Last week I spent much of my time working on a new bag design. I recently sat down in a shop next to Joanne (we were there for the long haul, so it seemed a sensible thing to do) when I noticed that she had a 
My lovely Mama popped round while I was mid-make. She has become so used to the constant production line that dominates my room that she has long since ceased to notice whatever it is that I'm working on and gets down to the happy business of tea-drinking and chatting while I cut things out and scuttle round trying to 
I created a narrow horizontal flap of material to visually tie up the two pleats of colour on either side, and have done the same thing inside to give the internal pockets a little more interest and detail.
I enjoyed making it so much that the minute I'd finished I started on this creamy lemony version, which is destined for my shop once I've taken some proper photographs of it.
Here's the inside purse and phone pockets:
I really want to make one of these bags for myself, but feel utterly indecisive as to what colour will go best with all my summer clothes...you'd think that I might just make them up in every colour...but somehow I find that I feel guilty making things for myself when I should be putting them in my shop. 
1 x zip (it can start off at any size, but should be cut down to measure 8" exactly)
So remember: Main fabric face up. Zipper facing down. Lining face down. Now sew! After you've flipped the fabrics round the right way it should look like this:
Now, it's time to stop faffing around with zips and start making your fabric into a make-up bag or pouch (.JPG)
Sew right around the perimeter of the material (above, I'm halfway through), leaving a 2" turning gap in the bottom of the lining.
Then put the lining back into the bag and relax. If my pattern has gone according to plan and I haven't omitted a vital instruction, you should now be in possession of some 
Well, the pause from sewing is only in the form of this blog post actually, as my machine has barely been turned off as I have been busy designing a new bag, but I suddenly felt more like doing a cat report than anything else. When we got our lovely cats in January I knew that we were primarily getting them for the little Teacakes and that there would be many sacrifices on my part...the copious hairs, closed sewing room door and hours of extra housework I have got used to...but the one thing I couldn't get used to was coming downstairs to find mice and other creatures racing around the kitchen when I was least expecting them. I tried to think positively and view them as the thoughtfully caught catty gifts that I knew they were, but I'm just not that good around nature and so in the end I avoided going downstairs during the day as I was too terrified by what I might find. I also began to obsessively remove any potential creature hiding places...the recycling trug was removed, my plastic bag carrier was hung elsewhere, the coat rack was 
So imagine my delight when I dreamt up the idea of a cat house for those times when I'm not there to let them in...and then my even greater delight when I discovered that this was not an original idea and that there were already whole companies in existence dedicated to creating lovely cat houses. And even better, one that would agree to paint their usually brown cat house a nice shade of willow green before they posted it off to me. It even has a window that Bella & Honey can peep through, space for a 
Above is a picture of Honey peeping out through the 
I finally feel that the cats aren't just here for the smaller Teacakes and it actually makes my heart do somersaults when I call for Bella and she bounds excitedly back from several gardens away, leaping over flowerbeds, and then making a lovely little chirruping noise when she performs an emergency stop next to my legs. In the same way that one does with a newborn baby, so much time can be lost just watching cats and admiring their lovely features. These photos were taken last Sunday when I was meant to be getting everything ready for the start of the week, but found that it was actually far more fun to laze on the grass with Mrs Belushi.
I write this post with all the joy of a person who has just unexpectedly found an unopened packet of chocolate covered hobnobs at the back of the cupboard, when only moments earlier she had thought that the house was entirely lacking in anything nice to nibble upon. There is double excitement to be had from realising that for perhaps the first time in my life I had actually put something nice in the cupboard and then forgotten about it for several weeks...how I have always longed to be the sort of person that does that and to be able to 
So it is all rather thematic that for this blog post I have surrounded myself with fairy cakes and 
Here is the finished version of the bib that is being stitched a the top of this post.
I was very tempted to put my labels beneath the applique pictures...just because I found the colours so pleasing and 
Anyway, 
The brown one is an 
He has asked me to make him a t-shirt with a large black bat on it. I love that he thinks up what he would like and puts requests in...and it makes me realise how far off the mark I normally am with trying to second-guess what they might like. I never would have thought of that.
Anyway, today the heating is on, the hobnobs are being eaten and a feeling of 
The Christmas before last I had made 
In theory Ian's lyric pad is sacrosanct...but rather wickedly the children and I occasionally write messages to him in there. Luckily these make him laugh more than they make him want to chase us around the house with a fork.
Anyway, I was so pleased when Lisa asked me if I would be happy to make one of these notebook covers as the guitar applique is one of the things that I have most enjoyed designing. And I loved doing it a second time around even more...for a whole sewing year has passed and I felt more confident in how to make it this time. It's amazing how much you change the way that you sew over the course of a year... Mr Teacakes noticed this too and was a little less delighted by this improvement than I was. 
Oddly though, the week before Lisa asked me to make this for her, I had made Mr Teacakes a second covered notebook as one of his Christmas presents, this time based around his other love: playing football. For Ian this cannot be confined to a 'football season' - his love for it is so great that this is a year-round activity and he can be found meeting for friendly games even when there are a couple of inches of snow on the ground or the pitch is completely frozen. On his return I had noticed that the first thing he would do was race upstairs and write down on scraps of paper the stats for each game of how many goals had been scored and by whom. So for Christmas I decided to make him a small notepad cover so that he had an official score book. Unable to cope with the maths of creating a black and white ball with hexagons on it, I decided to try to recreate a 
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