Tractor Bag

We went to a 1st Birthday party today - lots of party food and cake! Plus wine for the grown-ups which makes it a really good party as far as I'm concerned...

Birthday boy William is a couple of weeks younger than my Fred and his brother in only a few weeks younger than my Sam so Emma and I have had pretty synchronistic pregnancies!

Anyway, with a second boy, you know that they probably don't need/want any more plastic toys and while my usual choice would be a book, sometimes it's nice to make something useful, and since, in my opinion, you can never have too many bags, I thought I'd make a bag for boys's stuff.

When I was doing the boys' bedroom, I bought a single duvet on ebay with loads of transport vehicles on and used it to make a blind for the window and a sort of blind to cover the built in bookshelves that I didn't want to have to clear out.

From the leftover fabric I cut out a tractor and fused some interfacing onto it to give it some shape. Then I cut enough blue canvas fabric to make the bag and zigzag stitched around the tractor to applique it onto the front of the bag. A couple of lenghts of canvas to make the straps (folded in half, stitched down the side, turned inside out and a line of stitching down each side) and a useful bag for boys' stuff.

Hope they like it!

Key Board

I love a system and I love a bit of organisation. Needless to say, I don't always follow the system or put things where they're supposed to be but if you don't have something to at least aim for then chaos will be the result.

Take keys. The system is that keys, especially car keys, go on the worktop just inside the back door. Easy, first thing you do when you get in. That way, if I need to move J's car to get mine out I can. And vice versa. However, you will quite often hear someone yelling "where are your KEYS? Why aren't they here?"

And shopping lists. I seem to need to go to the supermarket every other day. How can that be? I write a comprehensive list, buy everything I need, and yet, two days later... Anyway, the thing about the list is that it's a random bit of recycled paper (envelopes normally) lying around that I have to search for to add something new.

So, today's project was to combine these two things into one wall hung piece of organisation. Here's how I did it.

You'll need:
An old picture frame, ideally in a co-ordinating colour

Card to fit - also co-ordinating

Something to hang keys off - I used simple nails

Silver pen or other embelisher
Bulldog clip/peg

Take the glass out of the frame; you won't need this. Hammer the nails (or screw little hooks) in to the bottom of the frame, evenly spaced.

Write appropriate comments around the card or decorate in your preferred fashion. Attach the bulldog clip to the card - I used velcro in case I want to remove it, but you could just glue it on. Assemble the frame, hang on the wall and admire your handiwork. Then hang the keys, and make a start on tomorrow's shopping list.

And done in the time it takes to make tea!

So today's project was to combine these two

The beginning

Ooh, my first blog post. Really quite daunting. I had thought that I should think it through a bit before starting but then just decided to sod it, start typing and see how it goes.

We bought our current house mainly because the loft had been boarded out and had a couple of velux windows (view a view of York Minster if you really stretch!). J used it as a games room for the first few years but at the beginning of this year I took it over as a sewing room. So much space, so much opportunity to make stuff. I dug out all my random bits of fabric and half finished projects and vowed to try and actually USE some of it - instead of saving it for who knows what. And there seems to be a LOT to get through.

The world of craft blogging has been great at giving me ideas for what to make - I'll put up a list of my favourite sites soon - but sometimes I spend more time doing this 'research' and planning things than actually doing... So I figured starting a blog might give me the motivation to produce more. We'll see.

So, intro over, I'll see about doing something I can talk about tomorrow.