Stash Avalanche

Sewing for other people

You may now turn over your paper.

Here's the thing:  call me fussy, posessive or whatever, but I generally only make things for people who I know are going to appreciate what I made. If I know that my gift is going to get stomped on and left out in the mud, I don't give it. I put love into the things I make and I suppose I expect people to respect that. 

This includes food by the way, but we're talking crafting here today.

Conversely, giving hand made things to people I hardly know can be an eye opener in terms of whether they are my kind of person or not. Give them something I made with love and see what they do - a distracted "that's nice" and forget about it, or actually appreciate my time and effort, and be grateful for my thoughtfulness.

Outside the cozy bubble that is handmade blog and crafting land, making things by hand still seems, to some people at least, to be the cheap way out, with a nice box with Gap or whatever on the front being the preferred option. Strange that spending time and making an effort takes a lower place than buying something made by a machine or a poorly paid worker half way round the world.

I'm not sure if I'm taking things too personally (after all, once I give it it's theirs to do as they wish with it) or whether I have the right to expect respect. I think mostly think the latter.

Discuss.

Sun hat #2

I made another one! This time for Stashlet.

Having had a bit of a ponder on how to construct this hat, I hit on the idea of bias binding - not round the edge of the brim as previously mentioned, but round the brim-crown seam, like this...

I have to say the inside of this hat brings me great joy.

Using this method makes a reversible hat - you could even put bias on both sides if you wanted. Unfortunately I was too clever and sewed a name tape into the crown, so this particular hat is not reversible, but the orange+spots combo is so fabulous I may have to make another one.

Here's what I did:

• sew brims together and top stitch
• sew crowns and tack together
• create sandwich of bias binding (wrong side out) + brim  (right side out) + crown (inside out) and sew all together
• turn up bias and hand sew edge to crown (but through one layer only)

If I do this method again, I'll try to take photos of the sandwich bit because I'm not entirely sure my description is clear.

ps. fabrics all from Ikea except the bias which is some I made from an unidentified fat quarter a while ago.

 

A hat for Master H

Stashlet has a friend at playgroup who turned one the other day, so I decided to make him a sun hat (not that we have sun at the moment but there's nothing like a bit of optimism to get you through to summer, is there?).

It's the same pattern that I used for Stashlet's hat last summer. Like the sweatshirt I showed you the other day, it's from the Burda 9522 pattern. This time I made the largest size (18" head circumference) which is a wee bit too big for Stashlet, and will be a bit to big for Master H at the moment, but I'm hoping that it will fit him by the time summer comes.

The fabric is some Ikea heavyweight cotton (which I bought ages ago to make an Onion Uniform Jacket and still haven't got round to it) and a polycotton (I think) gingham lining.

Having made this hat once already, and not being very impressed with the construction instructions, I decided to go my own way with putting it together:

• sew the two brims together and topstitch them
• sew the tops and sides together to end up with two separate crowns
• stitch the brim to the outer crown
• turn under and baste the seam allowance on the crown lining
• pin and topstitch the crown lining inside the outer hat

You don't get a reversible hat this way, but all the raw edges are concealed so it looks nice and neat. The only way I can think of to do a truly reversible hat would be to sew the lining and outer separately, put them together and bind the brim edge with a bias binding. I intend to make at least a couple of sunhats for Stashlet this summer, so I will try to do one of each construction and see how they turn out.

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In other news, my mother came for a visit, I've started an exceedingly part-time job at my LFS, and Stashlet is now with a childminder three mornings a week, so unfortunately blogging (as you will have noticed) has got even more infrequent.

My distance learning course has to be completed by the end of this month - I just have an essay left to write but having had a year's break in the middle of the course, there's a lot of re-reading that needs doing first (sigh).

But some positive blog related news: MrG's friend, Mr C, has given us one of his old laptops, so once we've put Windows on it (it has Linux Ubuntu at the moment which drives us mad), I'll be able to blog on the kitchen table and not wake Stashlet up with creaking floor boards every time I try to get to my pc. So small hurrahs and hopefully things will improve blog-wise next month.

Happy Tuesday!