Sunday 26 April 2015

Playing with Scraps

My fabric stash has lately been greatly decreased in size, until I am left with a few fat quarters and a basket of scraps. Now that bootfair season is rolling round again, I hope to rectify this, but until then I have to satisfy my need to play with beautiful fabrics. It's all very tragic really.


So I decided to just have a play. I don't know about you, but if I get it into my head I'm about to embark on a huge, never-ending project the size of a king's bed, I'll often stall at the first hill. By which I mean I will get all my fabrics out, lay them on the floor, spend hours looking at them before deciding all my ideas were rubbish and I'd never finish it anyway.

I picked out a few of my favourite pieces to play with, with no sort of plan or idea where it would go.


Out of those, I chose these 11 scraps to use, because I thought they created a rather striking (if garish) colour palette. They really are scraps in the best meaning of the word; the smallest is smaller than a tea coaster.


I began laying them out on a plain white pillow cover. At first, I tried using them in a landscape way; a beach, maybe, with yellow seas and a red sailboat over a red beach (see below).


But that just wasn't working out. It felt rather too forced. So instead I picked up the two longest pieces (the straggly busy print cream and the square angle cut red flowers) and laid them next to eachother and bang there was a ladies' shoulders and arms. A few more pieces laid down later, and;


I swear, in my head, I heard an old bossy Yorkshire woman saying "'Ere, Sir, look at what your 'ounds 'ave done to my best pinny!"

Once I had fallen in love with my scrap fabric lady, I turned her over onto a piece of paper, so that I had the blank white sheet and a reverse of the fabric layout saved neatly to one side.


I ironed the white pillow case, and really ought to have ironed the scraps as well, but in one way I liked the rag-tag look of the old housekeeper and in another way I was very tired and the thought of more ironing, which I detest, was intolerable.


Because I'd decided that the "pinny" had been "'ad by the 'ounds" I then had to make it severely more raggedy and chewed up. So I took a fork to it, and scratched and scraped and tore and ripped and had a real good time.


I pinned the pieces down, to stop them flying away once I tried to sew them on. You could also hand sew them on, tack them on with large hand-sewn stitches, or simply sew them on one by one, but I like to make sure the picture doesn't get tilted or bent in a strange way under the machine.


Sewing it was a pain in the backside because I had not used enough pins. I took off the bottom three pieces to focus on the top, and after they were sewed returned to the bottom bits and repinned them on. If you feel like you're out of control, or something's going wrong, don't be afraid to stop and change something. Just because the book says Do it all in one Go, if you're struggling or your machine is getting in a tangle, just take it at your own pace.


She's not finished yet obviously, I have some ideas for free-machine embroidering her face, legs and hands. I might hand embroider the little quote at the bottom, so people can hear her voice like I did.


Just goes to show, even if all you have are a box of old, cut up raggedy scraps, you can still have some real good fun not worrying about wasting any of your newly bought precious stash!

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