Monday 5 December 2011

Thift store fabrics

I love vintage fabrics.  Going to thrifts stores to look for these treasures are one of my favourite things to do (along with looking for vintage pyrex).  It's more than just vintage sheets though, there is a lot of unused fabric...from quilting cottons, flannels, apparel to home decor.  Here are a few of my recent finds:
 I think this one is so cool.  Here are a few closeups of these chic ladies:


My plan is to use it to make a large beach bag so that it showcases the print, which is very large scale.

I love the hilarious monkeys in this one:
I think this guy is my favourite:
The selvage says it's "Monkey Toile" by C.E. Tausch.  I was curious about the age of the fabric and the designer but a quick google search didn't get me anywhere.

Modern designer fabrics are great, but I like adding some more unique (and inexpensive) pieces to my stash as well. :)

Friday 2 December 2011

Another finish...I'm on a roll

With the motivation of knowing that I had a gift exchange with my work friends booked for today, I finished up another project.  Here is my version of a crayon/toy portfolio:
This is the front.  I added an initial to personlize it.  I added some sew in interfacing (aka a layer of some spare flannel and canvas) and quilted it (with my new walking foot!) to add some sturdiness to the cover.  I made a crayon portfolio before with canvas for the outside and cotton for the lining without any interfacing before but found it to be too flimsey looking.

Instead of doing a velcro enclosure, which I wasn't sure would keep things from falling out, I used a thick elastic that wrapped around to the back, as shown above.
Here's the inside (sorry, don't know why this pic turned out so horrible even though I took it at the same time with the same lighting), I made bigger gussetted pockets on the left for cars or other little toys and smaller gussetted pockets on the right for crayons with a pocket to hold a notepad in the middle.  I made it more complicated than the tutorials I've seen but I didn't want flat (non-gussetted) pockets because the cover would show bumps/bulges once you put anything in the pockets.  I had originally planned to add an extra flap to cover the crayons so that any fabric marked by the crayons would be hidden, but I was running out of time so I left that out.

I'm really happy with how it turned out and will need to make one for my little guy too (except with the extra flap to cover the crayons).