This week in sewing, I tried a couple of new projects: storage for Hot Wheels cars and for crayons. Each one has little pockets to put the item into and then the whole thing rolls up and ties closed with a ribbon. The one for cars doubles as a playmat with a black ribbon stitched down the center with a yellow line to make it look like a road.
The car rollup was made using this tutorial and the crayon rollup used this tutorial. Both were easy to follow and were really quite similar in their construction. Using the models from these two tutorials, I think that I could make a rollup for any number of items, so I'm going to do some brainstorming to see what I might want to make some other ones for. Both of these are projects I'll definitely do again.
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| The cars do go all the way in the pockets. I just had them peeking out for the picture. |
The other thing that I worked on this week was the start to a quillow, using some Star Wars fabric. By the start of the quillow, I mean that I've done the quilt part but have not yet added the little pocket that will allow it to be folded up and used as a pillow (hence the quillow name). One of the moms in my moms' group showed me the ones that that had and I thought they were pretty neat, so I looked up several tutorials online. I didn't follow just one tutorial, but just used the ideas of various ones that I looked at.
Putting together the layers was tough. Since this was going to be sewn together and then flipped rather than sewn and then put a border on, I felt that the sides needed to match up pretty well so I could keep my seams straight. And that was quite a challenge, especially with cats (Guenevere mostly) trying to get onto the fabric every time I turned my head away for a split second. I think this was the hardest part.
As for the quilting, the difficulty there was just the size. I cleared off my table completely so that I could stretch it out as I was sewing each line (I just did straight lines based upon the lines in the fabric). I'm not sure that I'm ready to tackle a project of this size (and it's really not that large: about 42" x 72") anytime soon, which is sad because I also bought some Muppet fabric to make another one. I'm also not sure when I'll add the pillow pocket. I've already been using it as it is and so I fear that it is destined to remain just a quilt and not a quillow. But it's still a cool quilt!
So that's what's been going on in my sewing world this week. I haven't had a lot of sewing time and when I have had craft time, I've been focusing a little more on knitting. But I got some really neat fabric yesterday and I'm looking forward to making more rollups and trying out some other projects that are in my queue, so I hope to find a little more time to sew this week.
