I'm really excited about my big project for this week. There were several ideas floating around in my head that all came together at once. Let's see if I can make my thought stream understandable.
Before I get into the actual project, a few bits of background info:
For a while I've been carrying around a box with all of my sewing tools in it, but was bulky, inefficient, and definitely not cute.
For the wedding this past summer, we used about 3o yards of blue and green fabric to make tablerunners. Most of the fabric is clean and usable, so now I have a huge pile of fabric to find a way to reuse. I was planning to use it up in a quilt, but all of the pieces for the quilt barely made a dent in the stash.
Ok, with these two things in mind, I set out to make a cute, efficient, and portable sewing case. I have a pile of inspiring fabrics that I've been dying to dive in to, but since this project involved more precision sewing than I'd done before, I decided to use wedding fabric.
The case came together pretty well, and I had efficient and portable down, but because the fabric was plain, it wasn't scoring very high on the cute front.
See?
Around the time that I was getting frustrated with this project from many small mishaps along the way, a friend set up a group on Facebook to encourage creativity by challenging members to incorporate a weekly theme into their work. To kick things off, this week's theme was "Me."
In a flash of inspiration one night, I realized that I could get two birds with one stone by incorporating the theme into sprucing up my sewing case. I browsed through my folder of embroidery designs and found one that fit me perfectly:
I am a craft butterfly. I can't keep my mind on one project for too long and I'm constantly flitting between three or four different ones, always trying new things.
I traced the butterfly using Artists Graphite Transfer Paper followed up with my ever-useful Mark-B-Gone pen. I picked white for the main wings to tie in to the rest of the sewing case and to make sure that it stood out against the blue fabric. Then I just picked colors that made me happy and made a plan using MS Paint. I embroidered the butterfly onto a separate piece of the blue fabric, layered it with a white piece, and attached it like a patch so that I could later easily remove it and move it elsewhere if I wanted to. It took me about 8-9 hours to complete and is probably one of the more intricate things that I've embroidered.
Attached to the back of the sewing case, it makes me happy every time I use it.
Here it is all tied up and ready to go:
The sewing case that I made for myself definitely isn't perfect, but I learned a lot and changed the way I did a few things when I made this second one using some of my delicious fabric stash. I love the retro-inspired teal and brown circles on the main fabric, and how the stripes tie in perfectly.
The rounded corners really did me in for the butterfly case, so I changed to square corners and it was much easier. I like the look a lot better. I also made a mini needle book to fit into one of the pockets! It can serve as a pincushion as well. I'm planning to get this case up in the Etsy shop within the next day or so. Look for more fun sewing cases to come!
- Valerie
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