Now as you probably realise I don’t actually need any more fabric, ever, really but in the spirit of supporting small businesses and the joy of having the postman deliver lovely things I have been adding a little bit to my stash.

I am not ill but just not leaving the house for a long time apart from the occasional short walk if the weather warms up. I always react badly to any type of infection and it aggravates my arthritis so I am in for the duration. Thankfully I have managed to get online delivery of all food and other essentials as well as fabric 🙂

A girl can never have too much Liberty can she? I think the original phrase is something like too many shoes, or diamonds, or something pretty useless when you have not left the house at all for a week. But stash, especially in the form of fabric gorgeousness, is just what you need in times like this. Beautiful and useful.

These lovely sets come from On Liberty Street on Ebay, a new seller to me but one that I will be using again.I hard a hard time choosing but went with my favourite colours in the end. These are 5 inch squares so will be good for doll making and quilt blocks.

I am thinking that this gorgeous rainbow set might be a nice addition in the future.Picture from the shop site.

I also bought some pastel cottons from Snowflakes and Strawberries on Ebay as I am actually running out of some quilting cotton colours. These are 10 inch squares.

I couldn’t resist buying some of the laces, ribbons, pretty binding and ric rac in this shop either, especially as the ric rac is a small enough scale to use for doll dresses.

I am going to pair these flowery ribbons in the bottom of the picture and the matching ric rac with some white fabric from my stash for Barbie dresses that I am planning to make a start on today. Having now worked out the fitting for the top of the evening dress pattern I have decided that this design would look lovely with a fuller skirt as a summer dress.

The third of the evening dresses is just about finished, I am just waiting for a delivery of press studs as I have actually run out of them. One of my lovely readers commented about possibly making a Tudor Barbie dress after reading my last post which sent me down a whole new Pinterest rabbit hole that I will blog about later. I had not really considered that people were doing this, though I have seen the Mattel historically inspired dolls, but yes historical costumes for Barbie is a thing and it is gorgeous to behold.

I now have even more new projects to consider which is diverting me somewhat from my progress through the WIPs. I am going to have to try and be very, very strict with myself over the next few months. I am thinking one finish of an old project a week before I am allowed anything new sounds reasonable.

I am going to be working from home until probably late summer at the earliest, we may meet up for some of the admin tasks in June but we are working on the basis that it is all being done remotely so for me that means 2 extra hours in a work day that I would normally have spent commuting. That and the fact that I keep waking up at six is giving me lots more hours in a day. I really, really wish we were not in this situation at all but it helps to look at the positives and at least I have plenty to do.

I hope that you are all staying safe, take care and thanks for visiting, it is the virtual contact that I am having with blogging and Facebook friends and the You Tubers that I watch that is helping me feel positive about this awful situation so I really appreciate it.

I really think these dinosaurs are the cutest things that I have ever made, I did love the dolls I made last year but think these are just so sweet. They are for my great niece for Christmas, she will be 3 in Feb and loves dinosaurs.

The pattern for most of them comes from a fab site, MoochiOochi Crafts, with so many free patterns for felt toys and I will definitely come back to this site. I think the stegosaurus might just be my favourite one.

I found it through a You Tube tutorial and it is very helpful on how to put the dinosaurs together though I used running stitch then stitched it again to close the gaps rather than blanket stitch as I was not sure how neat I could make it. I just adapted the adult brontosaurus to make the babies.

I was tempted by some gorgeous camping themed fabric the other night, I cannot even remember where I was when I saw this but it is from the Riley Blake ‘I’d rather be glamping range’.

I know I will not be able to use this for about 3 years but thought that I would rather get it now to add to stash and then when I hopefully get my little camper van it can be turned into a cushion. It is so cute! I got it from Sew Scrumptious Fabrics with low postage and very fast delivery.

Well I am off to Spain tomorrow, I haven’t seen Mum for 6 months so am really looking forward to spending lots of time with her and lots and lots of time doing not much in the warm. I am taking some cross stitch with me to make start on the ornaments for next year and will also be working on some more knitted animals for various friends.

Take care, have a very happy Christmas if you are celebrating, thanks for visiting and see you in a few weeks!

Traditionally the song goes, ‘I will wear the green willow’, and this is a traditional folk song from the early 1800s, a version of which was released by Steeleye Span in 1975.

My hat, however, is to go with my Steampunk jacket for this weekend’s event at Lincoln Asylum. I wanted a sewing themed hat and am so very pleased with the way that it has turned out.

The items are all stuck and pinned on as I only want this to be a temporary decoration, hopefully they will survive the journey and the event itself.

The usual things are there but I have added some unusual things from my little collection of vintage needlework tools.You can see some lace bobbins in the picture above.

I also have a set of small crochet type hooks which you can see in these photos, these are for darning stockings to enable you to pick up runs and also a glove darning tool lying on the brim in the photo below , the rounded ends were meant to enable you to darn the fingertips and are slightly different sizes.

I am hoping to use some of these things when I do my Make do and Mend talk in the future, more about that in later posts as this I something I am developing at the moment.

I downloaded some images from Google and printed them to make the needle card and button card and am very pleased with the way they turned out.The buttons are just stuck on and are some of my mother of pearl ones from my stash.

I have also made a little bag with a pin with some charms on, just need to add the ribbon drawstrings to it. This was the rest of the tablecloth from the back of the jacket and the reverse is the same embroidery as well.

I am really looking forward to the event, love seeing all the wonderfully creative things that people have come up with! I am really hoping that the weather will be good as well as I have a pink parasol to complete the outfit.

Hope you all have a good Bank Holiday weekend and will be back soon with some fab pictures.Thanks for visiting.

On Sunday we were WWW1 Land Army girls for an event called Bonnets to Breeches at Clumber Park. This was a dramatisation of a short story about the WWW1 Land Girls who were at Clumber, written by one of the property volunteers and performed by Talegate Theatre.

One of the things that Ellie found while researching was this wonderful video where talking cows were used to appeal to women to join, so we did 😉

Here we are in our costumes, all sourced from charity shops.She even made herself this wonderful badge.

The production took place in the walled kitchen garden and was a walking performance with each scene taking place in a different part of the garden. It was performed five times during the day by the four actors, assisted by guides who were all Clumber Park volunteers and during the day about 130 people saw the production.

While the performances were taking place and in between them our role was to be in another part of the garden with some of the old tools to display them to the public. We had a lovely time talking to lots of people who remembered using the tools we had and to lots of children who had to guess what they were used for.Here is Ellie demonstrating the mattock.

I also got to see the performance and to hear a very moving talk on the history of the Land Girls in both world wars by Cherish Watton who runs the Women’s Land Army website.

The walled garden is beautiful, I have only been there before in winter and it looked stunning with great displays of my favourite alliums.

This was such a lovely day, I really enjoyed myself and would love to be able to do more volunteering there if I can in the future.Here are all of the cast and volunteers at the end of the day.

I am still working on the headress for Kate, some busy stitching in front of the TV, a nice relaxing thing to do after marking all day. I am just going to attach the final bits of braid and smaller pearls and then I can reveal all.

Hopefully we will have lovely weather this weekend so she can wear it and I can get some action shots for you. Hope that you have a lovely rest of the week and a nice Bank Holiday weekend if you are in the UK.

Take care and thanks for visiting.

I wanted to make something for Ava’s first birthday next week but did not know what to do and didn’t have much time, only a few hours this weekend, so I did a little search earlier in the week and came across some very cute dolls.

After spending far too much time on Pinterest looking at all of the cute versions of this doll pattern that had been made, all in the name of research of course 🙂 I started the doll Saturday afternoon and had her finished on Sunday evening.

The sources for all these pictures can be found on my Pinterest sewing board.

I am very pleased with her, I have never made anything like this before, have often looked at stuffed toy patterns and thought that they were gorgeous but this is the first that I have attempted and apart from a couple of minor setbacks everything was very easy to do.

I am particularly pleased with the embroidered face, I spent quite a lot of time looking at different options then decided to embroider a whole eye but stopped halfway up, I think it looks quite lifelike.

I used a combination of two free patterns, the Black Apple Doll pattern for the body, arms and legs and the Josephine doll pattern for the head as I wanted a more rounded shape and cut my own hair pattern after looking at all of the photos on Pinterest. I also made some felt plaits which I sewed together before attaching to the head as the original doll has short hair.

I sewed the legs and arms onto the body before tacking it together but still had a few issues with that stage. I had to do the bottom seam 3 times to get the legs secured and then in the process of pulling the doll the right way out lost one of the arms. This is what it looked like yesterday afternoon.

The instructions say, ‘flip the body’,  but it was more like a, ‘Call the Midwife’, difficult birth scene 😉 Luckily the neonatal surgeons were on hand to re-attach the arm so all was good.

I made a little elasticated skirt and a flower bow to disguise where the sewing up of the head got a little bumpy. The body is the original dress for the doll but after seeing all the cute little skirts on the Pinterest dolls I had to make one. And there you have it, one very cute little doll and all made from stash, no new purchases at all.

Am very tempted to make some more of these, I love the split arms to give sleeves in some of the inspiration photos above and the cute little shoes, we shall see how much time I have to play later in the summer!

For future dolls I would like to try and get the arms laying flatter against the body and maybe play with the proportions of the arms as well. I am very pleased with this first one though.She has been sitting next to me all day helping me write my book chapter!

Take care and thanks for visiting.