haberdashery Archives - Purl and Seam

For quite a while now I’ve been longing for some enormous cushions for our sofas. The kind you can all snuggle into on movie night. Which can be thrown on the floor for small peeps to lie on. Which make a comfy place for you to rest your head for a quiet nap. Our 20″ cushions really weren’t cutting it, so when I saw the 26″ Inner cushion pad at Ikea, I snapped up 4 of them without hesitation.

I’d also been struggling to find some fabric which would co-ordinate with the existing curtains, was tough enough to stand up to family life, but which wasn’t so expensive that I’d have hissy fits every time a child went within 500 yards of it. Ikea came to the rescue with their Lenda fabric @ £4 a metre.

So far so good. At this point I’d only spent £28 on the cushion pads and 3 metres of fabric. I just needed thread and zips. But 26 ” zips retail at about £2.70 more or less. That’s £10.80 for the 4 zips…about 40% of the cost of the pads and fabric. I’m sorry…I’m not falling for that.

Enter the old soft-furnishers favourite secret….continuous zip.

You buy it off the roll in metres. It’s about a £1.00 a metre.

The little packs of sliders are about £1.30. They are really easy to attach…this video shows it very clearly.

So thanks to our good friend the continuous zip, I kept the cost down to about £8.50 per cushion and now we can squish on the sofas to our hearts content.

Result! Now I really must do something about the covers on those smaller cushions. 😉

I must be the last person in the sewingverse to make one of Rae’s delightful Geranium dresses.

Our little friend Vicky turned 2 last week, so it seemed the perfect opportunity to finally bite the bullet on this pattern. It’s available in 2 size ranges, 0-5 and 6-12, and I bought the bundle with both sizes as I suspected that a certain Ms Button would have her beady and stylish eye on this once she saw it made up.

The fabric is Cattitude in Cream by Lizzie House, purchased from M is for Make (where it’s listed as Purrfectly Happy). Look at those little faces! And their cheeks! Totally adorable.

I was super impressed with M is for Make. Not only do they have a delightful selection of fabrics, but I placed my order on Tuesday morning and the fabric was in my hot little hands the very next day. That’s the kind of fabric service we all love, no?

This is a great pattern too. The Husband passed comment at how quickly I had made this dress. It comes together perfectly and very quickly. The dress is lined in white cotton lawn, which you can just see peeping out of the neckline here, and I added a lining to the skirt and hand stitched the bodice lining in place as I didn’t want a line of stitches showing on the bodice. Even so it was done and dusted in an afternoon.

The hard bit was the buttons. I really wanted to pick out the orange on the cat’s cheeks. They do say the Devil is in the details. Thankfully the button stall on Chorley market is something of a marvel and has a good range of colours.

I think they’re a really good match.

I really enjoyed sewing this little dress. As anticipated Ms Button was dropping hints so big they could break your toes, so expect to see some more iterations of this in the very near future.

But first I’ve got her Spring Showers Jacket cut out and ready to sew.

PS…top photographic tip. Don’t photograph a cream dress against a cream cupboard in bright sunlight as you’re dashing out of the door, already late, and with a small boy throwing the screaming ab-dabs because….well I still don’t know what that was all about. Anyway, if you do, you’ll get super-washed out photos that even PhotoShop won’t be able to rescue. See Exhibit A above! Sigh!

Continuous zip…the unsung hero of home sewn soft furnishing

A Geranium with Cattitude

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