Friday 29 June 2012

Baby Bricks (with a lamentable lack of photos)


I've made these personalised baby bricks three times now. I love them!

The first time I made them I'd left myself very little time to make a baby gift but really wanted to make something rather than buy. So, I went for something uncomplicated and relied on the fabric to do the work for me. What could be easier than five stuffed bricks?





So the fabric? I found another great online store: Gone to Earth where I bought the Joel Dewberry Modern Meadow Electric Blue Fabric Pack.

These bricks were made with four inch squares of fabric cut from four different designs and a coordinating plain fabric. To add some structure I used a medium weight iron-on interfacing on all fabric. The letters were appliqued to the plain fabric using felt (bond-a-webbed in place) and embroidery thread.


Each brick is comprised of two different patterned fabrics and a solid. My tip is to assemble them as per the diagram here. Finally, I stuffed each brick with toy stuffing and hand-sewed the final seam.

The next time I made these was for my own Treacle's first birthday. And you know what? There's no photo of them. I better go and fix that now.



Watch this space



I used the same technique but to pad out the number of bricks I appliqued shapes on two of the bricks.

I tried to make them fun rather than ornamental by adding some sound. Two bricks have a crinkle feature - I backed one square with cereal packet paper (inspired by this post on taggies). One brick has a bell  - a craft bell like these (although bought from my local sewing shop) is suspended (ahem, thread and sticky tape!) inside a plastic ball from a Kinder Egg which is then centred in the stuffing. I wish I had photos of them in progress. Next time.

And finally, I made these again for another friend using the same fabric selection as the first time. As usual it was a last minute affair and I don't have photos. Sigh.








Thursday 28 June 2012

Converting from inches to centimetres

If you spend a lot of time on sewing blogs and love US patterns such as those from Colette, Oliver + S and Amy Butler, you probably work in inches much of the time. That's cool, my tape measure can deal with that. But uh oh, what if you want to order fabric from a UK site or shop and need to know your requirement in centimetres? Ugh. It's a daily irritation.

The Convert Units iPhone app has been indispensable. Love.