Fabric Storage Basket

Well, its Good Friday so I hope you are all planning to cram as much chocolate into your cake holes as possible over the next few days... I know I am!

So issue 2 of the new Simply Sewing Magazine turned up last week (it was a bit over a month and I eagerly anticipated its arrival!). It has a lot of cute little patterns in it, my favourites being the stuffed felt dinosaur which I am totally going to make, this fabric basket and a cute pintucked top. The pintucked top is however very similar to the free Colette sorbetto pattern though it does make a cute little variation and has some very nice dipped hems.

What I think I like most about this magazine though it that it contains loads of simple, yet lovely small makes. Things that don't require a huge amount of fabric or time and whats so perfect about this is that its totally a way of me sewing stuff out of the massive amounts of fabric I already have lying around doing nothing.

Now don't get me wrong, I am terrible at using fabric. I buy its because its pretty and then I fear using it for making something which turns out to be a huge failure, or something which I don't actually like. Well, time to get over that fear, I need to get using some of this stuff I'm hording!.

So this months issue came with a little floral tea towel and some patterns on how to best use the tea towel to make it into something else. These included a roll bag, a lunchbox, a pinny or cutlery roll. They are all very nice ideas but do you know what, non of them are practical to my life (and the idea here is to destash, not create stuff I don't need). So instead of making one of those I used the pattern in the magazine for this fabric storage basket and turned this tea towel into storage instead. 

The pattern called for some lining fabric as well so I used this teal and black fat quarter which I bought about 2 years ago from ebay. Its a lovely colour match and makes a very nice lining in my opinion. The nice thing about this basket is its also reversible. 

The pattern was really easy to follow, just a few straight lines and folds here and there and you have a basket. I did omit the interfacing as the free tea towel was pretty sturdy, it is a little floppy though so you might want to use it anyway. It doesn't fall over though so is perfectly servicable. Its now sat in the living room keeping my current knitting project in order instead of being strewn all over the side! perfect.

 

Have you been reading the new sewing mag? do you have any favourite patterns, or makes from it you want to show off? Please feel free to leave a linky below.

Happy Easter :)

At least my craft room is tidy!!

 

Wow, this weekend was a scorcher! What were you up to? Did you make the most of the glorious outdoors? We certainly did, we spent pretty much all of Saturday outdoors tidying the garden, sunbathing, putting up and enjoying the new BBQ (we are such amateurs at making a BBQ it was 3 hours until we got food, we were famished!!). Because of all this sun, and the fact I am truly a ginger, I think we both tried to stay indoors a bit on Sunday to make sure we didn't end up with heat stroke or severe burns. 

 

So what did we do, well we still pretty much just potted about, I think Mr Fox is still enjoying the act he has no pressure to do anything. I actually took some time to sort out, tidy and have a little but of a clear out of my craft room. I know some of you will have seen pictures of this before, but I haven't had it on this blog yet so I thought, whilst its tidy, its the perfect opportunity to show you all what its looking like.  

You can see that I have a lot of stuff horded in here and I have gotten rid of about 6 bin bags off stuff this year alone. I think it goes without saying that I am well and truly a craft horder. Though, as you have seen from my blog, I am always making one thing or another and it is actually quiet rare that I won't already have what I need before I try out a new craft idea I have seen on the internet. I think this is the biggest problem about not having a particular craft to concentrate on, I have too much of everything! 

My main reason for attempting another major clear out was because we will have to move the kitchen in to this room whilst we are living without one. Its the only room which will be away from all the brick dust which has suitable space to be able to do a small amount of cooking and has room to store the plates etc. I think I have managed to make enough room for it now though so I can start on emptying the kitchen cupboards and getting rid of even more stuff!

 

I am definitely finding that I am having less time to get into any major craft projects at the minute like I suspected I would. I am just enjoying being able to spend time with my husband and I don't want to be stuck indoors whilst we are having a summer out there. I do have some smaller and less labour intensive projects in my to do pile though so I think I will try to get on with those in the coming weeks.

Finally I bought some of my favourite fabrics which I have been eyeing up on The Village Haberdashery website recently; these awesome foxes and kitties.I only bought a FQ of each because I had no idea what I wanted to do with them but I think I will actually purchase a little bit more and cover some cushions with them (you can never have too many cushions right?).

I would LOVE to see pictures of other peoples craft rooms, so if you have one of your own and you want to send me a picture, or a link to a post showing off your space I would really like to see it. I can never see enough inspirational ideas for storing all this craftyness.