Christmas is coming, the pickledweasel's getting fat...

I need to stop eating honeyed salted cashew nuts, or I'll not fit into my nice new Christmas skirt tomorrow :( Things are Christmas a-go-go here in the pickledweasel household, despite me having a throat infection and munchkin getting over a stinking cold. We've been making Christmas decorations:

And cards:

And hair slides for Christmas parties:

And the icing on the cake, a man-bag for mr pickledweasel:

We decided to just spend £10 on each other this year (excluding presents for munchkin), as we're a bit short after the loft conversion. The bag came in at about £7.50, although that's kind of cheating because I calculated the cost based on the material used, so the whole yard of the amaaaaaaazing coffee cup fabric cost £6.60, but I've calculated it as £3.30 because I used half a yard. And I'm not including the £8.00 postage because it came from America :D Any ideas what I can make from the leftover half yard?

The denim was an offcut from Abakhan. The slider and the d-ring were actually a bargain - I've yet to find reasonably priced ones online, especially sliders, does anyone have a secret magic website that does bag making haberdashery at sensible prices? Anyway, I found this bag for £1.25 from our local Winners:

And cannibalised it. I'll use the zips and the canvas for a pouch I'm making for my sister-in-law, so it won't have died in vain :) I've not done much more Christmas making, just a hat and snood set for my neice - photos of her modelling it to follow - and I've made a mountain of gingerbread to give to friends and family using this recipe.

So here's wishing you all a very happy Christmas, and hoping you have a lovely day with family and friends. I'll just be on this big comfy chair over here, with a scarf round my neck, a hot toddy and this family sized bag of cashews :) x x x

Just one more, and then I'll stop. Promise.

I am a bit addicted to this pattern. After the last lot of shenanigans with the seams and turning through, this one sewed up like a dream. But I'm still not going to make them to sell, i value my sanity :) If anyone else is though, use recycled jeans, they work really well!

This one was made on a rainy Lancashire day, but it's being shipped off to sunny Australia, so I thought the tropical blue flowers were quite appropriate. It's going to a very lovely friend who emigrated there about 5 years ago, and who is sorely missed. She has two beautiful boys who I last saw 6 months ago - the octopus messenger bag was made for Ben, her eldest.

I would dearly love to make the trip out to see her one day. Maybe after the neverending loft fund has been repaid. My only worry would be that we wouldn't want to come back...

Show me the money.

This year is turning out to be pretty expensive. Along with the twenty squillion pounds we paid for the neverending loft conversion, we have had to repair the washing machine, then replace the washing machine, replace the hoover, replace the iron, and now the central heating is broken. Not broken in a major way, but it'll still cost about £150 to fix it.


Add to that the extra bill we have from our builder for changing the stair spindles in the loft (they were twirly, and they just weren't right. Now they're straight and they're lovely. Yes it was important and worth the money. Now be quiet) and using better quality wood on the cupboard doors (we're staining it rather than painting), and we're a bit strapped for cash.


I'm still finding things to put on eBay, and we're selling nearly all of our dvds on Music Magpie, but we need more moolah. So one of the obvious solutions is for me to try and sew up a bit of cash. My mum, the lovely grandma pickledweasel, has a little business making and selling glass jewellery and art. She does lots of farmer's markets, and always takes along a little selection of wooden brooches on my behalf. When I started making bags we talked about selling some on her stall, so I thought I'd finally crack on and make up some stock for her. I've been buying bits and bobs of fabric in preparation, and have quite a few patterns that can be used to make items to sell. My aim was 10 bags using this pattern in 7 days. If they sold, I would try a few more different styles out. Easy peasy lemon squeezy.


Er, no. Despite this being the fourth time I've used this pattern, the bag pictured took me around 4 hours to make and is unsellable unsaleable unsellible no-one would buy it. The outer is faux suede and the lining is a bit of vintage soft cotton I found in a charity shop. Both fabrics are quite lightweight so I thought I would use fusible interfacing on the floral cotton to give the bag a bit more structure. Only when I came to turn it through it had obviously added a bit too much structure, because it was like bloody childbirth. The stitches on the strap split, and tore the lovely old cotton. I had to unpick and re-sew the join at the tops of the straps so many times to get the two sides the right length so they would sandwich together properly that there is a whole new pattern of little holes in the faux suede. It just doesn't cut the mustard.

I have to accept that I don't have the speed or the skill to make it worthwile financially. In fact, I'd probably make more money if I stopped buying fabric and bag patterns :) I would love love love to make money out of sewing, but I just don't think it's feasible for someone who works part time and has a two and a half year old the rest of the time. Selling online is slightly easier, as you can make things as they're ordered, but you still need time to promote your business and find patterns that work for you and that you can use to make things comercially (or design your own). I've got rid of my little Coriandr shop, which was rapidly going nowhere due to a lack of promotion on my part. No matter how badly I want it, or believe it's my destiny (in an X-Factor styley), making money from stitching stuff isn't going to happen right now.

So it's back to eBaying the contents of my wardrobe and shopping in bulk at Approved Food in an effort to save money. If anyone has any 100% proven get rich quick schemes, or interesting recipes for tortillas or cous cous please comment below :)

Yeah, whatever.

I am in a foul mood today, so this post will not be genial, or courteous, or even polite. I really can't be arsed with small talk, so you'll get what you're given.

Here's a bag I made.

It's made of my favourite jeans, which I had to sacrifice because they had a big hole in the knee. The lining is made from some other fabric. I can't be bothered to tell you where it was from.

It holds things, and it was easy to make. I made another one before, but this one is better, because.... well, just because.

If you want me, I'll be on the sofa with my bottom lip stuck out and my arms folded. Now go away! >:-p

Mmmmm, stitches....*drool*

I did some sewing :) I managed to make Very Purple Person's reversible tote, which is a blinding simple and nifty pattern that everyone should download immediately if they haven't already done so. Mine isn't strictly reversible. Well, it is, but I used the same fabric inside and out :) I haven't got anything that goes with this slightly bizarre aqua monkey head fabric,* so I thought I'd better use it for outer and lining rather than trying to carry off some kind of 'it clashes so crazily it matches!!1!' combo. I love the shape of the bag and the size. Munchkin and I test drove it today, and it comfortably carried baby wipes, 4 nappies, my stupidly huge purse, my mobile, a snack bar and a beaker of water. I'm planning to make it again using denim from an old pair of jeans and lining it with something bright and flowery.

I am still planning to draft my own bag pattern, and you'll be relieved to know I've found my set square and my french curve. Now I just have to find the time to sketch it all out and go through the millions of revisions needed before I throw it in the bin and cry create the perfect bag. I'll keep you posted :)

In never-ending loft fund news, we have windows! Four of them, letting lots of lovely light in. And one of them has a very nice view, if you stick your head out far enough.

I found some non-gender specific wallpaper for Munchkin's old room. At least, I think it's non-gender specific, everyone else who's passed comment on it says it's for boys, but what do they know. It was beautifully hung by grandma pickledweasel, and I did the painting. It's not finished yet - the walls need another coat and the woodwork needs doing, but we've bought carpet, and it should be habitable in a couple of weeks. The plan is to move Munchkin back in there (she's curently sleeping in our room), and then start decorating the hall stairs and landing. And then our current bedroom. And then our new bedroom. By which time we will have no money left for food, but we will be so high on paint fumes and turps we won't care :)

* The selvedge says the design is called 'candy' so I'm guessing they were going for boiled sweets rather than monkey heads, but I prefer to see them as monkey heads.

I am a bag lady.

I really like making bags, they're so satisfying. They're functional, relatively easy (once you work out how to decifer the pattern, and choose fabric that doesn't run in the rain), and you can put your own stamp on them.



Here's two more I've made in the last couple of weeks. Folklore Bag No. 326 3, a present for a friend.

And a bag from the latest issue of Sew Hip.

My brother got me a subscription to the magazine for my birthday, and although I really love reading it I very rarely make any of the free patterns. I would love to do one of the quilts they've featured in the last few issues, but it just seems a bit of a big scary project. Anyway, this bag is a present for a five year old - what five year old doesn't like ruffles?

I scaled down the pattern by a third, and put pleats in instead of gathering my ruffles, as they're backed with denim and were too stiff to gather. In the magazine they sewed a row of buttons along the top ruffle to hide the seam, but I didn't have enough buttons that matched. I made a flower using this tutorial instead, and mounted it on felt and put a brooch back on so it's detachable.

In other news, Munchkin also has bag lady aspirations. Why else would she have taken off her sleepsuit and her nappy and intentionally wee-ed all over her cot two nights running?

Tentacletastic

I think this is the best thing I have made. Ever. It is a present for a 4 year old who lives in Australia, but we'll get to see him in May when he and his lovely mom and dad and shiny new baby brother are over in Blighty.

I don't know him that well as he's done most of his living in Oz, so I had to email his mom to find out what he likes - owls, octopuses, kangaroos and penguins are some of his favourite things, apparently.

The bag is the messenger bag from One Yard Wonders (I swear I should be sponsored by them by now, the number of bloody bags I've blogged about), and the octopus is made of orange fleece. I traced his outline from a library book of munchkins (Counting in the Sea, 1, 2, 3! It's very good :), although I had to do a bit of photocopy reducing first as he was quite big. I thought it would look better if he had some tentacles up front and some behind rather than being one flat piece, so I did two tentacley pieces first, and then overlayed the body piece after.

I marked his eyes on with marker and then satin stitched over the top. The bag is lined with some stripy cotton that was a remnant from somewhere.

I took my time with it, and I think that really helped. I'm often tempted to cut corners in order to finish stuff quickly, but I was very slow and steady, and as a consequence the bag is well made and my applique is neat. Huzzah!

Folklore Bag: Round Two

After my wrangling with unweildy top bands before, I was determined to make the Folklore Bag again from One Yard Wonders, because I wanted to contribute a non-wonky version to Finny's sew-along I and thought if I could iron out the problems with the pattern, it would actually be a really nice bag.

And it was :) It was a lot easier once I followed the corrections on the publishers website - although the top band pattern pieces are now too long, so you need to do a bit of fiddling to get them right. The fabric I used is a lot lighter than the one I used first time, which made it easier to sew, but means the bag is a bit floppier. If I did it again I would use interfacing on the straps as well as the body of the bag.

I'm guessing you're wondering about the fabric...it's from a well known londony textile company, let's call them, errrrmm, Biberty. Except it's not officially from Biberty, because it was £1 a metre from a magic fabric shop. There's another Biberty print on the other side of the fabric, a brown floraly print- the magic fabric shop man said that when they've finished one print run and are due to start another print run with a different pattern, they take some fabric that's scrap and run it through the machine to clean the inks, hence pattern on both sides.

I thought Biberty fabric for £1 a metre was a bit too good to be true, and it was. Proudly parading my lovely new bag at Centre Parcs last week, I noticed the fabric went a bit darker when rain drops hit it. And it didn't get lighter when it dried. In fact, it was brown and splodgy. Because the ink from the floral print on the other side was bleeding through :( It now looks like somone's liberally sprinkled soy sauce all over it. I might just put it in the washing machine to see what happens, it couldn't get much worse.

Shall I make the bag again? Will it be third time lucky? Or should I just sack it all off and get one from Primark?

Big Little Bag Giveaway

Yet another bag. And yes, it's from One Yard Wonders. How did you guess? :)

This is the Petite Diaper Tote, and it's not quite what I was expecting. Mainly because there's only one photo of it in the book, and it's pictured with the change mat unfolded, so you don't really get to see what the bag itself looks like.

Even worse, there are very few diagrams to accompany the instructions, so it was a bit of a pig to put together. They're currently looking for contributors to the next edition, and I seriously hope they improve the format, cause it's made me tear at my already thinning hair with every project I've completed.

Anyhoo, this was meant to be a present for a friend, and although it's turned out beautifully, because it isn't quite the animal I thought it was I've decided to make her something else. I thought the change pad folded up into the bag, rather than outside of it, and I thought there was a flap to go over the top rather than it being open with a tab to close it. Where I got these ideas from, I don't know :)

So I'm giving it away to one of you lovely lovely people. It'd be a great little bag to pop in the bottom of your pushchair or leave in the boot of the car for nappy emergencies. It'll comfortably fit a packet of baby wipes, a couple of disposable nappies (or one cloth one) and a snack and a beaker. It's the sort of thing that you should aim for when you're going through that 'I want to get back to using a normal handbag but I still need to carry a bit of baby gubbins around' transitional stage. I'm happy to send it anywhere in the world, so international peeps are welcome to enter.

All you need to do is post a comment below telling me... well, telling me anything really. I don't mind what you say, as long as it's not too rude :) Just say hello if you're not feeling very prosey. Or just put 'I want your bag please'. Whatevs. And I know it can be a bit of a pain to comment in Blogger sometimes, so if you want to enter by email you can, just drop a line to pickledweasel@btinternet.com.

You've got ages to enter because I'm away next week, so I'll draw a winner on Saturday the 27th of February. Good luck!

Faffy Folklore Bag

This is my second project from One Yard Wonders, and it's a birthday present for my brother's girlfriend. The fabric was from Ikea, and it was 99p a metre, like the stuff I used for the messenger bag. The print on it is huuuuge, and I wasted quite a lot of fabric because I wanted specific bits of the pattern for the front and back, and just plain cream for the bands at the top of the bag, but at 99p a metre I really don't care :)

(warning - this is a long faffy explanation. For the short version, skip down to the sentence marked *) Things were going fine until I came to join the top band to the lining - you sew the exterior panels together and attach a top band, and then you sew the lining panels together and attach a top band, and then sew them altogether with the straps sandwiched in between, if that makes sense. The lining pattern piece was slightly smaller than the exterior pattern piece, but you used the same top band pattern piece for inside and out. So when I came to join the lining to the top band, the band was too big. So I had to make it smaller. But then when I came to join the inside to the outside, the bands didn't match. So I had to put an ugly great pleat in the band on each side of the bag :( Pah!

I've since found out there are corrections to the pattern on the publisher's website. The pleats on the exterior have been widened, so that presumably when you sew them they make the inside and outside the same width. Although this would mean the top bands would still be too big, but at least you could make them smaller and then everything would be the same size. Confused? All you really need to know is:

*It went wrong but now I know how to fix it the next time I make it. And I will make it again, it's a lovely bag. I stuffed it full of organic chocolate and a cute purse I bought from Spunky, and posted it a couple of days ago, so the birthday girl should have it by now :) And I've posted my pics up on Finny and AfricanKelli's One Yard Wonders Sew Along group on Flickr - the bag is their project for Feb. Right, on to the next project! I have no idea what's wrong with me this month, I have been ridiculously productive...

Poppy Seed Head Messenger Bag

Grandma Pickledweasel very kindly bought me One Yard Wonders for Christmas, and last week I finished my first project from it. In the book it's a child's messenger bag, but I wanted to make an adult version as a present for a friend. She has two munchkins and is always running around here there and everywhere, so I thought it would be great as a 'Right, we're off to the shops' bag that she could bung her keys, wallet, tissues and a box of raisins in if she was just popping down the road.

I didn't change the size of the body of the bag, I just made the strap a bit longer. Actually, a lot longer - so long that you'd have to be fiddling around near your knees to get the bag open :D So I did a cunning thing and looped the strap inside the bag and stitched it. I'm going to get a D ring (is that the right word?) to hook on to the loop, and then give her a little clippy key ring to go with the bag. She can put the clippy key ring on her keys, and then whenever she uses the bag she can just clip the key ring to the D ring, and she won't have to root around at the bottom of her bag for her keys.

The fabric was from Ikea, and I used half a metre, which was the princely sum of 50p in the sale. It was the last piece in the shop, and I'm gutted there wasn't more. I did get some more fabric from the same range but with a different print - much larger and more abstract, but not as good as the poppy seed heads. I just about managed to squeeze the pattern pieces for the outside of the bag on to the fabric I had, so I line it with something else, and I used a linen chambray that you might recognise from Munchkin's Liberty wrap dress.

The project was pretty easy to follow, although I could have done with a few more diagrams and a bit less text, but that's just the way my brain works. I did have to completely reposition the velcro though, even though I followed the instructions on where to place it to a tee.

Only problem now is that I like it so much I don't want to give it away!

My sewing machine is poorly

It is not feeling very well at all. It keeps skipping stitches, and just makes holes and leaves a long trial of thread behind but doesn't actually do any sewing. So my deadline of 8 things listed on Coriandr by sunday isn't looking very likely :(

According to my mom official sewing machine consultant it could be that the needle is blunt, or that my tension is wrong, or 'something else'. I haven't touched my tension, so it can't be that. I've replaced my needle but have been waiting for Munchkin to go to sleep before I try it out. I'm really crossing my fingers it's not 'something else' because that would mean a visit to the sewing machine doctor in Manchester, which usually means spending money.

Never mind, I managed to get in my entry to the Crafty Chica Beach Tote Challenge finished and loaded my photos up online. I like my bag, but it's nowhere near good enough to win, some of the entries are amazing! You can see them on the Flickr Group.