stitch & sew

On Saturday morning as I was thinking about the week ahead and what I would do with my time off over the school half term holidays, my thoughts turned to sewing. 

I am the kind of person who tends to have multiple sewing projects on the go, not because I start one thing and get bored of it but, because I start one thing then think of other things I want to do, so start another. Even though I have a few projects in the pipeline at the moment, I find I am often thinking of what fabrics i could invest in. While I was pondering sewing & fabrics on Saturday, I thought to myself, 'It'd be lovely if there was a fabric shop slightly closer to home...' Half an hour later, we walked into Westbury on Trym to buy some local produce, and, lo & behold, there was a brand new fabric shop just down the hill from our house!

I managed to restrain myself while we bought fresh local raspberries & super cheap tomato plants, among other things, then popped in to Poppy Patchwork. I couldn't have been happier - they have such a beautiful collection of fabrics. Recently I came across Moda Bake Shop and their range of fabrics & wished that they were available in England as well as the U.S. Well, Poppy Patchwork just so happens to stock some of the Moda Bake Shop collections! (for those of you who have no interest in sewing, I'm sorry, please just indulge my excitement)

I tried to exercise restraint and just bought three fat quarters in these lovely colours.

I was keen to use these fabrics straight away, but in an attempt to try & combat my tendency to start yet more new projects before finishing old ones, I set about finishing up these two:

yep, it's yet another taggie blanket. 

finished, but far from perfect. this is the scrappy nap pillow project from Anna Maria Horner's book, Handmade Beginnings.  

While it was fun using up lots of scraps, this took a long time to make, and a lot of un-stitching was required in the process, and it ended up lumpy in the middle. I might try and amend this, but it'll do for now.

I'll be back later this week to show you what I did with my new fabrics.