January makes

I haven't got as much sewn as I usually do this month as we're doing up our kitchen and it's taking up a lot of my sewing time. I'm really hoping we're now on the home stretch with that so that I can get my kitchen put back together and also get some time in my sewing room!

Here's what I did get made this month. A starry wallhanging:

... with its embroidered label.

I had a notion to try sewing some leather things - nothing huge, maybe a coin purse (not that I have any coins these days!) or a card wallet or similar wee things like that. I found some leather off-cuts on Amazon here - I see they're out of stock as I type this but I paid all of £5.19 for a 2kg bag of bits. With free P&P, I reckoned it was a fab price to pay to do some experimental sewing. Here's a picture of the leather that came - mostly black and dark brown with some lighter brown and maroon in there too.

My first experiment was to make some letters to fit on keyrings. I made mine first then one for Douglas and one for Joanna. They were a bit fiddly to make but I was really happy with the way they turned out.

When Tilly saw Joanna's J, she wanted to bite it. Not to eat it but to just hold it. She did that once with an old leather glove of mine. She held it in her mouth for what seemed like days only dropping it to eat, drink and sleep! I decided to try another experiment and this one worked even better than the letters.

As you can see, Tilly LOVES her new bone!

I then did a bit of a re-purposing thing. I had 3 nighties that I had bought last year - or maybe it was 2020! - from Asda's. I was really disappointed with them as they were quite short - and shrunk even more after washing! I'm only 5'4" and they barely covered my behind so people taller than I am would have been displaying parts of themselves they probably would rather keep hidden! I dug the nighties out of the back of the drawer, cut off about 8" and hemmed them and I'm now wearing them as jammie tops. I'm wearing them with mismatched jammie bottoms but I reckon it's dark when I'm wearing them so that's fine!

Lastly, I was going through my "needlecrafts" folder on my computer and throwing away all sorts of stuff that I know I will never make. Boy, that was freeing! As I was doing that, I found this which I had made up all by myself years ago. 15 February, 2012 to be exact! Wow! 10 years ago! I originally drew it in Photoshop and I haven't had that on my computer for a long, long time but, luckily, the file can be used in Pixelmator which I have now.

I decided it was time to try out my design so I wrote out what each quarter of the Supernova star would be -

- and started gathering the fabrics. I took this photo when I was still in the middle of getting all the pieces ready. They're now all sitting in the four baskets - one for each quarter - and I'll hopefully get on with it soon. It'll finish at about 56" square so more a quilt than a wallhanging but, if it looks anything like my plan, I'll be very happy!