Stitch This

Well, now that Christmas is over, I can post about some of the things I made! I hope my recipients don’t mind, but there are some ideas here that I thought would be nice share. I’d be interested to see what everybody else gets up to with them.

First up, is a little footstool I revamped. As you can see from the first picture it was very, ahem, traditional. And pink. And fringed. And rather unloved.

Well, you know me. – I was up for a little bit of chopping. So Off went the fringe. It was a bit too drastic to get rid of all the padding however, so I stopped at that point.

I had some lovely grey wool fabric which I cut to rough size and stapled around pulling very tight as I went. The trick is to staple opposite sides as you go so 12 o’clock and 6 o’clock then 3 o’clock and 9 o’clock iyswim.

When done, it looked better but boring. Time to wheel out my present to myself from my previous employers, a Sissix Big Shot die cutter. These are normally used for cutting paper but if you add stabiliser, fabric works too. So, I ironed bondaweb to some pink and red fabric I’ve just got.

Then you cut the strip of fabric to size and feed it through the machine. It reminds me of a pasta maker/laundry mangle. I also got a townscape die by Tim Holtz with my redundancy present vouchers so I used that to cut little house silhouettes. The negative space is also quite cool I think. Watch this space with that one.

I ironed them on (remember, I used bondaweb) and then stood back…

To finish it off I hot glued some black and grey velvet ribbon and some olive jumbo ricrac round the base. I don’t have a final picture (Christmas deadlines and all that…) but hopefully you can see what I was aiming for. It went down well anyway. Which was good. What do you think?