Busy, busy, busy!

It's been a hectic old time, here at OST headquarters. The extension is going great guns and is only a couple of weeks off completion. I shall be breathing a huge sigh of relief because it means that I can then actually clean my house properly! We are just at the 'breaking through' point, which means that there is a nice thick layer of red dust on pretty much every single surface. 
Considering we've only had one builder on the job for the majority of the time, it's been a speedy build - especially given the size of it. We have a fabulous builder and I can't recommend him enough. He's been diligent, considerate and he even tidies up after himself each day. He also really loves kids, which is good because they've been MOST interested in what's been going on!

In the meantime, I have been doing the odd bit of sewing. I managed to do my first bit of paper piecing and made my mother-in-law a mug rug for Mother's Day last month. It was surprisingly quick and easy, although I do still need to work on my binding technique a bit...

We had a lovely Easter - I hope you all did too. The girls got to go to the school Easter disco - it was Tabby's first one as she's not actually at school yet. I was there to do the face-painting, so they got to go off and dance, run around like lunatics and consume as much sugar within the next two hours as they could. Needless to say, they were both rather tired and cranky by the time I got them home!

There was an Easter bonnet competition at the disco and Ellie wanted hers to have spring flowers on. Her teacher keeps telling us that Ellie isn't very good at using scissors and so I decided that she'd have the most scissorly intensive hat she could. I drew the shapes for her and she cut them all out. Her hat was lovely when it was finished and she won third prize for it. I don't think a jelly animal lollipop (her prize) has ever been more appreciated!

In other sewing, I've been making the usual assortment of bibs, blankets and bunting. I also made a couple of personalised door-hangers:

 
 









Last, but by no means least, I made this Kindle cover for my mother-in-law. It is her 70th birthday today and I thought it was about time she had her own Kindle. She and do a lot of book swapping between us and I've been evangelical about my own Kindle. She does use her iPad to read ebooks on, but it's not ideal. She's got the new Paperwhite version, so I'm very jealous! 

I thought it would be nice to make her a monogrammed cover for her Kindle and searched around on Pinterest for ages to try and find one that I liked the look of. I had something in mind and knew I'd seen it somewhere but couldn't for the life of me find it. I had a eureka moment late one night and popped over to Flossie Teacakes - one of the many sewing-related blogs I read - and found the pattern for her Cocoon Laptop Cover, which was exactly the style of Kindle cover I wanted. 

Obviously a laptop cover would completely swamp a Kindle but Florence's pattern is very scaleable and so was very easy to adapt. I had to do the embroidery first, before cutting that particular piece out, in order to make sure that it was in the exact right place to not get covered by the flap or the pocket. 

I used a plain, cream-coloured linen from Ikea for the main part of the cover, and some home-decor weight fabric from Laura Ashley (Summer Palace in duck egg colour) for the pocket and flap. I think it turned out quite nicely, although the final part of construction was a bit tricky. This was because the lining gets attached to the main part by slipping it over as an open-ended sleeve (right sides facing) and then just sewing all around the opening. On a laptop cover - which is much bigger - this isn't a problem, as you can simply slip the arm of your machine through the cover and sew all the way around. On a Kindle cover this doesn't work - at least not on my machine. I suspect it might be ok on a standard machine but mine is really quite large (because it is a combined sewing/embroidery machine and has a large sewing area for making quilting a bit easier!). Other than that issue, everything went swimmingly!

I'll do some extension photos next time...