Neato Ornaments – FREE Pattern!

November 17, 2011

Yesterday I gave you a pattern for a good, basic holiday stocking. Today it’s felt ornaments. (Psst! Visit this post to see how to combine my stocking pattern and this ornament pattern for extra fun!)

But now. . . ornaments. The pattern (click here to download) includes some really basic shapes – a tree, a stocking, an ogee, and two circles. The fun comes with what you do with these basics.

Add rickrack. (Boy – do I love rickrack or what?)

Add buttons!

Add fancy vintage trim!

Layer them together with a bit of really simple embroidery!

Don’t feel like you’re tied to traditional colors. I love these yellow and orange ones! (Especially nice too for folks who celebrate solstice.)

Download the free pattern. Gather up your tiny scraps of trim, your odd beads and buttons, your little bits of yarn – and have fun! These shapes are really simple and fun for kids to play with too. Put on some Christmas carols, serve up some cookies, and let them sew the rickrack on with the machine (nice easy straight lines). They – and you – will have a blast. I promise.

Read this post for the best part – combining the stockings and these ornaments in really inventive ways. 🙂

Happy sewing!

Best,
Wendi
Applique Wendi (with fabulous hat)

Swell Stockings – FREE Pattern!

November 16, 2011

Planning to make any holiday stockings this year? Here’s an easy peasy pattern – and it’s free! Click here to download.

The pattern is for a basic stocking made from felt and takes less than an hour to make. But (of course) you’ll want to fancy it up a bit. 🙂 The one on the pattern cover just has a bunch of inexpensive pearly buttons stitched on it – with the thread tails visible.

See?

Or use just a handful of buttons in a vertical stripe.

Beads are always nice – and beaded trim is super easy. You’ll still finish this one in under an hour.

This one has a strip of feather boa across the top. Ooh la la!

How about some rickrack? A couple of bands across the top are nice. . .

But vertical stripes are good too.

For this one I cut some dots out of felt (traced around a quarter for the size) and then laid them out and embroidered lines between them.

And here’s one with fancier applique (but still easy). You could do the same thing, using one of my appliqued animals quilt block patterns. How about embroidering on a stocking? One of the puppies or kitties would be really cute! So would one of the Rainbow Girls! Or one of the birds from the Bird Sampler! And did you know you can turn any embroidery pattern into an applique pattern?

The finished stocking is just a smidge over 17″ tall – a good basic size.

So there you have it – a bunch of swell stockings! Download the pattern and make one this year.

Get a free felt ornament pattern here.

See some fun ways to use the ornament and stockings together here.

Happy sewing!

Best,
Wendi
Applique Wendi (with fabulous hat)

Free Pattern – Make a Gizmo Cozy

February 22, 2011
free felt pattern - gizmo cozy

Keep your electronic gizmos from getting scratched up – and also keep them warm and cozy (and cute!) with a super-easy felt cozy.

In this free pattern I teach you how to measure and fit any device – so you can make cozies for your MP3 players, your cell phone, your tablet, your e-reader – even a laptop!

You can sew by hand or by machine. You can embellish with embroidery, or applique, or beadwork, or anything else you know how to do.

It’s a totally open-ended project, perfect for playing and experimenting. Have fun with it!

What You’ll Need

Difficulty

The measuring and construction of the cozy is super easy – just simple running stitches. You can make the embellishment as fancy as you like.

Measure Your Device

First we need to do a little math. All these gizmos are different sizes so you’ll have to customize the pattern for each device.

Width

Measure the width of your gizmo. You’ll need to account for the thickness of it too – so measure up one edge, across the surface, and down the other edge. I use a flexible tape measure so I can do this all in one step, but you can use a regular ruler and add the three measurements together.

To the width measurement you’ll need to add some seam allowance. I like 1/4 inch on each side, so add a total of 1/2 inch to your width. Write it down.

______________________ = cutting width

Length

Now measure the length of your device. It won’t need to wrap around the top, so this time measure up the bottom edge (to get the thickness) and then across the surface to the top edge. This will be your length measurement.

You won’t be sewing the top or bottom edge, so no need to add seam allowance to this measurement. But we do need it to cover the front AND the back of your device. So multiply your length measurement by 2. Write it down.

_____________________ = cutting length

Cut and Decorate

Cut a single rectangle of felt that is the cutting width x the cutting length.

Now – decorate it if you want to!

Remember – the front of the cozy will be the top half of the rectangle you cut. You can, of course, decorate both the front and the back. But if you want an image centered on the front, fold your felt rectangle in half and center your image on the top half.

See where I put the image on my rectangle?

If you want to embroider on your cozy, here’s how I did mine. . .

Step 1

Choose an image to embroider. I used one of the Rainbow Girls, but anything will do. Find all my embroidery patterns  here.

Transfer the image onto a second piece of felt.

Step 2

I like my embroidery to sink in around the edges and make the felt more three-dimensional, so I started by embroidering just the inside of the design on the small felt piece. For this design I stitched the French knots in her hair and on her dress, her eyes and her mouth. Nothing else – yet.

Step 3

After I finished the “inside stitching” I centered the scrap of felt on the top half of the rectangle of felt I cut in Step 5 above.

I attached the design to the cozy by embroidering the outline of the Rainbow Girl (the outline of her hair, her chin, the outline of her dress, and her legs and boots) through both layers of felt.

Going through both layers for the outline makes her hair, face and dress all look slightly puffy and rounded – and it also attaches the two layers together. If you want to do all the embroidery before you attach the design to the cozy – you can do that. Just use a glue stick to attach them together after you’re done stitching, or whipstitch all around the edge.

If you want to do all the stitching through both layers – that’s good too. It just gives you a subtly different look. Play around and experiment!

Step 4

Use a sharp pair of scissors to trim around the design, leaving a little extra around the edge.

One of these days I’ll get myself a pair of applique scissors (the bottom blade has a rounded tip so you can’t accidentally cut through the bottom fabric) so I can do this without having a nervous breakdown, but for now I just go very slowly and very carefully.

Sew It Up!

Fold the cozy in half, carefully lining up the edges. Pin it together on each side, 1/4 inch in from the edge.

Slide your gizmo in to make sure it fits. Fuss with the placement of the pins until you’re happy with the fit on your device. You want it snug – but not too tight. The device should still slide in and out easily.

Stitch up one side. I wanted big, chunky, visible stitches so I used fat embroidery thread and a running stitch by hand. Blanket stitch would look nice too. You could also use a sewing machine instead – with matching or contrasting thread.

Check the fit one more time before you sew up the other side. Make any necessary adjustments – and sew.

Trim away some of the seam allowance if you want to – but don’t get too close to the stitching or your seam won’t hold.

Finished!

Happy stitching!
Best,
Wendi

Applique Wendi (with fabulous hat)