Curtains with a matching valance are the perfect start … or finish to any room decor. As the Big Lebowski would say, ‘They really tie the room together.’ The valance is also a great way to add a dramatic dash of color or pattern in your room decor, and because the valance is narrow, you can accomplish this without making the room look too busy.
Once you discover the rotary cutter, you’ll wonder how you ever lived without it. Seriously, this thing is like the sliced bread of sewing. I suppose, if push came to shove, you could use it to slice bread, but that’s not my point. My point is that it is a wonderful tool, and can make the chore of cutting faster and more exact. When first confronted with its use, you may find it a bit inimidating. But following a few simple pointers will help you use this tool safely and easily.
We all know how it goes. In the fall, we make a resolution to give only handmade gifts for the holiday season. Then, December rolls around, and you don’t have the tree up, you have a full queue of holiday parties to attend, and the kids are begging to make cookies all weekend. That’s where our handmade Gift & Wine Bags come in. They’re quick to sew, and can at least add a homemade touch to those last-minute purchased presents. Plus, they’re re-usable,which means they’re a green alternative to wrapping paper.
I love table runners. You can use them alone or layered over a table cloth. They create a beautiful focal point for your table or buffet, like a little fabric runway, perhaps giving me an excuse to invite Tim Gunn to my house. But if I invited him, I’d probably have to also invite Heidi Klum, and then it would just be too crowded. So instead, I’ll make this beautiful Christmas Morning Table Runner and invite my friends and family.
Once upon a time, a handmade baby gift was the norm; from crocheted booties to blankets and quilts. These charming gifts were often passed along from one generation to the next, evoking fond memories along the way. Among our seven ideas, we hope you find inspiration to create a handmade gift for a new mom in your life.
In college, I once push-pinned a sheet over my apartment’s bedroom window and held it open when needed with a binder clip from my economics notebook. At the time, I thought this was quite inventive. Ugly, but inventive. I’m sure my landlord adored all those tiny tack holes in the molding. Now, I prefer beautiful curtains and shades, and I make sure to measure precisely to get just the look I want.
I don’t know about you, but my nightstand is pretty crowded. There are books and magazines and lotions and a clock and remotes and, and, and! This handy bed caddy allows me to keep my most-used items right at my fingertips, and the top of my nightstand stays tidy. The pockets all have the perfect expandable gusset: big enough to easily slide stuff in and out, but not so big that things topple out.
A charm pack is most frequently one 5″ x 5″ square of each fabric from a specific fabric collection, so the number of squares in a pack varies. Occasionally duplicates of some prints are included, and occasionally charm squares are other than 5″ squares.
Once upon a time there was a beautiful baby with golden curls. Admirers came from far and wide with gifts of soft, cozy blankets; each visitor trying to out-do the one who came before. The beautiful baby smiled and laughed and shook her golden curls. She loved all the blankets, declaring each one to be, ‘Just Right!’ We offer you the Goldilocks of receiving blanket options: Easy Baby Bear Decorative Stitch Blanket, Harder Mama Bear Ric Rac Blanket, and Hardest Papa Bear Bound Edge Blanket.
Does someone wake you up at o’dark-thirty on Christmas morning?! Then you need a zesty zap of yellow to get you going. This lovely, lemony tablecloth is the perfect foundation for a holiday breakfast feast of waffles, fruit, juice and coffee. The bright yellow is set off with creamy drop panels and it’s all tied together with deep crimson bands and bows.
A beautifully set holiday table needn’t be expensive. Our simple Citrus Holiday table is proof. We used fresh citrus fruits: lemons, limes, key limes, oranges, grapefruit, and clementines. And, since everyone has their own accumulation of holiday decor, S4H editor, Liz Johnson and I decided to take the Citrus Holiday challenge and use ONLY our own personal collections to decorate the dining room.
Adding a simple fabric border kicks this napkin up a notch. Napkins are a great beginning project and a great way to practice hemming. We made all our napkins match for our Citrus Holiday table, but it would also be snazzy to do a different, coordinating trim on each person’s napkin. Not only would it be a great way to use up fabric scraps, you could also keep track of which napkin belongs to which guest.
You’ve caught the bug and there’s no getting rid of it. Congratulations! The sewing bug is one of the greatest around. Of course, now that you spend all your spare time sewing, you may realize you want a machine that can keep up with you. There’s a lot to choose from, in fact it might seem overwhelming when you see all the features you can choose from as you move beyond basic. We’ve put together a list of the top ten features to look for on more advanced machines, so you can figure out exactly what you want and have the confidence to shop with knowledge.
A ‘Fussy Cut’ is not pitching a fit in the barber chair when one side of your bangs is longer than the other. Although that is perfectly justified behavior. To fussy cut in sewing is to select and cut out a specific motif from a printed fabric or center your pattern piece directly over a design within your fabric that you want to feature. This is what we did to perfectly center the beautiful pineapple design on each of our placemats.
Our Citrus Holiday series continues as we introduce Christmas Dining Room, with eight new tutorials plus a how-to on setting a citrus-themed table. From a lemony tablecloth beset with red bows to boldly patterned placemats, funky letter bead napkin ties, and the dreamiest-ever apron; you’ll serve up a meal to remember.
For each of our themed rooms, we like to have one idea dedicated to using up the scraps of fabric leftover from all the other projects. With the Stylish Baby Nursery, it’s these adorable wall hangings. All you need is an inexpensive hand embroidery hoop, a square of fabric, a little glue or tape, and you’re on your way to instant art.
This is our favorite pillow pattern. Even though the style is the same, it looks different in each different fabric combination. It’s so simple and uses such a tiny bit o’ fabric, making a pile of pillows is a snap. The envelope back means it’s easy to pop out the pillow form and wash the pillow cover, and we all know easy laundering is a MUST for any nursery item.
Stroll through many antique shops and you’re bound to find a sweet and colorful yo-yo quilt. First made popular in the 1930s, the small, gathered circles that create a yo-yo are super easy to make, and the resulting fabric puff is a fun embellishment for pillows, blankets and more. Make them by hand or use a simple tool. They’re great for using up small scraps, and perfectly portable – make them while sitting on the beach, waiting for the train, anywhere.
Having a small bed in the nursery is a luxury during the months when your baby doesn’t sleep through the night. For our Stylish Baby Nursery, the Sunny Horizons duvet uses bold stripes of several Andalucia fabrics to make a colorful covering with simple ties finishing off the bottom. When you collapse on it in exhaustion, you’ll feel so much better knowing it’s such a beautiful match to all the other items in the nursery.
Liven up a regular square pillow with triangular front accents. Choose a funky button to contrast with more conservative fabrics, or pick fabrics in bold hues and patterns to make the whole pillow pop. The unique design makes your finished pillow look pretty darn tricky, but the actual construction is quite simple.
Do you have a friend who is perky? Does the description go something like this: bright, happy, bouncy, cute? We think these plump and pretty pillows are perfectly perky. I got a quarter for every ‘P’ I used in that sentence.
We’re excited to debut our new Sew4Home series: Vintage Rescue, a category of inspiring ways to recycle, re-use or redesign something old to create a great new look and perhaps salvage something meaningful. For our first article, I thought I’d start with a personal story. It involves my always-a-challenge-to-buy-for sister’s impending birthday, cleaning the attic to move, and a much-loved and almost-lost rosebud chenille bedspread.
These clever storage baskets are not only cute and handy, they’re also a secret recycling project. The sides and bottoms of each basket are stiffened with recycled cardboard! But wait … they have another hidden talent: they collapse and fold flat to store.
If you want to ease into trying your hand at quilting, this project is for you. It introduces the technique of joining together small strips to create a single large piece. We originally designed this tutorial as a little crib quilt, but decided we liked it better as a dresser cloth for our changing table. So, we omitted the batting and quilting through all the layers. So, the purists out there are hurling quilt pins at me, because without out those things it’s not really quilting. I know, I know … it’ll be our little secret.
When your baby isn’t resting on this adorable pillow, it can be used for a rousing game of tic-tac-toe. The Nine Patch Center square is a quilting classic and very easy to create … even if you’ve never tried patchwork before.
A dust ruffle catches the eye and brings top-to-bottom cohesion to your nursery décor. It’s as functional as it is decorative – especially when it hangs all the way to the floor. It does really help keep dust from beneath the crib, but it also allows for secret storage space. My daughter’s crib came with a rolling storage trundle, and the dust ruffle keeps it stylishly hidden from view. Dust ruffles look especially cute with a softly gathered edge.
Learn to make these simple pillow coverings, and you can change the look of any décor in a few fast and easy steps. This construction has no pesky buttons, zippers or Velcro to deal with – just a basic ‘envelope’ closure on the back, which also means you can pull out your pillow and wash the cover when Uncle Mort spills BBQ sauce on it.
You’ve heard the joke: ‘what is an occasional table the rest of the time?’ Well, while you’re laughing, that poor table is sitting there naked. It’s time to make those small occasional tables attractive and important members of your patio party. It’s one of the simplest sewing projects you can do.
A piece of fabric inserted to enlarge or add strength. In garments a gusset is often inserted to add freedom of movement.
The best parties begin with a theme, and if you can stay within your theme using decorative accents, food and music, you’re on your way to creating a magically memorable event. It just takes a little planning and thinking ahead.
We always like to have at least one project that makes use of leftover fabric scraps. For our Patio Party, we created this fun party banner. Just print out the provided pennant shapes and cut out as many as you’d like from your available scraps. All you’ll need to buy is a length of cording, and, if you want, colorful beads to string in between the pennants. It’s a great green alternative to traditional crepe paper.
Your Patio Party guests will stay longer if they have somewhere soft and pretty to sit. Give your chairs comfort and style with a set of custom seat cushions. Outdoor furniture often comes with a set of basic cushions, but the standard colors are pretty bland and boring. It’s much more fun to mix and match colorful fabrics to create a unique seating experience.
Colorway is a textile industry term used to describe versions of the same design produced in different colors.
Crazy patch quilting incorporates small scraps of many different fabrics into one block. It came into vogue in Victorian times as a way for ladies to show off their needlework skills whilst passing the time in their parlors. The parlor went out of style along with the bustle (and the word “whilst”), but crazy patch quilting remains a terrific way to use lots of different fabric scraps in one project. This is a great project for incorporating old silk ties or bits of worn-out corduroy pants.
WOF is an abbreviation for Width of Fabric. This means that you would cut pieces of fabric as long as the width of the fabric, or the width from selvedge to selvedge. For much cotton fabric, this would be 45″. Home Dec fabric will come in 54″ and 60″ widths as well.
I can’t even begin to guess how many different fabrics there are in the world. Of course, any fabric can be used by itself, but fantastic results can be achieved by mixing different patterns and colors together. Now, if that seems out of your comfort zone, here’s a tip: the easiest way to start mixing patterns is to choose from a fabric designer’s collection made specifically for mixing. You’ll look like a pro on day one!
It’s tempting to skip it, but it’s a lot like the difference between a nicely toned body and one that isn’t. Just like you can skip exercising, you can skip interfacing. But, it won’t be a secret. Which reminds me… I need to go for a jog!
Interfacing is a textile that is either sewn in or fused on using a steam iron, between layers of fabric, to give it structure and body. Interfacing in itself is not very exciting, but it is one of the keys to achieving a professional look to your project. If you are new to sewing, you may never have run across interfacing because it’s not something that shows when your project is done. Most familiar to people is the way a dress shirt has a more substantial collar, placket and cuff. That smooth crispness comes from the interfacing hidden inside. Without interfacing, collars and cuffs would be limp and buttons and buttonholes would rip.
Do you keep every scrap of fabric you’ve ever had, even the small pieces you think you’ll never use? You may want to consider therapy. Or perhaps you could just make a couple of these cute pillow pincushions.
I love fabric. I never seem to come home from the fabric store with just the fabric I need for my project. It eventually became an organizational disaster… couldn’t remember what I had, couldn’t find it if I did. Something had to change.
You probably have something in your house right now with potential to become a pressing cloth. A section of an old white cotton bed sheet works fine. The older the better. Just cut it to size and, voila! It’s a brand new pressing cloth.
Choose an adjustable height board with a padded cover and a cotton or muslin cover. Avoid the outer-space-suit reflective covers
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