cozy time

we drink an astounding amount of tea. all kinds, all the time. we had to recently buy a new teapot (again) because our last one leaked excessively and eventually cracked and leaked even more. i had made a tea cozy for the last pot, but the new teapot is huge - as big as an elephant's skull, jamie says - so "new tea cozy" was one of the things on my to-do list.

it's just a simple cover, but nice and thick. the outer fabric is a heavy weight japanese linen cotton blend and it's lined on the inside with cotton, as well as two layers of cotton quilt batting. i meant to make a template as i went, but it was so quick and easy that the whole thing was done in about 15 minutes. now that's a satisfying, quick project.

tea time! gotta run. or walk - the tea will stay warm...

murder, she embroidered...

so we are some mega dorks around here. i loves me some murder she wrote or columbo on a lazy winter's day, and we have amassed a nice collection of truly bad tv mysteries. thankfully our mystery collection in general also includes all of the british-made poirot and marple collections too, and everything made by alfred hitchcock!

we just added season 6 of murder she wrote to our stash, and man, it's truly bad! the dad from friends is in one really bad episode, there are a lot of flashbacks and jewel theives, plus add in a cast of hollywood nobodies and misfits and enough '80s hair & makeup to fill the grand canyon and you're getting the drift.

a while back i'd sewn a stack of plain linen tea-towels and they've been collecting dust in a drawer for ages waiting for inspiration to strike. i've been meaning to learn to screen print up at blim on of these months, but for a quick and silly project i decided to embroider jessica fletcher's lovely busybody face onto one of them! yeah, so it didn't turn out so well...

i took a photo of her from google images, created an outline in illustrator, traced it onto my tea towel using a disappearing fabric marker and started to embroider. well, the marker started fading straight away, so i ended up kind of going freestyle. and the photo of her looked fine but somehow just doing her head lost the perspective and just looks odd. we've since washed this too, and of course now it's a little puckery and her chin looks more like she's got the mumps. of course, my basic embroidery skills may have also been part of the problem! the tea towel, however, is sewn to perfection! ;-)

funny though! cole either laughs at or slowly backs away from this when he sees it hanging in the kitchen... i'd back away, kid.

weekend project: ironing board cover

i use our ironing board a lot, particularly when you consider that i almost never iron clothes. it's pretty much the second most important part of any sewing project - just barely after the sewing machine itself!

we had to buy a new ironing board recently. for about seven years we'd been using one that we found in the closet of an old apartment. it was shabby and creaky, i think it was homemade to some extent, smaller than a standard ironing board and it threatened collapse nearly all the time. eventually, the top wore out altogether, so i went out to buy a new one.

the new one is fine - funtional but nothing to write home about, assuming that you would write home to discuss mundane household objects. but having a snazzy cover for the top would certainly perk it up quite a bit! this ironing board cover tutorial from the workroom/make something is just the thing: