A few chores less to do this week



My Bag Calendar

This has been a productive week with a number of jobs finalised, but there are always a few left. Meanwhile, everyday I get to look at the next page on my bag calendar which is a present from DH. He certainly chose well this year as the idea is you put the day before behind the stash of cards and voila a new bag appears. They are all ages and vintage seems to crop up a lot like this one, 1910 crotcheted metal thread overlay with a braided handle, European and look at those little bobbles... oh so cute! I would love to own a bag like this and the shape is pretty too. At weekends you only get one card so I await tomorrow...

Anyway, one of the jobs I finished today was attaching some fringe to my new kitchen curtains for my door. I decided they lacked a certain edge if you know what I mean. I thought about buying some fringe and then even found some bullion fringe I liked on the internet but somehow I could not bring myself to hit the buy button.....Was it a return to my austerity days which was nagging me to 'make do and mend'?  Well I don't know but I found myself rummaging, as you do......Well I have quite a few places I can go when I have this urge and I soon found what I needed for inspiration, some odd bits of Linton Tweed fabric of course and a few bits of velvet too along with some lovely stiff chocolate brown ribbon, enough for two curtain bottoms. Last night you would have thought a bomb had hit my room with pieces of thread everywhere piled into little colour coordinated batches.

TIP. If you want some lovely different thread for couching down in machine embroidery you cannot go far wrong with a trip to Carlisle and bagging some Linton Tweed, (they now do mail order) Carefully tease and strip out individual threads and you have a unique range of threads which are perfect in embroidery. Did you know that Chanel have a lady who does the same and makes the braid for their Haute Couture suits from Linton Tweed fabric? In France this is called Passementerie, and here is an inspirational site run by Gina B.

Now back to my fringe, 1st I had to sew small pieces of thread to the ribbon keeping the ribbon in the middle and the thread evenly spaced either side. I kept the threads fairly tight together so you could not see the ribbon through the fringe but did not worry too much about a ragged edge as the colour changes and thread changes were more important to me. I was trying to achieve a rainbow effect. This was not looking too good last night I thought, so I left it until this morning wondering if it was turning into a mistake............But after a night's sleep and on reflection, I decided it was working and finished the 2nd phase of making the fringe which was to fold it over in on itself and sew down the long edge of the ribbon being careful to keep the threads well out of the way and sort of combing them into place with my stitch ripper as I sewed. The photo below shows this in progress.



Making the fringe

The 3rd part was to sew the fringe onto the curtains, which I did this afternoon but no photo as yet. However, they have met with DH approval who was consulted now and then I have to admit. Remember he went to Art College so has a natural eye for blunders..........and equally knows when something 'works'. So I can recommend giving it a go and I now fancy a few more fringes after checking out British Vogue online and seeing that they are going to be part of this years fashion trend which is craft......hmm


I must not get carried away with this success as there are still many more jobs awaiting this week.....one of which is the planting of chillies in January in the greenhouse otherwise they will be ripening in October like last year.



Don't you just love those gardening jobs.