...fun on Sunday

Today has been a really happy, productive day, and there's still time left to snuggle up on the sofa with my husband, some ice-cream and a good film! Here's what I got up to:

• I wanted to do something special with the repair to my poor Mum's gardening trousers, after she got swept off her feet by Storm Ciara and they tore at the knee. So this morning I had a look through my fabric stash and found a pretty piece of blue floral cotton and a contrasting scrap of brightly coloured cotton chintz. This was a fairly basic repair:

1. Machine zig-zag the edges of the tear together. 
2. Cut a patch from the blue floral fabric big enough to cover the whole knee area from side-seam to inner-leg- seam, turn the edges under once and machine stitch them. 
3. Cut a simple heart shape from the chintz fabric and position it on the patch (I used a bit of iron-on interfacing to "stick" it into place). 
4. Carefully machine stitch round the outline of the heart, and then machine stitch the whole patch to the trousers. 
5. Use some embroidery thread to overstitch round the edge of the heart, sewing through all three layers - this gives the patch a nice homespun, rustic appearance and also anchors the centre of the patch securely to the trousers.

• In the middle of the patching process there was a knock at the door and a parcel full of woolly joy arrived - a 150g skein of laceweight yarn for making this fabulous Frattali scarf designed by Martina Behm! I'm pretty frugal when it comes to buying yarn, but it seemed like the scarf was designed to show this specific yarn to its very best advantage, so I felt somewhat justified in splashing out. I did manage to avoid paying the eye-watering postage costs from Germany after scouring the internet for a bargain price/free postage deal, so ultimately the finished scarf will only have cost me £20.15, countless hours, and (possibly) my eyesight*! Which seems a small price to pay for such a unique, beautiful thing. 

*This is the finest yarn I have ever attempted to knit with - you can see from the photo below that it is little more than twice the thickness of ordinary sewing thread!

• Seeing that the sewing machine was (a) already out and (b) not playing up, after finishing the trouser patch and getting a bit Gollum-like about the yarn, I decided to have a go at making a dress for my Sophie Tilley DIY peg doll. Although the fabrics that came in the parcel with the doll were very pretty, I've grown accustomed to seeing her sitting on my workdesk in her pale blue temporary tissue paper dress and decided that blue suits her better than pink. I'm thinking of giving the dress a cold tea rinse to take away some of the stiffness and brightness of the fabric. Next up her hair needs sorting - probably with a knitted skull cap I can attach lengths of yarn to for styling - and then some boots/shoes and a shawl/cardigan.