I’ve been pretty busy in my sewing room over the last couple of days, I’ve got the house to myself as Helen has gone Inter-railing round Europe and my OH is on Cadet camp…so peace reigns!

It’s only two weeks until I go to the Tea and Tents WI camping festival, I rather rashly said I would have a stall at the market so I decided I really need to pull my finger out and start sewing things to sell.

A couple of years back I bought some lengths of furnishing fabrics with the idea of selling things on Craftsy, it never really took off so I’ve got some lengths left. One is the VW camper van fabric. I’m hoping there may be a few people at T&T who like VW’s!

My first make was a cover for an A5 notebook. I bought a few notebooks at the same time as the fabric, so I’m using up my stock. The notebooks are slightly padded so I didn’t use any fleece, and as it’s furnishing weight fabric I decided it didn’t need interfacing either. I lined it with cream quilting cotton and used a lovely cerise pink cotton for the flaps. I make book covers with flaps cut separately, I just pin it all together, sew round the edge and turn it. I think it gives a neater finish rather than stitching one extra long lined piece and then turning the flaps in. It also means I can easily add a button tab (using a hair bobble!) Hope you followed all that!

My next make was a tote bag, I used my standard measurements of a 16″ square, I interlined it with fusible fleece to make it feel nice. It’s lined with the same cream lining. When I’m making these for myself I always add zipped pockets, open pockets, key fob, magnetic closures  etc, but I decided to keep these simple as I don’t want to have to charge alot for them and the more haberdashery and time I use, the more the bag would cost. It’s got a gusset at the bottom so it sits nicely.

I had a narrow length of fabric left so my first choice was to make an A6 notebookcover as I could just position it so a VW was in the centre of the front. I’d top-stitched the first one in pink as a contrast, but I decided it was easier to make it look neat if the top-stitching matched so I stitched it in cream this time, much better!

The final piece was just big enough to make a mini tote bag. I don’t think I’ve even got a scrap of fabric left, so job well done…just got the difficult job of pricing them and then fingers crossed that they sell!