Can I cut, stitch and blog my way to £1000 prize?

Despite leaving it a bit late, I (Daughter 3) have made something to enter into the Hillarys Blinds Country Craft Competition (what a mouthful) and I hope you guys enjoy reading about it!

So, naturally, I chose the cream fabric with the Wild Poppies scattered over it, due to it matching the colour scheme of our front room perfectly. When it arrived, however, I was entirely stuck. I've never really created my own pattern before without a lot of my Mum's help (wait that's not true, I made up the pattern for my GCSE Textiles piece, but considering I had two years to do that I don't think it really counts), so it took a lot of deliberation just to decide WHAT I was going to make. Eventually I decided on a foot stool because, let's face it, I've made plenty enough cushions before.

So first, it was the question of how to incorporate the fabric. Obviously it needed to play a major part, but which part? I decided it would be the top of the footstool, and I discovered a sheet of cream fabric that I thought I could use for the edges. To make it more difficult for myself (because who doesn't want to do that?) I decided to make the poppies not only go over the top but stretch round to the sides. To do this I measured the square on top of the footstool and used this as the diamond for the middle of another square. Kind of. That's quite confusing. Here's a diagram of the net.

So then I cut that section out of the poppy fabric. Next I needed to figure out how to make squares for the sides out of the top triangle I had for each section. I split it into two sections and cut 4 big triangles and 4 small triangles out of the cream fabric I had found earlier. The grey areas are the cream bits. Next I sewed the small triangles to the edges of the poppy fabric. And the other cream bits to the poppy and small triangles of fabric (Damn I'm really not very good at sewing/explaining/blogging). I then sewed up all the edges inside out to each other to make it shaped, well, like a footstool.

 





 I did all my cutting with scissors (which in hindsight wasn't a great idea because it wasn't that accurate... but hey ho hindsight is a great thing) so I had to sew it weirdly at the top. But my lovely Mum on Mother's Day took time out of her relaxing (laundry) and convinced me to make a feature out of it. Design Opportunity! So I put back to front darts in the top four corners, as shown belooow.

 

 

Next I made some binding.  with this I used my cool left handed rotary cutter. I cut it at 21/2 inches, then folded it in half and ironed it. I sewed it all along the bottom using my quarter inch foot, then folded it over and top stitched it using red because I frankly couldn't be bothered to hand sew something that is going to drape along the floor.

 

I then pulled it back on the footstool and voila it fitted (just). And it goes with the room. Yaaay.

Check out the competition at http://www.hillarys.co.uk/inspiration/the-hub/2014/country-craft-competition/