Sewing fun at The Lunenburg Makery

The Lunenburg Makery is a place for learning, making, and gathering around craft. We are a multi-purpose craft space including sewing facilities, a library and reading area, a retail space and studios. We offer workshops and courses as well as drop-in projects, sew-by-the-hour, evening craft circles, and studio space.

The Lunenburg Makery is one of my favourite places in Lunenburg. It’s a great shop that sells fabrics and yarns and crafting kits and does clothing alterations and hosts workshops that teach you how to make all sorts of crafty things. They also offer sewing lessons, and if you buy an annual membership for $65, you can use all their sewing equipment for free!

A while back, I blogged about the stool Brian and I recovered in Summer Fun fabric from Minted.

I LOVE this fabric, and after covering the stool, there was still enough fabric to make a cushion cover. Except I don’t know how to make a cushion cover, and I have absolutely no sewing supplies. So I took a sewing lesson with Rita at the Makery. She’s a great teacher – very knowledgeable, encouraging, and gets you to do rather than watch.

Rita had a great idea – she suggested that I used a plain fabric on the back of the cushion cover, and that way I would probably be able to get two cushion covers out of my piece of fabric. I came up with the idea of using two different colours on the back, and I chose turquoise and coral.

There were a few boo-boos along the way, but after a couple of hours of hours of sewing and lots of laughs with Rita, I finished my very first cushion cover :-)

Yesterday, I went back to make cushion cover #2. This time I was able to do most of the work on my own. I’d already cut all the pieces with Rita’s help at my lesson,  so it was pretty much just a matter of sewing hems on the backing pieces and then sewing everything together. Except nothing with me is ever simple ;-) I was pretty happy with the hems on the backing pieces that I sewed all by myself. But when I went to pin them onto the front piece of fabric, they were too small. I had sewn the herms on the scrap pieces of backing fabric. Oops! Oh well, extra practice :-) Once I got the right pieces done, things went smoothly and pretty soon I had cushion #2 all done :-)

        

I love my new cushions! Thank you Rita at The Lunenburg Makery, and thank you once again to Minted for providing me with the beautiful fabric :-)

Happy weekend!

A crafty & colourful weekend

I know lots of people love all-white houses, and I do appreciate all-white houses that are well done. But I’m just not an all-white house kinda girl. So now that we’re living in an all-white rental house, I’m always on the lookout for colourful accessories and art and anything else that will add some pizzazz to these white walls.

On Friday, I stopped in at Wavewood Designs to talk to the owner about one of her paintings. While I was there, I noticed that the painting that I had fallen in love with back in June was still hanging on the wall. Which was a shock, because I was sure someone would have snagged it by now. So, since it was still there… and since it’s called “Living The Dream”… and since I love it… I decided that it was meant to come home with me :-)

“Living The Dream” by Teresa Dadson

On Saturday, I took an artistic typography class at The Lunenburg Makery taught by artist Susan Black. I thought it was funny that when we had to choose the paper for our first typography project, everyone chose brown paper. Except for me. I choose neon notepad paper :-) I gotta be me! We all created the word JOY in in our own styles…

And then we all chose a word that we wanted to create and designed our own font. I tried to make mine look like waves. Can you see it? Kinda sorta?

While I was in Lunenburg, I stopped in at The Mariner’s Daughter to pick up this awesome fair trade African basket from The Baba Tree Basket Company. I actually broke out of my purple/turquoise/green  comfort zone with this one :-)

And finally, I’ve been going a little bit crazy with a can of Indigo spray paint. No paintable surface is safe, and even some unpaintable surfaces better watch out (dogs, I’m looking at you!)

What’s your favourite way to bring colour into your life?