Stitched containers and bleach printing

I have joined the new Stitch Club being organised by TextileArtist.org  https://www.textileartist.org/. The first workshop was led by Debbie Lyddon and the challenge was to make a container for a meaningful object that reflects what is inside. We were encouraged to include a grommet in the container to reveal a glimpse of what was inside.

I made 2 responses to this challenge - a practical container for some gardening snips and a book cover to hold my Mom's school exercise book from her sewing class that I have inherited.

I started by finding some firm fabrics - navy-blue cotton drill and some denim cut off the bottom of a pairs of jeans from my Mom's old fabric stash. I experimented with decorating them by printing with bleach and painting freehand with bleach.

I used ordinary thick household bleach painted on leaves pressed down with a plastic box. I wore gloves and glasses and laid the fabric on an old board covered with a bin liner.

This worked really well and I was amazed by the detail you could get on the leaf structure just using this crude method.

I loved this but it didn't reflect anything about the contents of the sewing book so I decided to try printing with sewing objects out of an old inherited sewing basket.

The ends of cotton reels worked quite well as did thick needles and bodkins. Overall I thought it might not be very impactful so I also printed some objects with acrylic paint. The larger scissors in the picture were a cardboard template I made from drawing round my small Fiskars scissors. I hoped that the thin card would absorb the bleach and then print a good image when held against the fabric. This didn't really work out.

Having had this useful trial run I then printed my final fabric. The exercise book has a round logo on the front so that seemed perfect for the grommet element to reveal. I cut this out first and then printed the fabric. I wanted to use the hem of the jeans as the top of the cover.

The bleach printed scissors on the front didn't turn out quite this well so I touched them up with the paint brush but all the other things worked fairly well.

I particularly liked the buttons with bleach and acrylic.

Yes - the jeans really are this dirty. My Mom could be quite impulsive and must have chopped the bottoms off to make shorts before they made it to the wash basket!

To practice sewing the grommets I started on the smaller container. First I created a pattern - see above. I used jewellery wire to make the small grommet to make a hole to hang the pouch up in the greenhouse. I used 3 rounds of wire - it was thicker than recommended but was fairly easy to sew. I used some old cotton thread found in the inherited sewing basket, which was maybe not thick enough but was all I had. It seemed to sew ok with a big needle.

I then assembled the pouch using the sewing machine to attach the front and back before cutting off the dip on the front to show the snips when in use.

I then strengthened the top edge with a similar technique but this time using kitchen string.

This was more difficult and I had to solve a number of problems like what to do about the seam allowance inside and should the string sit on the front edge or the back?

You can see from the photo that I tied the string together with a bit of thread to ensure it kept its shape. In addition, a tip we were given for these grommets was to always cut the hole in the fabric smaller than the finished size as the hole stretches as you stitch it.

Overall it came out fine and feels quite strong.

Having practised both methods I decided to use thinner garden wire to make the grommet on the book cover as it was important that it made a strong round shape. Sewing this in went ok - you need a lot more thread than you think! We were advised to sew in the grommet before making up the container.

I then had to decide how to finish it off. I didn't want to lose the character of the jeans so I decided to sew the bottom hem on the machine and then finish the right hand side with satin stitch in orange thread to match the top-stitching on the jeans. Finally I added some press studs to close off the side and retain the original fell and lap seam of the jeans.

Getting the hole and the logo to line up was difficult and I had to undo the bottom seam a couple of times to get it right but overall I am pleased with it.

Here is one of the pages from inside the book - when you read this you realise how hard it is to write instructions for what we do instinctively. (She didn't always get an 'A'!)