The gift that wasn’t and a tutorial

Here is a  quick delightful last-minute gift you can whip up  for a friend all in an afternoon, using your small scraps.

I made it from this book  in the Hobby Craft Series that I have had forever! I have loved turning the pages and dreaming of making all those pretty things in it.

Have also made a few things like that little elephant I  made into a bag for baby stuff when my son was an infant – the bottles went into the legs and  tissues into the trunk! The cat I made into a  pillow!

But one thing that I always wanted to make was this scissors cozy – with the instructions in Japanese.

This would make an ideal gift for the queen bees in my virtual quilting bee! And English paper piecing or the paper foundation piecing method would be perfect for this, I decided.

For those of you looking for a quick and easy gift for someone who loves sewing, I am sharing how I went about making this delightful little cozy!

You will need

– 25 scraps of assorted fabric about 1.5″ X 2.5″

– 12″ X 8″ fabric or assorted scraps for back.

-12″ X 8″matching  fabric for inner lining

–  30″ matching bias binding 1′ wide

– Two pieces of  thick  batting 12′ X 8″ and 10″ X 6.5″ for back and front respectively.

If you decide to do English paper piecing – Each of those small triangles has dimensions 0.75″ base and 1.5″ height. The top angle is 30 degrees; you can easily make a template on stiff card paper, using your quilting ruler or a protractor if you have one.

Use the template to draw 25 triangles on paper and cut them out very accurately. Ensure your fabric is starched real stiff! Place the paper triangles on wrong side of fabric and cut roughly 1/4 ” outside it.   Tack the fabric to the paper. This comes up really fast 🙂

Follow the picture here  to join 5 rows of 1, 3, 5, 7 and 9 triangles. To join, you place two triangles right side together and take tiny whip stitches along the edges to be joined. There are several excellent EPP tutes available on the net and on youtube!

If you decide to use the foundation paper method (like I did), the ready height of the front is 7.5″ and the base width is 3.75″. Follow the picture to make your foundation paper pattern. Trace out rows on separate strips of paper about 3″ wide and add 1/4′ seam allowance on either side of the row.  Begin with the centre triangle as piece 1, adding on triangles on either side as you go along. When the rows are ready, trim them  and join them up . I used hand sewing to join the rows for a more perfect finish.  Here is what the front of my cozy looked like.

For the back, I decided to go for a scrappy look and joined up 1.5″ X 2.5″ rectangles in 7 vertical rows roughly in a triangle shape about 7″ wide at the base and 12″ in height. This is what my unfinished back looked like. Of course, you could use a single fabric to make the back.

Then came the lining. I was at my stingiest best and stitched the lining into a tube along its longer side. I marked a point about 9″ on the seam and cut and cut it like this! The shorter piece with the seam would be used for the front inner lining and would not show up 🙂

Add the batting and quilt each piece individually ( without trimming the back). I just quilted in the ditch.

Bind the front base only. ( I now drew a template 10.5 ” tall and 5.5 ” wide and trimmed the back.) Place the front and back together.

and do finer trimming if any required. Put the binding and you are ready! I also added a little loop on the back to facilitate hanging the scissors near my workplace.

Do ask me if anything is not clear, this tute assumes that you know the basics of EPP / foundation piecing! This is how my finished scissors cozy looked from the front…

And here is the back!  At the end of it all, I so fell in love with the cozy, that I decided not to send it to the Queen Bee  :-p

Instead a made another one, this time for a pair of small scissors , pictured here!

I decided to quickly mail the gift and block to Queen Bee Nirmala, before I changed my mind, again! Hope this will make up for sending her a block made of printed fabric instead of solids like she wanted, and that too three weeks late 😉