This week's Iron Craft was about money, and per normal I'm not going to make the deadline. Heck, I want to be finished before Saturday, but that is just not likely to happen either. It's OK. I'm enjoying the process and leaving my sewing machine under my craft table and doing all of my sewing by hand. It might be a bad idea with something like a wallet, but the end result is that as slow as I am, any sewing project is more likely to be completed if I don't lock myself into my craft room to work on the project.
I decided I wanted to make a wallet pretty much as soon as I found out what this week's challenge was. I have this large wallet from Bungalow 360 that I picked up ages ago to match my purse, but it is large enough that I find I am overstuffing it. I am trying to find a happy medium and cart less stuff around. I'm hoping a smaller wallet will allow for that.
I found this cute wallet pattern online that looked to be about my skill level. I didn't want polka dots though or a flower applique. Instead I wanted pengies, like this one.
I'm not sure my penguin is as cute as that one, but this has been my efforts over the past day or so.
I followed the tutorial's second (well, actually first) tutorial for the applique and free hand drew my little penguin onto the blue fabric. I cut the pieces and then needed to sew then onto the fabric rather than use the heat and bond stuff from the tutorial.
I used left over sock yarn with yellow floss for the couching around the penguin. There are some areas where I'm going to take a seam ripper and take out the initial basting stitches. I didn't want them to be visible, but I also didn't want to stitch so close to the edge that I caused additional raveling.
I picked everything I needed for this project at Gather Here, which was awesome! The only thing they didn't have was velcro, and when I got home I found that I had an unopened box of the stuff in my sewing box.
Things left to do? Most of the sewing. I'm going to outline the penguin's eyes in either white or the yellow floss. They are pretty darn hard to see right now.
After I finish that part, I need to cut all of the pieces. I think I will actually use my rotary cutter and mat for the first time, so I will do less line marking and more clean cuts. Not many of the fabric stores I've been to will cut less than a quarter yard, so I have enough extra to be safe from mistakes. Hopefully by the end of the weekend I will have a wallet (and I might have had it by the Iron Craft deadline if I didn't decide that hiding under the covers was much better than anything else I could do on Monday).
