Fabric

When I was first putting together the Poppy Tunic pattern, a friend suggested I try using Kaffe Fassett’s shot cottons for the main fabric.  I’ll be the first to admit that I’m not a huge Kaffe Fassett fan.  I know that he is extremely popular, but his style just doesn’t grab me. His shot cottons looked great though and I was lucky enough to get a selection to try from Alan at XLN Fabrics.

Wow!  They are absolutely perfect for sewing clothing – especially when you are looking for something with a nice soft drape.
Unlike other solid fabrics, shot cottons are not completely solid.  They have a more organic look and feel about them, with colour variations and imperfections in the weaving giving them lovely individual stlye and detail.  The weave of a shot cotton is quite loose and they are fairly lightweight, thus creating a nice soft drape and feel for garment sewing.  And there are more than 50 colours in the range!

The cotton is woven using two different tones of thread  – the lengthwise warp threads and crosswise weft threads are usually a different colour.  Sometimes the difference between the colours are very vivid and other times they are much the same.  Each shot cotton has a unique dimension and seems to give off a different colour depending on how the light reflects against them.  When the raw edges of the fabric frays, a bright stripe of colour appears (see photos below – and check out these funky shot cotton scarves!)

 

I highly recommend using shot cottons in garment sewing and know that I’ll definitley be visitng these again in the future. There are loads of great colours and they are really comfortable to wear.

It is difficult to properly determine what colour your shot cotton is going to look like in real life from the swatches that Kaffe provides.  Here are the ones that I have in my collection so far, along with their names.  I’ll be sure to photograph others as I collect them to help out with determining colour choices.

This time around I took my time selecting the fabrics.  I didn’t want anything matchy-matchy so grabbed a few of my favourite fabrics from my stash and played around until I came up with a collection I was happy with. 

There is definitley nothing matchy-matchy about these fabrics!  Although the more I look at them, I can see why they work well together – there are a few from the same ranges, the scale of most of the prints are small or have a small detail about them and there is a focus on grey, lilac, aqua and green…

Cushions really are a quick and easy way to spruce up a room and freshen things up a bit – could I claim this as my spring cleaning for the year?!

My favourite method for making cushion covers is hiding the zipper under a folded flap of fabric.  It gives a really neat and professional finish.  I don’t like envelope closures as they always tend to stretch open and look sloppy over time.  If you are interested, here is a handy tutorial to hide the zippers in your cushion covers.

I was a little worried about using regular quilting weight cotton to make the cushions.  In past experience they have become saggy and stretched and haven’t been able to withstand the beatings that our cushions get (see below) so this time I fully lined each cushion using a piece of (dodgy) scrap fabric I had lying around.  Nothing fancy with the lining, just cut a piece the same as the exterior and overlocked them together around the edge and then worked with the joined pieces as one.  It has made a huge difference in the stability of the cushions and I’m confident they will be long-lasting.

Hmm, looks like fun…I might have to join them in their antics next time!