Quick tricks: ironing board cover

Any of you other sewers out there will already know about Tilly and the Buttons, but for the rest of you, Tilly was a contestant on the Great British Sewing Bee, and has since become a giant of the indie pattern world, with one of the most stylish blogs in the business. Poring over some older posts, I found this tutorial for making an ironing board cover. Our ironing board cover was really on its last legs – burn marks, a rip, an air of tragic desperation… I bookmarked the page straight away.

I had a some lovely purple fabric that I bought out of love, even though I couldn’t think of anything to make with it and the colour doesn’t look that nice against my skin. So this was the perfect project for it! The instructions were dead easy to follow – I cut a little further away from the board than it suggests just to make sure, but otherwise I followed them to the letter. Here are my pretty non-artistic photos of the finished product!

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Quick tricks: making hair flowers

Honestly, this is so quick and easy I feel like a bit of a cheat writing a blog post about it.

When I knew I was going to be making this dress, I thought how lovely it would be to have some blue hair flowers to go with it. Blue, however, doesn’t seem to be a popular hair flower colour and, well, I couldn’t find any. Whilst walking around Sheffield town centre filled with existential despair (how could you do this to me, Accessorize?), I spotted a shop selling bunches of plastic flowers for a pound. A pound? Hmm.

An hour later I was home, armed with plastic flowers, the kind of hair clips I haven’t worn since I was a little girl, and some very serious-looking glue. I picked a Bostik glue that had “metals” in the list of things you could use it to stick – I’m pretty sure anything strong will do.

From there, it was simple – I cut the stems of the fake flowers as close to the petals as I could (be careful not to cut into the part holding the flowers together), popped the clips open, drizzled plenty of glue on the base of the flowers, arranged them nicely on the clips, and left overnight to dry. And done!

Quick tricks: the pom pom crop

I love a good pom pom – and that’s not a euphemism. I’ve been seeing them everywhere on ready-to-wear clothes this season, so I decided to do a little experiment. I bought the white crop top – if you’re more dedicated and less scared of jersey than me, you might make your own – from H&M (£1.99!) and picked up the pom pom trim at the market – I think it was £1.20 a metre, and they had plenty of colours. Then all I did was pin in place around the hem of the top, and sew! I did it on the right side because I liked the braid part of the trim, too – but you could always hide that part on the wrong side and just have the pom poms peeping out from underneath the hem, if you preferred. Handily, the braid also hid my stitching! If you don’t have a sewing machine but like the look, you could do this by hand – but it might take quite a long time. You might remember my beautiful model, Simo, from my Matilda visits Cameroon post. I made the top for her because I think it looks darling with the kind of little printed shorts or loose trousers I know she often wears in summer.