Lavender project

For the past few months my goal has been to clean out my house, to determine what projects I will actually move forward with doing with the supplies I have laying around, and to finish projects that I have started. Unfortunately, there's a lot of those. I have different projects for different areas of the house.

Upstairs in my oldest sons old room: machine sewing and any ironing

Bedroom: a plethora

Living room: crochet and cross-stitch

Kitchen: whatever I feel like making when I want diffused sunlight, table space, and when I feel like letting the kitchen witch out to play.

Workshop: Holy Shazbot, a little bit of everything.

And in every single one of those areas are many assortments of projects in various stages of doneness. Recently, while in the sewing room, I ran across some small inserts that I had sewn to make lavender and flax seed pillows. These small pillows are fabulous warmed or cooled, for use with headaches, sore muscles, sleep, and I always loved them on my eyes after yoga while in shavasana.

I couldn't believe how close I was to done on them! I know I had stopped working on them because I had run out of lavender and didn't order any until recently that I needed for another project. I talk myself out of spending money quite often, which is great on the pocket book, not great for when you don't want half-finished projects piling up. I also grow lavender, one plant of it, but knew that it wouldn't be nearly enough to finish the bags. Plus, I always leave the first bloom of the season for the bees.

So, I set out to finish the bags and that is no small feat for me. Any time I sit down at the sewing machine is a crapshoot on how that will turn out. Some times I surprise myself at how well something came out and other times I'm stopping every two seconds to deal with the gremlins in my machine! My pincushion is skull so that I feel a little more badass and let my machine know who's in charge. (HA!)

The pillow covers are cotton and made from fabric that I've had here. I don't have a lot of fabric, according to me, but I have enough to stay busy with little projects like this. I have no idea where I ran across the original sewing pattern for these, but have been making them for years. I tried a different sewing pattern (again, I don't remember where I got that one from) and didn't like that one. It was smaller than I liked, didn't go to together as well. It's the bottom one in the picture of the three pillows. I needed to stick with what I was doing! It was working, why change it? You can find many variations of patterns online to try! I used to even make sleep masks too, but you can't machine wash those and eventually the fabric can feel kind of yuck and you can only spot/surface clean it.

The inserts for the original ones I did are made from cotton muslin that I had laying around in my stash. I'm out of that now and need to get more if I want to continue making them.

I mentioned that the filling was flax seed too. I bought a high quality brand, raw flax seed=expensive! I'll be using a more economical  filler moving forward! These take more filling than you might think they would. Two of three have already sold though to friends and it feels good to get things done and where they are meant to be. 💜