Car caddy (no. 1)

While I was writing my last post about the little pinafore that I did some applique on, I had to think of my first applique project that turned out quite well (after lots of failures, will write about this sometime). So here it is.

I found this wonderful tutorial for a car caddy over at Homemade by Jill, and I decided to try it out for a birthday present for one of my boys' friends a while ago. What shall I say? It's FABULOUS. Really well explained, sews up easily and quickly and you won't need much beside an old pair of jeans and some small pieces of fabric.

However, I did not follow instructions exactly, but made a couple of design changes. For the inside, I picked some bright green corduroy - oh, I so love sewing with corduroy! I find it easy to cut (just follow the lines ;-)), and it's wonderfully soft to the touch. It can be a little tricky as it has a tendency to shift in one direction, but careful pinning does the trick.



As I don't really like sewing with felt and don't have any in my stash, I chose to use a strip of denim for the road and applique it on using shiny embroidery thread (Gütermann Sulky in white) and a wide but very short zigzag stitch.

That went pretty well and made for a nice, crisp look. I also like that the denim gives the "road" some structure or direction.

Finally, but probably most importantly, I used a different applique on the outside. I had this little scrap of Riley Blake "Peak Hour" fabric, ironed on some fusible interfacing, cut out the car and ironed it to the outer denim piece. As I wrote above, I had tried out applique before, but was never really content with the outcome. So I was actually a little surprised with how well it turned out...

I must admit that I'm really quite proud of myself. What do you say? Take a closer look:

On this project, I also tried out freezer paper stenciling for the very first time. Now I'm totally addicted to this technique (just what I needed - YET ANOTHER hobby ;-))

All in all, this project took me only a couple of hours, and I'm really very slow, reading and re-reading, double-checking measurements, pondering over fabric choices... So if you sew at normal speed and are looking for a handmade present for a little car lover, I can only recommend trying out this pattern! It was so much fun, I made two more after this one. I'll show you some pics soon...