Liberty Tea Cup

I recently had the chance to test a pattern for Laurraine at Patchwork Pottery.  She pattern tested for me with the Sew-Ichigo patterns, her proof reading and attention to detail was amazing, so I was happy to return the favour.   Regular readers here know my love affair with tea and tea imagery so I feel a kinship with Laurraine who is similarly inspired by tea and all that relates to it.  I followed her Quilted Teacup pattern  and made a Liberty lawn and linen tea cup.  

Liberty lawn is the perfect match for a teacup pattern, so English, delicate and small prints- just like floral china.  Ali at veryberryhandmade has started selling Liberty charm packs in a range of sizes at The Fabric Market Place.  I bought a pack of 15 x 4" squares and dug into my little Liberty stash making this a scrappy project, just as Laurraine intended.

The linen is Kaufman Essex linen in bleached white.  I had a selection of this sent to me when I did the Zakka Style Sew a long.  I first came across Essex in a quilting bee when it was part of a fabric selection.  It is linen/cotton blend, but it cuts like a heavy cotton- it doesn't slip and slide or even fray in the nightmarish way that 100% linen does.  The yarn dyed variations are incredible- I will show you more soon, but I always like to have a few colours of the standard Essex in stock and I have always bought from Simply Solids.

 To make this a truly scrappy project, I even pieced my binding.   Liberty lawn is thin enough and strong enough to make a great binding without significant seam bulk.  Laurraine's pattern prints as a booklet so there are illustrations and words for each stage so I was clear on what I was doing at all times.  I especially like pictures when I am following instructions and Laurraine has tweaked all the illustrations to make sure they accurately represent each stage of the process.

It is quite a fiddly pattern as all 3D sewing tends to be but it is not hard.   The skills covered are bias binding- making and attaching and then just standard sewing.     There is a balance of hand sewing and machine stitching and she includes a glossary and diagrams of all hand stitches involved.

The pattern comes out at around the size of a medium china tea cup- so delightful!  Now all I need is for Liberty to do a mix and match china tea set using their classic pattern archives!

You can find Laurraine's pattern here along with other equally detailed and cute projects.