Sew Beautiful

This is the perfect season to spend some time indoors working on decorating projects that will give your home a bright new look. If you are a sewer, why not give your rooms a face lift with fabric? It’s amazing how a few simple changes can make a major difference, and to help you get started Butterick Patterns and Waverly have teamed up to offer home sewers a wide range of decorating options.

A good place to start, if there’s a baby in the house, is with the nursery. Crib sheets, bumper pads, coverlets and roll-and-tie window shades are quick and easy projects and a new pattern from Butterick shows you how.

These items also provide a great showcase for your sense of color and design. Instead of the cute animal and alphabet prints that are a staple of traditional ready-made infant furnishings, why not take advantage of your sewing skills to assert your individuality and create a more modern setting in which to nurture the newborn?

The nursery shown here, for example, features cheerful contemporary prints from Waverly’s Harmonics collection that would be at home in any room. The crib sheets in Simplicity offer a charming study of Queen Anne’s lace, while the bumper pads and tie-up shade are stitched in Rain, a soothing abstract diagonal design. The coverlet may look like there’s lots of sewing involved but using Quadrants, with its grid layout of nine blocks of color, makes things easy.

Directions for making an upholstered tack board and fabric-lined baskets – items that would brighten any room in the house – are also included. Those shown here are made with Sutton Square, an intriguing jacquard cloth that has a subtle checkerboard design of one-inch squares (it’s the same fabric used to create the giant scallops on the crib coverlet).

Window treatments are another easy way to freshen the look of a room. Butterick has a new window treatment package that includes directions for several different valances including the box pleat version shown here in Waverly’s Linear stripe from the Harmonics collection and another eye-catching design fashioned from Ballad Bouquet atop Stripe Ensemble (both from the Romantic Overtures collection) that relies on inverted pleats and an angled hemline for its intriguing shape.

These fabrics and patterns can be found at Jo-Ann and Hancock stores nationwide.