Mother’s Day gift: Here’s a quick and easy project perfect for Mother’s Day: a heart-shaped lavender sachet, based on one of the projects in Sanae Ishida’s book “Sewing Happiness: a year of simple projects for living well” published by Sasquatch Books and reviewed here
MOTHER’S DAY GIFT SUPPLIES / MATERIALS
Heart-shaped paper template
Scrap fabric (recommended: cotton piece)
Coordinating thread + needle
Lavender buds (1/2 cup to 1 cup per sachet. Try to get the non-culinary kind.)
Optional: small funnel
Note: the sample sachet is approximately 4″ in height and filled with about 1/2 cup of lavender buds. The fabric size was 5″ x 10″.
1. Create heart-shaped template. Fold cardstock in half and draw half a heart with the center on the folded edge. Cut it out.
2. Make sure to iron your piece of fabric, then fold in half with right sides together. Trace the heart shape on the wrong side using chalk or a pen (chalk shown). For the purposes of this sachet, you don’t need to worry about pesky things like grain lines.
3. Cut out fabric. Make sure to use fabric shears or extra sharp scissors.
4. Thread about 20 inches of coordinating thread and knot the two ends together. To make the thread visible, dark blue thread was used for the following steps.
5. Sew with a running stitch. Since you don’t want the lavender buds to leak out, make sure your stitches are as close together as possible. Leave an opening of about 2″ to turn the sachet right side out.
6. Here’s what the back looks like:
7. Clip the bottom corner near the stitches, taking care not to clip into the stitches. Then create little snips all the way around (use aqua marks in the photo as reference), again taking care not to clip into the stitches. This helps the curved edges to lay flat instead of puckering.
8. Turn sachet right side out. Any pointy tool like a chopstick or pencil will do, but I like to use the end of a small paintbrush to push out corners and to adjust the shape to my liking but be very gentle! It’s very delicate, especially with hand stitching, and you don’t want to accidentally poke holes.
9. Using a funnel or rolled up piece of paper (in this case, I simply used the heart-shaped template), fill sachet with lavender buds. Avoid over-stuffing the sachet – it should be around 1/4″ to 1/2″ in thickness when laid flat.
10. Close up the opening with a slip stitch. Voila! A cute little aromatic sachet to use as a Mother’s Day gift.
