Car boot buys and till rolls!

So I nipped to the car boot this morning and struck lucky as well as buying my bananas for work this next week : )

Someone on a Facebook patchwork group had posted a tutorial for using till rolls as a backing, making with her instructions,

attractive strings of flying geese.

I imagine most of you will already have seen the idea but it was new to me. She was using up her scraps and 2.5" width till rolls and the result was really nice, so of course I thought I'd try it too, some-when or other.

So this morning, 2 x packs of 5 till rolls for a £1 - bargain!

The lady who sold them, said -

I suppose you've got a machine they fit then!

Her face when I said,

No I'm going to use them for patchwork ....lol...

I didn't explain!

Now the lass on FB, drew vertical lines down each side of the till roll strips

and then found the centre line between them and drew that in vertically.

Then she  drew diagonal lines, in V's towards that centre line,

all down the length of the till rolls.

She then placed fabric pieces in a flip and stitch format down the length of the roll, forming a flying geese strip.

Well I wasn't going to do all that drawing of lines down 2 miles of till roll obviously, since all I want are scrappy strips which will use up some of my scraps!

Not so much flying geese as skew whiffy V's!

Once stitched together I cut them half an inch wider than the till roll itself, then spray starched them on the front.

It was surprisingly easy to tear off the till roll from the back since it was serrated anyway where it had been stitched through.

Clever that!

Then I starched and ironed the back too for some stability.

Because I've used scraps and lost all sense of fabric bias,I ran lines of machine stitching down each outer edge, which may be overkill,

but it will keep them intact till I use them.

It hasn't made a dent in my smallest bag of scraps, so I will be making several more!

The other thing I couldn't leave at the car boot was this for £1.50...

 Its clearly an old frame and canvas and it is so charming, I couldn't resist it. I have washed the canvas already and the yellow eye has come up beautifully and thankfully we had a couple of hours of sunshine with a breeze, so its dried nicely.

I think I may cut Percy Parrot out at some stage and use it in a textile collage, though he is almost worth framing exactly as he is, even though he is not finished!

Oh and the other things I got were 1 full Au de Toilette and a 2/3's full PERFUME! bottle of Lair Du Temps for £10!

There's a chap comes once a year with all the ex display stock from various  stores, they must replace the display bottles once a year and he buys that stock and sells them at the car boot.

I have bought from him several times over the years and struck lucky today as he reduced the prices of what was on the table.

Instead of £8 each bottle, I paid £10 for two - but I don't think he realised one was actually perfume : )