Nightshade

I hope everyone has had a good Thanksgiving!

After putting the binding on the sampler the other night, I felt like I was kind of on a roll. I decided to make an eye mask. If you haven't noticed, I do most of my quilting  late at night, which means that I end up sleeping long after the sun has come up. After I painted my room, I took down the blackout curtains - because face it, that's not cute. I had an old eye mask that I couldn't find, so i decided to make a new one. I happened to have some fq's of Nightshade by Tula Pink on hand, and that was perfect. :-)

I've never done this before (like usual...) so I just drew the general shape I was going for on a piece of muslin. I used the muslin to trace the shape onto the fabric, fussy cutting both prints.

I cut some layers of batting and blackout fabric as well, and layered everything up with the right sides of the prints together on top. Though in this picture, I haven't put the light purple print on yet...

Stitch around the top and bottom, leaving about an inch and a half or so open on BOTH ends. Turn it right side out. Mutter profanities as you do so.

Once this is done, take a length of elastic and measure it around your head while holding the mask up to your eyes.

Put each end of the elastic inside the open sides, turn the edges in to *sort of* match the edges that are already stitched. Pin like crazy. This part will be frustrating, just so you know. I ended up trimming the sides of the batting layer so that there was less to deal with when turning the sides in by hand.

Stitch again around the whole thing, securing the elastic and closing the sides. All done!

The finished product is nothing to write home about - the stitching is not straight, the pinned sides are not as smooth as I'd like, and where the elastic goes in the sides are not even! There were actually several things that I would do a little differently if I do this again;

~ I think I would go ahead and pin and stitch the elastic to the sides during the FIRST round of stitching (carefully putting the elastic in between the layers to make sure I don't stitch over more than just the ends).
~ That would leave the TOP open to turn it right side out, which would be much easier to turn in and stitch.
~ I might consider putting more batting in, to make it fluffier, or using minky or something for the side of the mask that goes towards the face. Or maybe that would be too hot?

Let me know if you've done something like this without any pattern/direction, and how it went!