Tea Cup: Third Development

I’m now on my third development teacup. the previous two I am very happy with how these set of teacups are developing.

• Firstly, I drew and cut out the top and bottom pattern pieces that create the outside of the cup. I drew and cut out five tops and five bottoms. I added a 1cm seam allowance to the top parts of the tea cups also.
• I then iron the fold for the seam allowance so when I attached all of the components together this will be sewn down as well.
• Once I had done this, I got the bottom piece and then a top piece and pinned these together so I could then sew and attach the two pieces together. I repeated this for all five pieces until they were all attached like the images below.
• Once I had attached all the top and bottom pattern pieces together I then pinned these together and began sewing them together. Once both of them had been completed and now created a circular shape of a tea cup,  I turned the tea cup the correct way to check that the stitching was okay and moved on.
• This time I changed the way I made the cup. I didn’t have any of the cord I had previously to make the teacups. I went to a local shop that I knew supplied some crafty pieces and luckily they had a section with ribbons and cords. I found some gold cord but also this lovely silver ribbon, shown with the images below, I purchased both of these.
• I used then used the silver ribbon to create the bottom of the tea cup I made a circular shape with the ribbon and stitched this together. To make it easier for me and so that my teacup looked professional I did add some hot glue to attached the bottom to the tea cup, which has worked very well. It is also more hardwearing than just trying to stitch it on.
• I then began looking at adding the lining of the teacup I have continued to use the plain white polyester fabric as it has proven to uphold all my previous attempts. I’m going to do six lining pieces again as this has worked best with my other cups rather than just using five. Once I drew them out and cut the pieces out, I began to sew these together as well.
• I then placed the lining inside of the cup to make sure that it fitted in nicely with the outer cup pattern pieces. Using pins I pinned the outside and inside of the teacup together so then I can sew them all together. I used a light green machine thread to do this.
• Next was looking at the handle. This time I also included the lovely silver ribbon. I used a little hot glue to attached the top half of the handle into the seam of the teacup, this worked very well in comparison to me sewing it on like previous attempts. I then brought the ribbon down to see where I would place the bottom part of the handle and cut the excess away and then used hot glue again to attach the bottom half of the handle to the teacup.

Here in the images below is the final outcome of this tea cup. I am not as happy with this attempt of developing my teacup. The lip of the cup doesn’t look as professional as previous attempts. I believe this is where I have not included the silver ribbon to separate the lining of the tea cup and the outside of the cup. When I have adding the lining it is less noticeable that the lining and outside of the teacup aren’t exactly lined up which is the problem here. I am going to continue developing my teacup.