A little bit more fruit... or is it a lot?

As I said on my apple post:

This was made for the #stitchingpirates Sailing the fruit contest however as the rules say that there must be 2 pieces of fruit this is not my final entry - I need to add something else before it is eligible.

Well the pieces you see with the apple are the "something else" I added to make it an eligible entry. I first planned to do a 3D  strawberry which was originally mystery project B but it turned out to be too stiff to be able to make a strawberry out of it so I knew I had to make something a little bigger. So I then decided to make a tangerine to go with the apple but creating a pattern as I went along making the tangerine (as I just *knew* that people would want to make the tangerine and there was no way I'd be able to make a pattern once I'd completed the piece) was slow and I didn't think I'd be able to finish this on time. So I looked in my pattern scrapbooks to see what I could find that might work.

  It all started with the raspberry embroidery which I completed in less than a day but once it was done I didn't know what to do with it and it didn't really seem to suit the apple so I set it aside to think. The pattern I'd found in my scrapbook to make the raspberry also had some other fruit so I decided to move on to the strawberry with the initial plan of using the strawberry next to the cherry as a needle book but the strawberry turned out to be so bit that would have been a little bit too large for the needle book, and the two together would have been bigger than the bit of embroidery fabric I had left. At that point I decided to just do the strawberry and leave the cherry for something else, though I now also didn't know what to do with the strawberry either.

Full of doubt as to what I was doing for this but knowing that even if I skipped the apple completely and just went with the strawberry and raspberry it would not be "enough" I decided to keep going with the embroideries thinking that at worst I'd have a set of fruit that went together as they all came from the same pattern. I looked at the scraps of  embroidery fabric I had left that was the same as what was already present in the other embroideries and had a think as to what I could do with them. I still wanted to go with a sewing kit but couldn't see how I could use the strawberry for it. I decided to make a needle book out of the raspberry and considered using the cherry for a pincushion but realised that it would just look odd. I did know that with the round shapes it would look nice on the flap of a scissors case so that's what it became.

The last pattern of the 4 for the fruits was far too big for the fabric I had left as it was a long string of berries  but I picked out a couple of the berries and used them. I didn't want to make a square our of it as I had the idea of a single dangling tassle at the bottom so sacrificed 2 of my hexagon papers to make elongated hexagons and using a bit of red fabric as the backing and a scrap of ribbon I had on my desk I made a scissors fob out of it.

By the time I'd finished all these pieces I realised that I could make a box with the strawberry if I lined pieces of cardboard with fabric, so, as I didn't have any fabric glue, I had to do it the old fashioned way: by stretching the fabric over the pieces of cardboard and then carefully sewing a second piece of fabric to the first. The piece you see above is the base which was given a piece of felt as the outer side so I had to stretch the lining first before adding the felt. For all the other pieces I stretched the outer fabric over the card and sewed down the lining. I needed more fabric around the edges of the strawberry than I had so I sewed some strips of red batik to the outside of the embroidery and placed that on 2 pieces of batting (one smaller than the other to make it dome a little) and then stretched it around the cardboard. I then sewed all the pieces together using DMC perle thread and a large needle - it was rather painful sewing this together and by the time I was finished my hands really hurt.

I wanted to be able to fully open my box so didn't sew up the sides of it As you can see I also added 2 little pockets to 2 of the sides. What isn't so visible in these photo's is that the box is covered with read and white fabrics - 2 red and 2 white for the lid and 2 red and 2 white for the box itself - swapping them round so no 2 are next to each other.

Stats for all the items:

Apple:
Colours: 11 DMC colours blended together to create 30 different colour groups.
Fabric: White 28 ct Even weave
Size: 2 1/2" wide x 1 3/4" high / 6,35 x 4.45 cm

Berry:
Colours used: 6
Fabric: White 28 ct Even weave
Size: 1/ 3/4" x 1 1/4"

Cherry:
Colours used: 6
Fabric: White 28 ct Even weave
Size: 2 7/8" x 4 1/4"

Raspberry:
Colours used: 7
Fabric: White 28 ct Even weave
Size: 2 7/8" square.

Strawberry:
Colours used: 10
Fabric: White 28 ct Even weave
Size: 5 1/4" wide x 5 1/4" deep x 3 1/4" high