Molly's Sketchbook: Lavender Sachets

I used to think that sachets were kind of silly and useless, along the lines of crocheted toilet paper covers. Turns out, I was wrong; sachets are cool and practical too! They're not only pretty and wonderfully tactile,  but they also make your clothes and drawers smell great! (Now could someone please explain to me what a toilet paper cover is for?)

My sachet change of heart was made possible by a remarkable new product, the Dutch Chintz Garden Roll. Like sachets, chintz sometimes has a reputation for being unstylish (or “chintzy”), but these Garden Rolls quickly dispel such a notion. Each Roll includes a whole world of historically accurate and totally beautiful fabrics that truly spark the imagination. Comprised of fifteen 4-inch by 60-inch strips of fabric, each strip is divided into three different reproduction prints. Plus, there are five tone-on-tone strips. And so, swept away by this rainbow of jewel tones and extraordinary prints (whose actual dimensions are so well suited for a hand-sized project), I decided to give sachets a try, despite my original skepticism. 

I quickly became a sachet convert. They were so simple and fun to make, especially in an assembly line, and they made my whole house smell like lavender!  I loved picking out my favorite chintz prints and matching them with others to create fresh smelling stacks of sachets. 

Materials

To make twenty 3 1/2-inch square sachets:

• A Dutch Chintz Garden Roll
• 1/2- yard Organic Canvas in Natural
• 100% cotton thread in color 1240
• Hand Quilting thread in color 829
• A 1 pound bag of dried lavender (This site also has a lot of other great smelling herbs that would work well if you wanted to try something besides lavender.)

Note: The garden roll contains enough fabric to make as many as 300 sachets! If you'd like to make more than 20 just keep in mind that you can get 20 from each 1/2-yard of canvas. Here is a picture of the roll before it's cut:

Cutting

Pick out the fabrics you'd like to use from the roll of fabrics. In the example I am making a set of 12. If you're going to give them or use them as a set make sure you like the way they look all together.

Cut each of the chintz fabrics into a 4-inch square.

Cut 12 (or however many sachets you're making) 4-inch squares from the canvas, one for each of the chintz squares.

Sewing

Press one side of each of the cut squares 1/4-inch towards the wrong side.

Pin each chintz square to a canvas square, right sides together, with their folded sides lined up. Do not pin the folded sides.

Using the cotton sewing thread and a 1/4-inch seam allowance sew around the three pinned sides. Make sure to sew down the sides of the folds.

Turn sewn piece right sides out.

Filling and Finishing

Fill each sewn pocket with 10 heaping teaspoons of lavender and pin it closed. Make sure that the folded edges are flush with one another and that no raw seams or stray threads are popping out past the pinned edge.

Using the hand quilting thread sew the sachet closed with a blind stitch: Start with the knot on the inside of the fold. Pull the needle through along the fold of the chintz side and exit 1/4-inch from the edge.

Push the needle through the opposite side's fold (on the canvas side) directly across from the first exit point. 

Go back and forth like this, sewing through the folds, until you reach the end of the open side. Tie a knot at the end.

Pull the thread through to the front of the sachet and snip it at the exit point to hide the end.

Thread an 18-inch length of the hand quilting thread and do not tie a knot. Starting from the canvas side of the sachet take a small horizontal tacking stitch through the sachet. Leave a 4-inch tail. Re-stitch over this stitch a few times and pull the stitch tight so that the sachet puckers towards the center, as shown above.

Double knot the working end of the thread to the tail on the canvas side, making sure to pull the knot tight to secure it. Hide the ends of the thread inside of the sachet as you did in the previous step and you're all done!