Cover Your Fireplace! If you're so inclined...

Being as I've been deliriously sick all week, I've had a lot of time at home. Most of that time was spent sleeping, but when you wake up at 2pm on a Thursday, you are suddenly grabbed with the urge to "do something". There was no way that I was getting dressed, so I figured I would show you some pictures from my last project which might come in handy for your home, or for a friend's. As Chris pointed out, many of our friends in houses have fireplaces they cannot use for one reason or another, including our friend Bryce. She had brought up the idea of covering the plyboard that blocks her fireplace with a fabric version of a fire, but I didn't get to act on that until a couple of months later.
What helped me jump in was this awesome black paper/fabric I have that I thought would be really awesome as the background, since most other fabrics wouldn't look cold enough to be the cavernous space around a fire.

I had originally wanted to use a red paisley as the majority of the fire's area, but couldn't find one that suited my vision so I turned to my wall o' fabric and willed myself to be open minded. The "red" section of my fabric wall claims almost as much space as the "blue" section, so there was a lot of awesome stuff to choose from. I ended up using some impulse buys from shopping days gone by, fabric/old-saris-cholis-etc my friend Preet donated to my sewing cause months ago (ever handy), and some of my favorite quilting fabric that I bought for love of the designs. This is a good opportunity to use fabric pieces of any size you have lying around.

Each flame tongue was cut, then had its seams pressed under, had the seams stitched under, then was placed on the fire background to be stitched on. It was annoying, but a good exercise in patience. The seam stitching made the final stitching part a lot easier, so I'm glad I did that even if the small fabric pieces kept junking up my machine.

The logs were the final part to go on, though I suppose it would look pretty neat to have them overlap with the fire more. I took some liberties with the wood selection: it was originally supposed to be faux bois, but I was feeling punchy so I used this animal print I had on hand. Bryce thinks it looks more like stone than wood, but I'm still a fan. Oh, the fire had to be stitched to the outline in there too. That's important.

And then we put it in front of her fireplace! (disregard the off-measurements--we never established what was length and what was height.)

So, if you have a fireplace to cover, make this project your own!