UFO: Busy Stripes Quilt

I have no idea why this little quilt has been sitting in my UFO box for two and a half years.  A little stitching in the ditch, a little binding and it will be all set to go to a little fellow I know who will love to snuggle under its flannelly goodness. 

Smocks and more

K has a birthday party to go to tomorrow. We needed a present and something special to wear, stat. I found the pattern for this "Swing Swing Smock" in Amy Karol's Bend the Rules Sewing and modified it to fit my six-year-old. Thanks to Amy's zig-zag method of applying bias tape, it was a cinch to make -- took maybe an hour, tops. The fabric is Amy Butler from my stash, and I have a yard of that pocket material waiting to become a Lazy Days Skirt (by Oliver & S) -- but we needed something warm enough for K to wear now.

Out there on the Internet are tutorials galore, and I found one to make a child's skirt from an adult's sweater and another to make a child's leggings from the arms and shoulders left over from the adult's sweater made into the child's skirt. As it happened, I had a brown cashmere sweater that I didn't enjoy wearing very much, that was just the size, shape and softness to make into a skirt-and-leggings set for K.

She was delighted with her new outfit when she came home from school today and it was all I could do to get it off of her at bedtime! I'm just relieved that both pieces fit and were comfortable for her.

For her friend's birthday present we found fabric featuring the characters from Disney's The Princess and the Frog -- K reports that the child is Disney-princess crazy -- and I made another smock. I didn't have an appropriate sweater to make a skirt/legging set so I purchased a t-shirt and leggings at Target that I hope will fit her. I am less enthralled with this outfit than I am with the one for K, but if it suits her classmate's taste (which I hope it does), then I'm happy.

Back in the studio

I took a break over the holidays and mostly worked on knitting mittens -- finished a pair for myself and nearly finished a pair for D, which he may yet get by the time the cold weather is over. But I'm back in the studio with a new sewing machine and plenty of new projects in the works.

Before Christmas I went through my stash of thrifted sheets and readied them for projects galore... They're not just for pajama pants anymore!

I spent most of today working on a long-overdue birthday present for my nephew J, who turned The Big Oh-Three back in November. I had fun making his superhero cape, though by the time I was done it had me singing my high school's alma mater (Crimson and gold, triumphant evermore!) and wondering whether J might look more like Ronald McDonald than a powerful crime-fighter. I think he'll probably enjoy it just the same.

My notions bin has yet to recover from the ransacking it received when I was looking for just the right trim for an improvised doll's dress that K's hand-me-down baby could wear to show-and-tell last Friday. It was constructed and donned with haste and I have not seen it since, or I would show it to you here.

Here are the pre-washed fabrics for the preemie quilt I'm making as a sample for the craftivism group I'm trying to get together at my church. I've been wanting to work with 30's reproduction fabrics for a long time, and I had a good excuse to buy some last week at my quilt store's Fat Quarter Friday -- they will be perfect for a baby, and they mix seamlessly (no pun intended) with some vintage scraps I bought when we were antique-scrounging in Michigan last summer.

So my hands are full and busy, and I must say I am quite happy with the whole deal.

Six!

Happy birthday to my new six-year-old!

Here she is in her self-made birthday crown:

And here she is in her mama-made oilcloth apron:

 (Naturally, I have a matching one.  Painting party, anyone?)

Stacked Coins Doll Quilt

Yesterday's post featured an improvised rail fence quilt taken from mainly reds in my stash. Since I decided to make the blocks first, then determine the layout, there were a number of leftover blocks. Here's what I did with them, influenced by the Stacked Coins Doll Quilt in Remembering Adelia: Quilts that Inspired Her Diary by Kathleen Tracy.

It used up all the leftover blocks and only took a little scrap fabric from my stash to finish. I'm so pleased with both red quilts that I'll be re-creating them in blue and posting instructions for making them here, hopefully in the near future.

I'm thinking of making a doll bed, complete with mattress, sheets and pillows, out of a cardboard box (because those make the best toys, as everyone knows), to give to K at Christmas.

Art-on-the-go, take two

I needed a gift for K's friend who just turned six. He was having a "pirate party" and I so wanted to make him a pirate-themed "art-to-go-bag," but there just wasn't fabric to be had that wasn't sooo 5-years-old. So I settled on some "boyish" red-black-and-blue dots and stripes and made him this bag with matching felt pencil roll and art journal, and I found him a Dover Fun With Pirates stencil book to toss in with the mix.

I thought he'd probably like it but according to his mom he loved it! He takes it apart and shows it to everyone and explains what it's for, and even brought it to school for Show and Tell on Friday! I could not be more tickled! I hope to make one for the other kids in his class as they have their birthdays ... here's hoping!

Catching up

It's been a crazy couple of weeks -- I'm thinking I need to modify my weekly plan to include some flex days where I can concentrate on housework and errands and bill-paying and not so much on creative work, important as that is.  There just don't seem to be enough hours in the day.  But despite all the time I've had to spend catching up on those things I've managed to give a fair amount of time to creating; it just hasn't always been what I've wanted it to be.

I put in a few hours making birthday gifts for K's friends.  First was an unsatisfying hoodie towel for a 6 year old boy.  There just wasn't any flannel in the fabric store that I liked, and it didn't come out looking right.  Then came an unimpressive art-to-go bag for a 5-year-old girl.  The straps came out uneven and I decided it was not a good enough gift, so I kept it for my own use and made her a very nice felt pencil roll and included some watercolor pencils and a brush -- I think she'll like them, I must remember to send them to school with K today as she missed the party last week.

Also, for the last week I've been working on my Secret Quilt Project, which can now be Not So Secret since I've decided that it won't be a gift for anybody because it is clearly a Practice Quilt so I will be keeping it for home use.  I am using the "Go-to Quilt" pattern from the Katie Did blog, with chartreuse and pool blue as my solid colors and a medium-scale floral with those colors and a darker teal for my print, and dark grey thread.  It's attractive to me but I'm not sure it would be to anyone else, and the stitching lines are kind of sketchy and look more like bolts of lightning than straight lines in places and rainbow arcs in other places.  I think that perhaps attempting a queen-sized version of this quilt for my first try was a mistake.

I have also been collecting materials for other projects.  Yesterday I went to Village Thrift in Pennsauken, a wonderful source of vintage materials that I can't remember if I've mentioned before, and collected a pretty 1970's pillowcase and a (slightly itchy) rose-pink wool blanket.  The pillowcase goes with a small collection I'm growing that I hope will become a patchwork duvet cover for my bed; the blanket will become, among other things, a throw for the tv room, a hot water bottle cover, and possibly a pair of slippers. 

In the works:  dawni's quilt, a miniature schoolhouse quilt for K's teacher, baby gifts, some small things with the linens from Philip's, a couple of drawstring bags to hold tights and slips and other unmentionables, hoodie towels for K to take to day camp and if K has her way, boots and umbrella for a 3-inch-tall kitty -- keep dreaming, kid!

Down by the riverside

Yesterday was by far the best, most beautiful day of the year. D and I took a walk downtown to check out the moving sale at Olde City Quilts -- they will be relocating just a few yards closer to the river, so I did not have to feel sad to see them go; instead I joyfully gathered quilting fabric remnants into my arms until I could hold no more, and headed out with a sack of fun and interesting additions to my stash that I otherwise would not have been able to afford.

We had lunch at Legends, a local gourmet pizza place that specializes in fancy pies named for celebrities. Neither of us was feeling adventurous, so we just had ordinary individual pita pizzas, but one day I'd like to go back and try the Don Ho -- pineapple, apple smoked bacon, mandarin orange (I could skip that part) and fontina cheese. Yum!

From there I decided to push my luck with D and beg to stop in the new (to me -- it's been there a year and a half, I found out when I asked the owner!) sewing/fabric store on the corner "for just a quick run-through." It's a good thing he had his Android phone with him to play with because I was in there for at least forty-five minutes, touching fabric and touching it again and pulling bolts out and juxtaposing them and squealing at the pretty notions and the sample projects. I was grateful to be the only one in the store, so I could fall all over myself without getting embarrassed.

The store is called Just Make It ... Sew and is truly an enchanting place for a textile-crafter to wander through ! The rooms are bright and airy with a wonderful selection of elegant and touchable fabrics gorgeously arranged, and the owner -- whose name I neglected to ask in my excitement -- gave me just the right amount of space. I clucked and fussed over her Amy Butler Midwest Modern prints, trying to match one or two with some lovely bright soft linens that were on sale. I did find two combinations that I liked, and bought fabric to make hooded towels, along with some thread for my big secret quilting project. I will definitely go back there to shop and I am excited that the store offers sewing lessons too!

(In celebration of the weather and the fabric and the end of Spring Break, we stopped at Umm's Ice Cream Parlor for the first time this season. Huzzah! is all that need be said about that, I think. We ate our ice cream as we walked home by the Delaware River. I ask you, could it possibly get better than that?)

When we got home I did some fulling of a couple of pieces of wool suiting I bought a while back that I thought I might turn into blankets. The final texture and amount of shrinkage surprised me. I need to keep practicing until this process becomes really familiar to me, at which point I'm sure something else will have come up which fascinates me more.

Here is the first hooded towel that I made. I under-bought the cotton fabric and had to make the whole thing smaller than I normally would have, but that's okay because this project is meant for a newborn-to-6-month-old and they have such little bitty heads that would get lost in a giant hoodie anyway. Since the baby is due in July I thought it would be nice to have a cooling towel/blanket, and this one fits the bill nicely -- both the linen and cotton layers are smooth and moisture wicking, and they both lack the nappiness of the flannel and terrycloth that I normally use, which keep a child warm but also retain moisture. This will be a quick-drying towel or a light-layer blanket.

What about Studio Saturday, you ask? Believe it or not, I accomplished my goals! I had a nasty bout with insomnia last night anyway, so around 4am I took apart the desk (don't ask what I had to do to find a flat head screwdriver. Why would you use all the flat head screwdrivers and then scatter them all over the house so no one else can find one when they need it? I'm asking you, D!) and moved it into K's room (she was with Grandma & Grandpa,) then put it back together and emptied my closet. D measured for shelves in the late afternoon. Mission accomplished! Woot!

A blessed Easter

This joyful Eastertide, away with sin and sorrow!
My Love, the Crucified, hath sprung to life this morrow!
Had Christ, that once was slain, ne'er burst his three-day prison,
Our faith had been in vain,
But now hath Christ arisen, arisen, arisen, arisen!

G. R. Woodward , in Car­ols for East­er and Ascen­sion­tide, 1894

We could not have had a more glorious Easter. Brilliant sun, beautiful (and packed!) church service, wonderful food, family and friends. K absolutely danced through the day. Hope yours was just as lovely, whatever you did!

Here is the promised photo of the rabbit family -- final tally is twelve, not counting the one I didn't quite finish and the ones I rejected as looking a mite too ... um ... happy for a proper Easter basket.

Repurposed

Remember the chococolate-and-vanilla blanket that I felted? The one where the binding got all puckered? I got tired of seeing it sitting on the floor of my closet, where it stayed because it was too sloppy-looking to put on the bed, so I butchered it. In my new favorite sewing book, Heather Ross's Weekend Sewing, there is a marvelous felted-wool baby blanket project, and I happen to know a relatively new baby, so I thought I'd give it a try. It has a gloriously colorful patchwork binding that was too much fun to make.

So much fun that I ended up making two blankets! Heather's project called for an appliquéd monogram, but a) I am afraid of appliqué and b) I liked the simplicity of the blankets as they were, so I left the monograms off. Not bad for a day's work.

As far as Studio Saturday goes, I did not meet my goal of moving my old desk into K's room -- though there is still hope that that might happen today. I did manage to get all of D's books downstairs, and even had him sort through them and choose some to give away, which left enough room to move the travel books and atlases downstairs, too. That leaves me with most of the second Billy bookcase empty; I'm keeping two shelves full of photographs, negatives and cameras because they qualify as "art," and because they occupy K's attention when she's in here and I'm busy with other things.

Because I got carried away with the sewing yesterday, I may not work on any sewing projects today, but we'll see. The bug has bitten and I am eager to get to dawni's quilt.

Peeps you can keep

Who better to great you on Try-it-out Tuesday than Peter Cottontail himself, the first of my branchings-out into new territory. He's a wool felt rabbit just about the size of a Marshmallow Peep but with (in my humble opinion) tons more character. I plan to make about 7 more of the little creatures in different colors to give to K for Easter Day, along with a little drawstring bag she can carry them to church in for some quiet play. It was fun to work with the wool felt and embroidery thread, and to fashion the charming little critter in a relatively short time.

This project came from Cynthia Treen's Last Minute Fabric Gifts.

If you're looking for some entertaining and informative reading, you could do worse than to go over to the Peep Research Page .

Countdown to five

The birthday preparations for K's fifth are well underway, and since she is spending tonight and tomorrow night with her grandparents they can now take place out in the open, which is much nicer for D and me. I had a fabulous time making her a birthday bunting out of Amanda Soule's The Creative Family, and have started a birthday crown following instructions from that book as well. And last night D and I spent an hour (that's all!) making a glorious pink tutu after Design Mom's tutorial (I love how she helps her children create meaningful Christmas gifts for their siblings.) I think I'll save the pictures for the weekend so I can show them in use by Herself.

My mother-in-law was literally holding her belly as she roared with laughter at the sight of the sewing and crafting paraphernalia that has exploded in the dining room and expanded into the living room. She has this idea that it won't all fit into the front bedroom upstairs we are currently using as an office. Because of the slight possibility that that might be true, I am not including photographs of my current craft space either, lest I become a cyber-laughingstock as well.

Art On The Go

I have to admit that we did not have a wonderful time this evening. There was shouting; feet were stamped. A basin of water was dumped down the heating vent in a certain someone's room, and there was subsequent precipitation in the dining room. I think that we are going stir crazy and just plain getting sick of one another. A frolic through the sprinkler would do us a world of good. They're predicting rain for tomorrow -- perhaps I will suck it up and get out the rain gear and take us puddle jumping.

I did have time to work on some genuinely fun projects today. First was the tote bag that I mentioned earlier. I had always wanted to make a bag before but had shied away from other patterns because they involved scary things like pockets and interfacing. This one has handles that are sewn down exactly as you see them and a lining that's just a bag-inside-the-bag. (My lining is a red-and-white polka dot, which looks adorable with the ladybug novelty print. I wish you could see it.)The bag is meant to be K's "Art-On-The-Go Bag," as described in Amanda Soule's book The Creative Family. To go with the bag, I ordered some Lyra colored pencils (but don't buy them here; go comparison shopping, which I did not and now I'm kicking myself) and made the felt pencil roll that Amanda describes in her book. I also made a matching patchwork Moleskine notebook for K to use as a sketchpad/journal. With these I plan to include a homemade coloring book and a pencil sharpener, and whatever else I can think of that might be inspiring. Ideas, anyone?


The pattern for the bag came from The Impatient Patchworker by Jayne Emerson.

Nighttime yarns

K and I have a long-standing tradition of meeting in the middle of the night for songs and stories. I have no patience for singing or storytelling at bedtime; her bedtime is my bedtime too; I need to be sleeping then, my brain doesn't work at that time of the evening.

But tug at my sleeve at 3:30 am, and I'm good to go. Ever since she was an infant, and I sat with her in the rocker, gliding and singing endless hymns (they have so many verses, I thought eventually she'd fall asleep!) we've done this. Such was tonight.

Actually, tonight was a special treat. Tonight I pulled Prince, Princess and Duke out of my, um, ear. The royal ones are a trio of lion cubs I made up on an interminable vacation out West last year, when I wanted K to think of me as "Mama Lion" protecting her cub, rather than the adversarial witch I was becoming for demanding tolerable behavior and refusing to reward atomic meltdowns. The stories were as bland as I could make them -- her reading material of choice at the time was My Little Pony paperbacks -- and the Mama always either rescued her cubs from danger or welcomed them safely home. For good measure, I also made sure that Princess was the brave cub and that Prince and Duke were nervous and a little bit stupid. Perhaps that was unfair of me, but I was trying to fill a deficit, here.

So tonight I told a boring story in which the cubs got lost in the forest and Princess found the way home, after which Mama tucked the three safely into bed and sang them a lullaby, which I also sang to K, and I handed out some cuddles and kisses and turned the bathroom light back on, and I'm quite sure she was asleep before I hit the landing. It pays, sometimes, to be a lousy storyteller.

Yesterday I started and finished a project for K's Christmas which I was not at all sure I was going to be able to do. It was very similar to the receiving blanket project but involved terrycloth, which I've never sewn with. I did have to stop and re-pin one time, and re-adjust from a straight stitch to a zig-zag, but once I made those changes it was pretty much smooth sailing, as I'd chosen the appropriate needle at the outset for dealing with stretchy fabrics.

The finished project, as you can see Curious George enjoying, is a reversible hooded towel/flannel blanket, and I am very pleased with the results. It looks to be warm, absorbent, and oh-so-cuddly so I am going to make one for my nephew as well. I'm thinking that with the leftover terry and flannel I might be able to make matching baby washcloths/hand towels or something like that -- maybe a double thickness of terry bound with the flannel? I'll have to wait until I have some time to experiment.

This project was adapted from Last-Minute Fabric Gifts by Cynthia Treen and Karen Philippi.