My First (Dresden Plate)

Our Modern Quilt Guild did a sewing room swap where you picked someone's name and anonymously made them a gift for their sewing room.  I'm usually more into the giving part of this kind of thing (hello, Secret Santa) since it involves my two favorite things: getting creative and surprising people.  But in a swap with these talented ladies I must admit I was selfishly much more excited about what I was going to get.  I was not disappointed!

One of the suggestions I'd given my giver was a knitting needle organizer.  I've bought material specifically for this project twice, but never got around to designing or making anything.  This has been my system since I bought my first pair of needles seven years ago:

I was lucky enough to have my name picked by the amazing and talented Hema, and knew before opening it that this was going to be so much better than anything I'd make for myself.

The back has this lovely umbrella material and my NAME, which as you all know, if you've seen my next generation quilts, is one of my favorite things to include on a handmade gift.  So I loved that, especially since it was in my favorite color.

The inside had more fabric from the same April Showers line - originally from Seattle, anything with a rain/umbrella motif will always remind me of home.  Since knitting is really a cold and rainy day activity, it felt particularly appropriate.

It took me about two seconds to fill this up and discover I had as many as three sets of the same size needle - now I know exactly what I have and will never buy another duplicate. And how nice that there's space for the long needles and right below, the double-pointeds? You'd think she was a knitter.  Everything I wanted to, fit, including the crochet hooks and stitch holders.  Thanks so much Hema!

My recipient had no requests in terms of object or color, so I got to do whatever I wanted.  I had never heard of thread catchers until I saw them at Quilt Camp, and immediately wanted one (so everyone else must too, right?).

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They're like little trash cans you can hang off your sewing table for when you clip threads/corners so your floor doesn't look like mine.  I decided to use this pattern, and was pretty happy with how it came out.  My only complaint is that you're supposed to use glue in several different sections when sewing wasn't that hard and made it so much nicer.  I ended up only using glue to attach the rubber shelving mat on the bottom, and even that I'd sew on next time.

This was a May project so I was feeling summer and went with yellow and this corn/sunflower fabric that I bought too much of at Marden's ($2.99 a yard!).  I don't even like yellow that much, but I like it here - and since it turns out my recipient lives in Florida most of the time...

The top is a pin-cushion topped with a mini-dresden plate, which I'd never tried before.  It was totally quick and easy and made me want to make a whole quilt of them.

The pin cushion is velcro-d to the stability tile, so you can detach it if you need it elsewhere:

I was very happy with what I gave and got, can't go wrong in a swap!

Meh Mondays

I don't get to much of the Sunday Times anymore, but I usually make an honest effort with the magazine, and always make it at least to the Meh List. It seems like it'd be easy to come up with entries for this, just like it seems like coming up with a good entry for the New Yorker caption contest would be easy - but it's not.  This week has been all about Meh projects over here.  Maybe I'll make that like a craft blogger thing - we've already got Work-In-Progress Wednesday and Finish-It-Up Friday, maybe it's time for Meh Monday, where you post the projects you finished, but that either aren't that impressive or that you aren't that happy about.  Only I'm sharing on Friday, because I've got to move on to bigger and better things!

My first project was a new seat for the stroller I got J for Christmas.  The cheap-o fabric gave way on December 26th and the poor thing has been pushing it around for a few months now, unable to figure out why everything keeps falling out the right side.

 

The frame at least seemed sturdy enough, so I'd been meaning to do a new cover.  I really wanted to incorporate pompoms.  We like pompoms around here, we just aren't sure what to do with them.  J puts them in the salad spinner, the cats smack them all over the house and I just like to squeeze the ones that come on a ribbon like this:

Then I found this fabric last week.  J and Smashy Cat have been very sweet together lately; she likes to show him books about cats and he likes to smash his head into hers.  This totally reminded me of them (despite the whole vegetarian thing in this house):

It was about an hour project, very simple to just copy the old one.  

Not at all what these pompoms were intended for.  It looked much better before I put them on, but someone is really into them and I'm worried about what would happen if they were suddenly gone. It got a very satisfying reaction from the recipient who saw it through a window and started jumping up and down yelling "I see that! It's COOT!" So, kind of ridiculous but there you have it. 

I also did some spring cleaning this week, since spring has suddenly decided to show up.  I had to throw away about six of my favorite t-shirts because they've developed these little holes.

This is the genius of ladies clothing manufacturers - get us addicted to these super-thin, soft t-shirts that will only last a season, charge us twice as much because they're "tissue paper thin" and then sell us replacements next year.

For some reason the holes in my shirts are always concentrated in the stomach area.  I have no idea why that would be.  But these Ciao Bella salted caramel ice cream bars are pretty incredible (skip the other flavors, this is the only good one).

I remember seeing a tutorial about turning your oldies into toddler t-shirts, which seemed like a nice way to give them a second life.  You just lay out your shirt:

Lay a T that fits your kid on top and trace down each side and across the bottom:

Sew the sides, take up the bottom too (or don't, it could be a dress if you don't have those stupid holes), and there you have it:

Hey, and if the neck is too wide and goes all flash dance, just add a binder clip - they don't even notice.

The whole thing took under ten minutes.  Wasn't sure what to do about the neck, but a friend suggested elastic, and that took another three minutes to string a 1/4" strand through the pre-existing neck. Here's the finished product:

A Sun Tea Dress

Does anyone else remember Red Rose Tea? I think it was like the Lipton Brisk of the 1950s (and '60s and '70s).  The kind of thing you won't find at Whole Foods but they still believe in it at Market Basket. We had it in our kitchen growing up, but I think we only used it for sun tea.

I don't remember ever getting a porcelain miniature...

I remember trying to serve it to my Grandpa Lee once, thinking it was so sophisticated with the little red rose on the tag. That's when he told me that I should never drink bagged tea because it was made up of all the dirt they swept up from the factory floor after the good leaves had been sold as loose leaf.  Other lessons from Grandpa Lee:
1. You shouldn't order fried rice because it's just a way for the chef to dispose of leftovers;
2. It's OK if you bruise easily, it's because you have aristocratic blood; and
3. Education is the one thing they can never take away from you.

But those are discussions for another day. I have fond memories of both the box and the dusty, factory-floor-flavor of this particular tea and the sweet, sweet tags - I knew someone would do something creative with these if I just searched Etsy!

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When I found three yards of this material at Fabric Basement, it was a throwback to the Red Rose days.  I pictured a cute tea-length skirt or something simple and retro that wouldn't throw me too far off my carefully-calendared creative track.

I abandoned the skirt idea when I came across this much-too-complicated dress pattern that seemed perfect for the roses: Simplicity 1687.

I KNOW- $18.95, are they crazy? All I can say, is it would've been a good opportunity to use a Joann's coupon, if I'd had a current one.  Simplicity is very proud of the fact that they have never adjusted their sizes, so you are really supposed to go by measurement.  This can be really disheartening.  According to Simplicity, I needed to go up FIVE sizes. Fantastic.  Way to make me feel like this dress will be flattering.

I made the lining first, just to test it out, and it was HUGE.  Like ten inches too wide. When I cut into my pretty rose fabric I chopped it down three sizes, blindly hoping maybe that would fit? It's already way out of character for me to make a lining first, so there would be no more testing.  A reminder of why I shouldn't make clothes and should stick to quilts.  Just as I was finishing, I realized I'd included an extra panel in the original lining I did - which was (in part) why it was so huge.  The dress barely fit - at the last minute I had to make some awfully narrow seams and even my hidden zipper got into the act, affording me another 1/4 inch since I didn't "hide" it.

Aside from sizing, I was also really annoyed that the pictures showed a contrast fabric both above and below the pocket zipper while the written pattern only included fabric below, which is just dumb and would look totally weird.  Here's how they suggested it would look:

I had to make that part up myself.  Who publishes a pattern with that kind of mistake?  Sorry, but if you're going to sell something like this at a premium price, you might want to test it. My improvisation was good enough:

Aside from the pulling at the neck (I think my shot cotton was too thin? Or something with thread tension or not enough curve clipping? Although I clipped the heck out of it. It's so hard to learn from your mistakes when you aren't sure what they are), I think it came out pretty nice.

Now I just need a warm day.

For Pleat's Sake - Take Two

You may remember these pretty purses I made last fall - free pattern here:

It was a lovely, springy patterned purse just in time for the snow.  In December, I set aside the perfect fabric to make a more winter-appropriate version of this bag, but never got around to it.  I gave away the original with red handles but had ordered an extra set for the next version of this purse, and last week they fell off the table, so I knew it was time.

In keeping with the tradition of sewing seasonally inappropriate things, I made a bag with snow-covered trees on it. It's still 42 degrees here on some days, so I think I can get another month out of it.  Or call them Magnolias.

I love the way this one came out - true to the notes I made last time, this is 2/3 the original size, but still fits my laptop perfectly.  I also used a lining that matched the handles and sewed them on with a denim needle, sooo much easier and more professional looking than what happened before. I also thought I wanted a pocket, and I don't really know how to do pockets, so I just sewed two pieces of fabric together, turned it inside out, and sewed it to the lining.  I don't think that's really right, but it was fast, and as it turns out, I don't use it anyway. If you happen to know of a good pocket tutorial, feel free to leave a link in comments!

Very happy with this one:

The Hills Are Alive

I've always had a thing for dressing twinsies.  It wasn't like my mom purposely dressed me like my sister, but I think I kind of wanted her to, and if there happened to be identical swimsuits on sale...  I remember the year my mom got all four of us the same pair of blue Nikes with yellow swooshes and I repeatedly pointed out to strangers that we had matching shoes. I'm sure my brothers really appreciated that.  I was the youngest, and very shy, so I felt proud when people associated me with my super-athletic brothers and my overachieving sister.

Or maybe I'm overanalyzing and everyone raised in the '70s on The Sound of Music wanted to dress like their siblings after seeing the play clothes Fraulein Maria made from old curtains:

Speaking of which, I was shocked and saddened to learn from an Austrian friend that not only has no one in Austria ever heard of this movie, but there is not a traditional folk song called Eidelweiss that brings grown men to tears and fomented Austrian resistance against the Nazis.

And before you make fun of my ignorance, according to the internet, I'm not alone (and look! I learned to take a screenshot!):

I have to admit, I have an urge to push this dress-alike thing on my daughter even though I KNOW it's lame to dress your baby like you.  And yes, I indulge occasionally, though I try to limit myself to footwear.

That said, I'm sorry J doesn't have a sibling (although after looking through this post, I bet she's not) and I try to make up for it with cousin connections. She'll wear anything if you tell her Daria has one too.

I have a lot of this leftover from Daria's quilt:

So I made her a little nightgown to go with it:

Box pleats, very curtain-y. Once Josie saw it and learned it was a Daria nightgown, she needed one too.

Now if I can just get her to sing "The sun has gone to bed and so must I."

Going Back to Cali

I did it.  I took my toddler on a cross-country flight, all by myself.  I'm not sure I would've done it if I'd known we were going to add 3 hours to the flight so we could "refuel in Salt Lake City due to the strong headwinds," - an excuse I still don't believe, given I've flown this route a million times since 1992 and never encountered that issue.  But luckily we had an absolutely charming 10 year old boy sitting behind us who was willing to copy every noise J made for hours on end.  This was her feet through most of the flight, trying to scale the back of her seat as she air kissed, spit and squealed at her new friend.

The red-eye return trip kind of sucked since (as I learned later) my girl had mild pneumonia, water in her lungs and a double ear infection.  If there's a prize for observant mothering, I apparently am not winning it!

But the point of the trip was to see some of my west coast family for a pre-Christmas Christmas because none of us wants to travel during the real week.  It's nice: you get a tree together, play Christmas music, open presents and pretend it's the real thing. And I took pictures of none of these things since I was for once living in the moment and forgetting to record it!

Which gets me to the MADE part of the post.  You may remember I made this lovely wallet for myself earlier this year.

It's a great pattern from Blush Bunny that you can get here - and though time consuming (some hand work), totally worth it and not that hard since the instructions are so detailed.  I'm going to say it's about a five-hour project from ironing to final thread clip.  Seven if you're making two!

This time around I made the credit card slots a quarter of an inch narrower (my cards fall out sometimes because the slots are a touch too wide) and I used a medium-weight interfacing, which gave it a more structured feel than mine has.  For my sister I used this really pretty muted fabric with maroon accents.  In case you hadn't noticed, that pink/lavender color is my favorite right now.

For my mom, who like me does not fear the bright, I went with this fabric.

A little modern, but one of my favorite color combinations.

I was practically finishing them on the way to the airport so I didn't get any photos prior to wrapping.  When I grabbed them a few hours later to take pictures, they had both already been filled by their respective recipients.  I'm taking that as a compliment.

Hint for next year: start the Made gifts in November.