New Little Blanket

Gotta show off this new blanket that I made. I've had the idea of doing a baby blanket with pennants and the verse "His banner over me is love" for a long time - I mean, what better verse to snuggle a baby up under?

Materials:
one yard of muslin
one yard of white minky
scraps of cotton fabric - six different patterns (for the pennants)
fabric paint and stiff paintbrush
fusible interfacing
white cotton fabric
embroidery floss in black, and four colors that match the cotton fabric scraps
temporary fabric glue or pins
thread to match the muslin
ruler

Equipment:
sewing machine
computer & printer
glass table or big window, or something that light can shine through for the light box

Here's how I did it:

1. Cut a piece of muslin 38 by 30 inches.

2. Cut out 12 pennants out of cotton fabric - two each of six different patterns. I made a template that's a triangle - 6 1/4 by 5 1/2 inches - to cut mine out.

3. Iron 1/4 inch under on all the edges of all the pennants, and arrange them in three rows on the muslin. Pin and machine-stitch them on.

4. For the letters, print out "His banner over me is" onto typing paper in a font you like, really large. Cut the words out, taping them to the back of the muslin so you can see them through the front. (Again, I'm back at that light-box magic.)

5. Using the taped-on words as a guide, paint the letters in fabric paint and a stiff brush.

6. Trace the letters in "love" onto fusible interfacing, and fuse them to white cotton fabric.

7. Cut them out, and pin or temporarily-fabric-glue them to the muslin. (I use Aleene's No-Sew Fabric Glue to hold stuff until I stitch it on - pinning it is too. . . well, dangerous.)

8. Using embroidery floss in colors that match the pennants, back-stitch an outline around all the letters.

9. Using a temporary pencil or pen, trace along where the string to hold the pennants up should go.

10. Use black embroidery floss to back-stitch the three lines.

11. Cut a piece of white minky fabric the same size as the muslin.

12. With right sides together, pin around the edge of the two fabrics, and machine-stitch together, leaving a gap along one of the sides to turn it (about six inches). Clip corners.

13. Turn blanket right-side out, pin, and stitch about 1/4 inch in from the sides, making sure to catch the open gap. (Mind the gap, as they say. You know, in England.) Yeay, you're done! That's it!

Or, even better, just head over to my Etsy shop and buy one. That's easier. :)

Shark Week

So, this just about sums up how my day went. It's mostly this guy's fault.


But I can't be mad. Seriously, what other one-year-old gets such a kick out of having a pair of pants on his head? He's the best.


So here's my project: I took two short-sleeved tee-shirts and a clip art image (because I have mad skills with the clip art) and turned them all into voila! one long-sleeved layered shirt with an awesome shark on it! Now, full disclosure: this was all the result of a mistake. I bought a gray shirt, thinking I would paint the shark on that using my patented* light-box method. (The light box stuff is posted back in September 2010. I'd link it, but that's beyond my blogging expertise.) Turns out, I couldn't see the image through the gray shirt, so I had to go back to Wal-Mart for a white one. Now that I had $6 instead of $3 sunk into this project, I knew I really had to make it count. I had seen this tutorial on Pinterest for how to turn a short-sleeved shirt into a layered-look long-sleeved shirt, so I decided to try it out. I changed up a bunch of stuff, so here are my steps, complete with poor lighting and the messiest work desk ever. Enjoy!

* light-box method not patented
I started out with two same-sized tees, washed and dried.


I took the gray one - the one I was going to cannibalize for sleeve purposes, and cut up each side seam and around the sleeve seam. You really only need to cut off one of the sleeves, it turns out.

Making sure the front and back of the shirt were smooth and even at the bottom hem, I used one of the sleeves as my pattern, and pinned it up as high as it would go on the shirt.


I cut around the curve of the shoulder seam, and extended the sleeve to the bottom of the shirt in a semi-tapered way. It's very technical. (I like how this turned out, because I used the hem of the shirt as the sleeve hem. I'm no good at sewing on knit, so using pre-existing hems is bonus for me.)


And, here are the sleeve shapes I ended up with.


Next is the only tricky part - with the white shirt inside out, I tucked the short sleeve into the shirt, then placed the long-sleeve addition inside the sleeve and pinned it to the seam. (Okay, what I really did was turn everything right-side out and hold the sleeve where I wanted it, then turned things inside out until I could reach the seam. Otherwise, there's no way I wouldn't have ended up with something inside-out. I'm famous for my inside-out stitching.)


I machine-stitched the gray sleeve into the seam of the white shirt. The goal was to try to just get the seam. I was lucky in some spots. Not so lucky in others.

Then, careful to keep the white short-sleeve out of the way, I pinned and sewed down the bottom of the long sleeve.

I repeated the whole sleeve-attachment process on the other side. Duh.

And there it is! Definitely not perfect, but I consoled myself with the idea that the little man who will be wearing this shirt is in a constant state of motion. The chances of someone actually seeing a seam on a shirt he's wearing are slim.

So, these sleeves are probably more 3/4 length than full-on long-sleeves. Which is fine. If I had used a bigger shirt, I could have pinned my sleeve pattern further up and gotten longer sleeves.

And here's my awesome shark image. I was going for something that screams, "The wearer of this shirt is all-boy! He's a man-child! He knows karate! And more than a thing or two about dinosaurs!" without being too obvious. Subtle, right?

Light box engaged.

I just used black fabric paint and a teeny-tiny paintbrush.

Ta-da! Welcome to shark week, y'all.

Sew She Sews Bib Tutorial

I love this bib template and tutorial from Sew She Sews! Here's my take - of course, I had to add an initial. Because I put letters on everything.


And these pictures really demonstrate how much Mr. Man appreciates the time and effort I put into making him homemade things. You know, to show him how much I love him and cherish him.
You can tell he feels cherished, right?

I didn't follow the tutorial exactly. (Because I'm the queen of shortcuts.) Instead of putting quilt batting in between two layers of cotton fabric, I used cotton fabric for the top, and just slapped some minky on the back.

And that's how I spent my Friday morning!

Little House

I ran out of things to do with Penny the other day, so I mixed myself up an Instant Breakfast. I love those things. Then I ended up with an empty box, because it was the last package. So I turned the top of the box into a roof shape, and grabbed some scrapbook paper, scissors and glue, and let Penny go to town making doors and windows to stick on our little house. She loved it! She's been playing with it for days. Isn't it always the goofiest little things that kids enjoy the most?


I'm loving this cooler weather - it's so nice to be able to play outside again! And cooler weather means one thing: Ozark craft fairs! They're just over a month away - October 13-16. I can't wait!
http://nwacraftfairs.com/allfairs.asp
Which ones do you never miss? Any hidden gems?

CraigsList Desk Makeover on the Cheap

We found this desk for $30 on CraigsList. We needed something in the guest room for the computer to sit on. Now that the guest room will be housing a new baby this winter, we were thinking about selling the desk, but I'm not one to part with furniture that easily. This is also why I'm a terrible poker player: once I'm invested in something, I will go down with that ship. No such thing as cutting my losses.

Here's the before:

Missing trim, brass hardware, oppressive brown color, hole in the back. . . Not a lot too cute about it, except the little critter posing in front of it.


And here's the after:
We slapped on a fresh coat of paint, switched out the hardware, and bulked up the trim to make it look. . . less like it was purchased for $30. My favorite part is the beadboard that we stuck up on the back, in front of the crumbling particle board.

Yeay! One step closer to turning my bedroom into one giant craft room. . . Now, if we could just get rid of that pesky bed.

Book Ledges

I was born to be an English teacher. I love books. I think they're so beautiful. Especially picture books. Before I became a stay-at-home mom, my career aspiration was to be a Literacy Specialist. I was taking evening classes to get my endorsement. One of the things I learned was that kids are enticed to read when they can see books. (Other concepts in the curriculum were more advanced - it wasn't all obvious stuff.) We put up gutters around the walls in our classrooms so we could prop books up where kids could actually see the fronts of them. It worked! My kids that year really loved to read. And they thought I was wacko for nailing gutters to the walls. But the reading thing, that was important.

I think having the books facing out is especially important for the little kids. Penny can pick out the book she wants based on the spine, but it's so much nicer to be able to see the whole book. Plus, in a playroom, books are all the decoration you need! They're gorgeous! And kids have images from advertisements, TV, giant toys. . . so much stuff pulling at their attention. I wanted to give their books a fair shot at getting used as much as the big, colorful toys.

I am so lucky to have a father who can build stuff. I draw what I want it to look like, and he makes it happen. I based these book ledges on some Pottery Barn Kids magazine racks. Each ledge is an eight-foot by 5 1/2 inch shelf for the back, and another shelf that's 3 1/2 inches deep nailed to it. The support pieces have 1/2 inch holes drilled through them to hold the dowels up.

Here's how you know my daughter is being raised by a Literacy Specialist. She likes to flip through books and "read" them, making up the stories as she goes. This morning she picked up an Alice in Wonderland book, and started out, "Once upon a time, a princess named Eric Carle. . ." Okay, if you don't have toddlers you might not know it, but Eric Carle is one of the best picture book authors/illustrators in the world - he did The Very Hungry Caterpillar.

More to come soon! We finished the dining room over the weekend - I'll give you a hint - the walls are teal!

It's a Blue Kitchen!

Hey! Remember me? I blog. Sometimes. Not often. Okay, close to never. It's been a super-busy Spring at our house. We've had a lot going on, including diving into our painting projects. We've been in the new house for eight months now, and this kitchen was about to drive me crazy! D was taking a couple of days off work, and as a concession to me, he said that he'd help with painting a room while he was at home. He did not anticipate that I would choose the kitchen. Probably he'll qualify his chivalrous declarations in the future. The big problems with this room were the lighting, the wall color, and the beat-up cabinets. So, pretty much everything. (Someday we'll replace the dated appliances, but that wasn't in the budget.) We took down the awnings, and we tried to take down the wallpaper border. It wouldn't budge. We ended up just painting over it. Ugh. This fluorescent beast has greeted me every morning for the better part of a year. I was not sad to see him go. When we went to Lowe's to pick out new lighting, D took a picture of this thing to ask those friendly folks about how we should get it down. The lighting guy was really tickled to see it. He said that these lights were pretty common in Bella Vista in the 70's. Hmmm. Our house was built in '96. . . (Side note - we usually go to Home Depot - they've been very helpful in the past, but their lighting selection didn't hold a candle to Lowe's. Candle. Get it? Sorry. I couldn't help it.) My knight in shining armor, who's just risked life and limb to wrestle this thing to the ground. Painting the cabinets was a huge project. I had no idea how time-consuming it would be. I'll give you a summary: take off doors; repair; sand; prime; paint; paint; paint; paint; rehang doors. Okay, that doesn't sound like that much work, but it took forever. And the finished product: We left the doors off one of the double-cabinets. I wanted some openness there, and I like having all our pretty white dishes out. I love a plate wall. Especially when all the dishes are white. I found these at T.J.Maxx for $8 and $5. Can't beat it! When P saw the dishes on the wall for the first time, she laughed her big laugh and said, "You can't put plates on the wall!" Au contraire. Two of the pitchers were made by my Granny; the other one was a T.J.Maxx find. And now that the fluorescent light is gone, the dishes actually look white and not dingy! Hooray! Sorry for the lighting in this one - it's too bright outside to get a good indoor shot. That, or I don't know how to use my camera. I wanted a good picture of this window treatment. It's made out of a tablecloth from Williams Sonoma - the only splurge in the room. I bought it months ago, and it was the inspiration for all the colors in here. Turns out, it's super-easy to make a tablecloth into a poofy window treatment - all I did was box pleat it until it was the right width, then threaded it onto the rail. Then I just gathered it up across the bottom and pinned it with safety pins until it looked right. Since it was already hemmed around the edges, I didn't have to sew anything other than making a pocket for the rod. Our next project is the kids' playroom. I want to do a big chalkboard and book storage/display ledges. . . I'll let you know how it turns out. Hopefully it won't take me five months to post again.