Bought All Four Lisette Simplicity Patterns

Now I need some impetus to sew them.  Anyone want to do a sew along with me on one of those patterns?  If you haven't bought them -- Joann is having a 1.99 Simplicity pattern sale this week!

SEWING FRIENDS

Why was I the last person ever to know that Oliver + S's designer was planning on making patterns for women with Simplicity?!

I'm not even joking -- I love this designer and her use of cottons.  She makes me want to wear yellow.  And I really should not do that.

Just To Inform You

I do plan to put a tutorial for making the icing and icing the cookies you've been seeing me churn out either on my blog or Helen's blog.

I'm currently waiting on determining the final design of some cookies I've got planned.

Also, someone with a new baby who occasionally blogs here with me should start looking to her own Monkey socks. A certain ninja kitten just started her first heel.

Still Creating, I Swear

I just am not creating anything fabric-y.



My obsession nowadays is cookies. They taste so good too!

But, fear not, I've started to knit once again. I shall show you the Monkey sock that I've secretly plugged away at over the last week when I get up the energy to post photos again of my knitting.

I Want To Quilt -- No, REALLY

I know I'm not crafting much recently, but I've been really big into drawing (another creative hobby) and playing Japanese video games (another gigantic and useless time suck that leaves me better able to determine that the Japanese are really weird, but kind of awesome) and baking cookies (third batch of royally iced cookies so far). However, I was just sitting at my computer, trolling through my feeds, when I came across a fabric line that made me want to quilt HARDCORE.

Anyway, there I was, innocently looking at sewing blogs when Bookworm Bethie attacked. All sweetly, she posts about how she got a charm pack of Sherbet Pips from Moda. I hit NEXT SEWING BLOG on my browser, but then, I stopped and went back. Were those people on scooters? Were they wearing scarves? Were the scarves striped? Was it impossibly adorable? Check, check, check, check.

This line is done in red, pink, turquoise, grey, and white! It features people on scooters in the winter. It features little girls swinging. It was possibly designed with me in mind. I'm fairly sure of it!

I tried to think of skirts or sleep boxers I could make from some of the yardage, but I knew what I really wanted to do. I wanted a quilt. A nice simple quilt with lots of white to offset the busy patterns. I'm pretty sure that as soon as yardage becomes available in April, I'm picking up several yards of various pieces so I can make my dream quilt. Then that fabric can sit with my neglected needles and sewing machine and they can all cry about the fact that I ignore them.

Still... it's so cute that I suspect that I will not resist.

New year, new look for my chairs!

Many, many moons ago, my chairs were looking pretty grubby, and I hatched a plan to recover them (and Jenn hatched a plan for me to blog it.) Easy peasy, right? All you need to recover chairs like these are some fabric and a staple gun!



WRONG. The fabric was easy to acquire. Jenn escorted me to Jo-Ann's, and we selected a lovely navy pattern... in 2009. And then it sat, and sat, and sat, waiting for me to do something with it. First, I needed to borrow a staple gun. Then, I needed staples. How long can this take? A mighty long time. Finally, the impending arrival of a new baby provided sufficient motivation for this long-overdue craft project.

For the first chair, I decided to remove the existing cover. It was also stapled in place, with a far more powerful stapler than any I have encountered. To pry that fabric loose took roughly 2 hours, screwdrivers, two people and quite a bit of elbow grease. Needless to say, the subsequent chairs have their original covers under the new ones.



The only upside of all that work? I could use the existing cover as the template when cutting the new fabric.

Stapling is a two-man job. You need a second person to hold the fabric taut while you staple. Additionally, I had to hammer the staples in a bit to get them fully flush. Each chair takes about 5 minutes, once you have your system down.



Once we finished the first one, though, the other 3 flew by. Before I knew it, my capable assistant was reassembling the newly covered chairs!



So, over a year, 2 hours, 20 minutes and 9 months later, I think we can call both of our recent projects a success. And now I'm considering another, similar project... recovering my bed frame, that is.

Want Tutorials?

So, I wanted to clue you in on the two crafty things that I did discover this Christmas season. 

One, I've figured out how to turn my multitude of wrapping paper into paper bags.



Not the most useful thing this year (except it works for cookie deliveries), but I suspect that when I have a child at grade school, it'd be neat to send in lunches made out of wrapping paper or such at Christmas time.

Two, I finally learned how to make a damnable bow out of wired ribbon.



For years I've lusted after this ribbon, only to reject it, because it was nearly useless in my wrapping efforts. Now, I buy this ribbon ALL the time. That's my new Christmas wrapping rule.

Any one want tutorials on either of these items? If so, let me know. I think I'd enjoy putting those online.

CHOO CHOO!

Ugh, so much to say here that I feel overwhelmed! So, this is the choo-choo shirt I bought material for about eighteen hundred years ago. In fact, when I originally planned to make it, it was going to be size 2T. Guess what? I made it 3T!




Why do I have so much to say about this shirt? Because, it is my sewing introduction to many things such as collars, buttonholes, plackets, and setting in sleeves! I mean, I just learned so much about sewing and so many things I did with this shirt came out well.

The pattern is from Heather Ross's Weekend Sewing. I am going to admit that I like the finished look of this shirt, but this pattern was kind of a bitch. The collar was all kinds of messed up and you can tell when you look at this shirt!

It took me four or five tries to get that collar done and I'm still not pleased with it. Also, though I did not find any errata, I could not at all get the collar and shirt to line up. I had to undo the sewing I did on the collar and cut it up prior to attaching it to the shirt correctly.

And the drawings Ross did in the book don't really look like the pattern pieces. Occasionally, I'd look blankly at the instructional drawings and just pause and examine the pieces I cut out. I'd re-open the pattern pieces to make sure I had really cut everything correctly!

In other news, I'm not recommending this pattern. Try to find another button down shirt pattern for young boys. I hear Oliver + S is offering one, and I'm considering buying it since I do love the look of my son in a button down shirt that I've made him.




I am pleased with the sleeves since this was the first time I've set in sleeves! I was most worried about doing that and I flipped out while pinning since I was sure that my machine was going to walk the sleeve faster than the body of the shirt such that I ended up with too much sleeve. However, it all looked great in the end. I think the sleeves might be the nicest part of my work on this shirt, though the placket also turned out pretty.




I'm rather tired right now, so I'm going to cut this a little shorter than I originally expected. I finished the work on Sunday while Nathaniel was awake. He was fascinated by my sewing machine, begging to sit on my lap. He talks a bit about the shirt, telling people that his mommy made him a choo choo shirt. In fact, one evening after a nap, he woke up and stared at the scraps of fabric I had thrown away, and he panicked! He said to me, "Choo choo shirt!" I had to reassure him that his real shirt was in the living room, waiting for him to wear it.




I really enjoyed sewing this, but I'm getting a little gun shy about sewing from this book. I think it might be time to move to some Simplicity patterns.

I Finished Something But This Isn't About That

I promise that I'll be posting about my finished (sewing) project this week, and I might even have teaser pictures tomorrow, but I have a link to a great tutorial for hand picked zippers today. I've been hearing a lot of my dressmaking blogs talk about hand picked zippers and I'm always made WTF face at my computer screen trying to figure out how you would even do one.

Turns out Sewaholic could practically see my WTF face and she decided to tutorialize the heck out of the sewing!

Oh, I can't resist a grainy, blurry teaser pic of the finished project that I shall parade before you later!




Do you appreciate the way that my son is already hideously embarrassed by this all?

Coming Out Of Hibernation

To tell you that I'm excited about three things.



One is my new secret obsession. Japanese washi tape. I mean, I'm obsessed with office supplies in general. However, the cuteness that is washi tape kills me. Seriously, the store Cute Tape is making me flip out. It sells cute stickers. And cute labels. And cuteness. It might as well sell kittens.

Oliver + S is going to publish a book of patterns. I'm no secret admirer of Oliver + S. I think the children patterns they put out are adorable, modern, and sweet. I just can't justify the cost of one or two or EIGHT BILLION when I don't sew enough.

Turtlegirl has posted a tutorial for an adorable twisted garter cuff for a sock. It makes me want to knit that pair of socks right now. Maybe if I didn't have two pairs of Cookie A socks on the needles right now.