I've been reading Amy Karol's blog. and since I love her writing style, decided I needed to get her first book: Bend the Rules Sewing.  This book starts off with bunch of basic information on sewing.  This is the book I was looking for a couple years ago when I got started sewing, but I don't think it existed yet.  It's really great book for getting started with sewing, because it has both details on essential techniques, plus a bunch of projects so you can actually get started and make stuff.

The first project that caught my eye was the puppet theater in the Small People section of the book.  Evan isn't likely to sit still long enough for a puppet show anytime soon, but the puppet theater is just so cute I had to make one.  Well, actually two.  My nanny's son is going to be three next month, so he might be willing to watch puppets, or maybe even put on a puppet show. 

The project itself is pretty easy; it's just a bunch of straight lines.  The shopping for this project was pretty involved, requuring multiple trips to the fabric stores (not that that's a bad thing ).  There are three fabrics: a background, valance, and curtains.  The directions call for all cotton fabrics, but I wanted something that seemed more like theater curtains, so I used a stretchy shiny velour kind of stuff.  I got the solid background fabrics and one of the valance fabrics from the crazy fabric store ($2/yard, whoo!), but didn't find anything I liked for the second valance on that shopping trip.   This project requires a lot of notions/accessories: bias tape, ribbon, twill tape, wood dowels, ball fringe, a button, and a tension rod.   I decided to skip the twill tape, and make a pocket for the wood dowels out the background fabric instead.  I found the wood dowels at Joanns, the tension rods at Target, the bias tape at the crazy fabric store, and the rest of the stuff at Hancock.  I didn't realize that the ball fringe is a "trim" and therefore not eligible for the 40% any "fabric item" coupon at Hancock, so I had to pay full price (the horror!)

Once I had all of the parts, it didn't take long (in actual work time) to put it together.  It did take a while in calendar time, since I only had time to work on it in short stretches.  Both puppet theaters are now rolled up in the matching cases in the closet, patiently awaiting the holiday season.

 

For Evan:

 

For my nanny's son:

I've been wanting to make a felt crayon roll for months. For some reason I can't explain, I find them irresistibly cute. What is a felt crayon roll, you ask? It's fabric with slots in it, and a tie. You put your crayons in the slots, then roll it up and tie it. It's super cute... just look at the pictures below. You know you want one too.

Evan is almost ready for crayons... he only takes small bites now.. I decided that's close enough. There are lots of tutorials on how to make these. I liked the Skip to My Lou instructions the best --m concise and easy to follow. I just needed some wool felt to get started. Fortunately JoAnn Fabrics had it on sale that week, so I got two colors.

My first attempt was an 8 crayon version for Evan:



It's really not as crooked as it looks in this picture. It does curl up a little on either end when the crayons are in it though. He has the jumbo crayons, which are a little snug in the 1" pockets. Evan can get them out, but he doesn't have the dexterity to slide them back in (or draw with them really; he still likes to eat them...)

Next, I made a 16 crayon roll for a 3 year old's birthday.



The regular size crayons are easy to get in and out. Maybe too easy. Somehow red violet didn't make it into the birthday wrapping... oops!

Now that I've made a couple, I want to try something different for the closure. It's going to be awhile before Evan can tie a bow, so I'm going to try making a tab with some velcro on it.

I saw this post on craftstylish about reusable snack bags and had to make some. I hate throwing ziplocs away after using them once; it's ridiculous. I also happened to have everything I needed to make them already: some fabric scraps and velcro, both left over from making a mei tai (baby carrier).

The directions call for cutting out two 6x12 pieces of fabric, folding them in half, and sewing up the sides. Once I folded them up, I realized that the person who wrote the directions was using fabric with no particular direction. My fabric had tigers, and if I did it that way, they'd be upside down on one side. Oh well, my bags would be slightly shorter, but that's ok. I made two squares, made sure the tigers were right side up on both sides, and sewed around three sides. Then I cut 1/2" off of my lining fabric to allow for the bottom seam allowance.

I decided to use PUL to line my bags. PUL is polyurethane laminated fabric, which is a polyester knit on one side, and 1 mil polyurethane on the other. This is what cloth diaper covers are made of; it's light, waterproof, and comes in lots of colors. I'd bought some a while back to make a diaper pail liner, and thought it might be nice to have a waterproof snack bag. I wouldn't put a cup of water in the bag, but it'd be great for something like slices of fuite. I pinned it carefully together, started sewing, and realized I'd forgotten what a pain it is to sew PUL. It's stretchy. The laminated side is slippery. It feeds unevenly; when I got to the end of the top piece there was still half an inch of bottom piece. It gets all gather-y. When you mess up, it's hard to get the stitches out.

I made it through one bag and decided that cotton liner in the example wasn't such a bad idea after all... I'd already three sets of fabric, so I found some plain cotton, cut out a liner piece, and shortly had a cotton-lined bag.

But then I realized hey, someone with an internet connection must have sewed PUL before. It's only because of the internet that I'd even heard of PUL, right? Yet again, I was amazed that I survived before the internet. With a few minutes of searching, I found this trick: pin paper on top of the slippery PUL! It fed through the sewing smoothly. When I finished, the paper came right off; it was perforated like a stamp. Amazing.



left: cotton-lined bag, right: PUL-lined bag

My house was built in 1951. For the most part, that's a good thing -- they used good materials, and did a lot of things the labor-intensive (and better) way. Almost everywhere we've repainted, we've found traces of peach paint underneath. The whole house must have been peach inside at one time. When I painted the hall bathroom, I decided to go with the 50s style instead of trying to fight it. It has mint green tile on the floor and counter, with darker green on the edges and around the shower. What goes better with mint green than... peach? I also put up round mirrors to go with the hexagonal tiles, and changed the light plate, trash can, and over-toilet storage to shiny chrome. I installed all white towels and rugs.

I couldn't find a curtain to fit the original (and ugly) window, so I just got a cheap sheer polyester white one and tied up the bottoms. It worked, but I never really liked it. But that was before I had a sewing machine! I decided it was time to fix it. I went to the crazy fabric store (the one that has huge piles of fabric everywhere and they don't really speak English but where I often find great stuff), and started looking for something that was orange-ish, green-ish, and/or said "50s". I found a sheer peach orange fabric with brown and turquoise flowers. It was orange. I hate orange. It had brown flowers on it, with turquoise. It had gold glitter. Wow. Was it the ugliest thing I'd ever seen? Or was it perfect? I wasn't really sure, but it was only $2 a yard, so I thought it was worth a try.

It was 60" wide, so I just used a full width for each panel. I hemmed up the sides, made a casing for the curtain rod, and hemmed the bottoms. This is the third time I've made curtains (four if you count the valance in Evan's room), and it's really easy. I think it took less time than shopping for something to fit the window the first time. I hung them up and I think they're growing on me. They're really more orange than peachy, but I like the green and blue in the pattern. It's so nice to have something that actually fits. I like how they look different during the day and at night. And hey, curtains are easy to make -- I don't know why it took me 4 years to get around to ditching the crappy white one!

At night, you can really see the pattern:


During the day, the light comes through (but you still don't have to see the ugly window handle):

I was inspired by my towel robe to do some more clothing recycling. I found this post about how to make kid's pants from a T-shirt, and decided to give it a try. Evan could use a few more pairs of pants; he can sometimes go through three or four in a day. I'm not sure where I found that link, but I'd seen a suggestion of cutting the butt area a little roomier to accomodate cloth diapers. That sounded perfect, since Evan has a few pairs of pants that just don't fit quite right, probably because they were cut to fit over disposable diapers.

For my first pair, I cut up one of my many old T-shirts. I couldn't just leave it plain, so I found some leftover flannel, folded down the sides, and sewed a strip of it on the sides of the pants. They're comfy and soft, and they fit great. Is it strange or cute that he matches his quilt? I used elastic that I took from an old fitted sheet, so it's like one new pair of pants just materialized in our house -- how cool is that?



I've been reading in Soule Mama's blog about all of her amazing thrift store finds, and decided I should check out the YSI Thrift & Gift that I'd never actually been to but drive by every time I go anywhere. I got a big blue T-shirt to cut up into another pair of pants, and umm, some other stuff (a rocking horse, foam letter/number set, floaty wetsuit...) This pair didn't go quite as smoothly. I wanted to use one of the decorative stitches on my machine on the side; I thought it would be easier than cutting, ironing, and sewing a fabric strip. Yeah, well, maybe the snowflake/asterisk stitch isn't designed for use on stretch knits. I thought it was going ok, and then I realized it wasn't moving. I tried to pull the fabric out. Nothing happened. It was totally wedged. I finally got it out, tearing a hole in the fabric in the process. Then I had to get out the screwdriver, take off the face plate, and fish out the huge knot of thread/fabric chunks from inside my machine. Time for a new plan. I decided to cut out some frogs from some leftover blanket flannel, and use it as an applique, conveniently hiding the hole I'd ripped in the fabric. You can't really see it in the picture, but that's why there are stars sewn on at the hips. Now I've go the technique down for patching pants when they get holes in the knees!

Did you see the cute blue fish towel in my bib gallery? There's more to that towel...



My mom got me a cute book of things to make for babies,
Crafts for Baby. It's got an assortment of stuff, from woodworking to papercrafting to sewing, but what caught my eye was a pool robe. Last year when we took Evan swimming, my husband or I would hand him up to the other, to be wrapped in a big towel and dried off. We don't think that's going to work so well this year now that he wants to walk everywhere instead of being held down.

I've made stuff from patterns and from directions I found on web sites, but I'd never traced a pattern from a book before. It looked like it was mostly rectangles though, so I thought I'd give it a try. I squashed the book onto my scanner and scanned it in. It said "enlarge 400%", so I opened it in Photoshop Elements, told it to constrain proportions, and multiplied one dimension by 4. So far so good. Then I tried to print it. Photoshop told me it was too big to print on one sheet, and offered to scale it. But I wanted it BIG, not scaled back down. I looked in all the printer driver dialogs and couldn't find any way to make it print on multiple pages. How did I ever live without Google? A bit of searching yielded PosteRazor, and with that, plus some scissors and tape, I was ready to start.

One of the selling points in making this pattern "easy" was that it uses the hem of the towel for the bottom, sleeve, and hood edges. The directions call for one large bath towel. I thought my old towel was large... definitely large enough to wrap one wiggly baby. But when I laid out the pattern pieces, it didn't have enough towel hem for all of the pieces. It should have said bath sheet or pool towel; a regular size bath towel just wasn't going to work. Oh well, good thing I had two of these old towels to cut up (ahh, now you know where that bib came from).

I lined up the pieces with the hems, cut them out, held them up, and... uh oh! Paul tells me he can't tell me how many times he's seen me holding up a piece of fabric recently and saying that. What was the problem? Well, the first problem is that you should never ever cut fabric when you have a spare second between removing a little boy's hands from a houseplant and and picking him up after he tripped on his feet. You see, the towel has a nice fish pattern. All of the fish, being normal healthy fish, have their bellies on the bottom and their dorsal fins on the top. Except... except... on my front robe piece, all of the fish are... wait for it... swimming upside down.

Sewing the robe together was easy. Cleaning up the 10,000 little bits of towel all over the office, family room, kitchen, and hallway was a little harder. It looked cute, so I found Evan to try it on. He's often not a big fan of having stuff pulled over his head, but something was wrong. The body of the robe was definitely big enough, but not big enough to get over his shoulders and then get his shoulders turned and through the arm holes. Who came up with this design for a little kid anyway? After a little more searching, I found inspiration in the pool robe @ Sew, Mama, Sew. I decided to cut it open and make it look like a normal robe. I finished the edges with my newly-acquired bias tape skill. And bonus! Now that it's in two pieces on the front, you can't even tell that the fish are upside down! (Right?)

While trying to make velco closing bibs, I realized that making them big enough to close comfortably but no so big they're unwieldy was a problem. Maybe ties weren't really that hard to use. I searched for toddler bibs, and found how to make a bib from a towel. Wow, perfect, a new bib and recycling stuff! It looked pretty easy, so I found an old towel and got started on...

Bib #4 started out as an old black (now slightly faded towel). I've been cutting everything up with my rotary cutter, and it is so much easier than scissors. Except... it sorta made a dent in the top layer of towel, It did not cut through both layers. Ok, so I traced the pattern and cut it out, and wow, it's hard to cut through two layers of towel with scissors too. On to step 2, making the bias binding. I cut some strips of fabric and started sewing them together. Then I folded them out and found... uh oh. Some of them don't turn the right way. What is the right way anyway? Was I even paying attention, or just sewing along thinking how easy it was? Now I know why they sell those packages of bias tape in the fabric store, and wondering what I'd gotten myself into. The package is what, $2? And how many wrong ways are there to attach the strips to each other? Apparently I was going to find out. Finally, I put a sample of two correctly joined strips on my chair so I could line up the next one, draw a line across it, and do it right. Once I had the bias strip, the rest of it was simple. The instructions say to turn the tiny little ties, but I just folded them closed and topstitched. Easy. I really like this bib: it's soft, washable, and big enough to catch a lot of food.

Bib #5 was another of the same pattern as #4. But this time, I decided to make it easier: use a patterned towel, and buy that package of plain bias binding. Making this one, I learned that the cut edge of a towel frays. It frays a lot. There were little tiny dark blue towel bits all over the table and the floor. Somehow more of them got into the hallway. I also found that the packaged bias tape was not nearly as soft as the one I made. It was kinda stiff, and a little hard to bend around the tight curves of the armholes. But hey, it was ready to use, and bib #5 was done in record time. Just in time, too, it's cherry season!

Evan has outgrown most his baby bibs, but is making bigger messes than ever. My husband and I decided it was time to buy some new ones. We started, as usual with baby stuff, at Target. We noticed that most of the bibs were tiny useless ones, like we already had. We found one package of bigger ones, made out of some sort of plastic, so we thought we'd try those. They're long, yes, but that is the end of the good qualities of these bibs. The plastic doesn't bend easily, so it's constantly getting in the way.

Ok, so now that I know what I don't want, I can do better, right? I searched around a bit online to figure out how to make bibs. I found a suggestion to use the vinyl tablecloth material, and set off to the fabric store to buy some.


Bib #1: http://www.poopockets.com/free/bibs/bibs.htm
Looks simple, right? Just cut out a bib-shaped piece of vinyl tablecloth, sew on the bias tape and velcro, and it's done. Umm, yeah, bias tape. I've wrestled with that stuff before. I sew happily along on the top, get to the end, flip it over to check, and realize I haven't been attaching the bottom part for oh, half the time. Pull out the stitches, try again, repeat in smaller sections until it's finally done and I'm wondering why anyone ever sews anything. But wait, there's got to be an easier way, right? There is! I found it! Amy Karol made this awesome video: http://angrychicken.typepad.com/angry_chicken/2008/03/bias-tape-tutor.html And now I have a bib, can sew on bias tape, and found a funny blog.


I have lots of fabric left, and I definitely need more than one bib, so I thought I'd try some other designs...


Bib #2: I have a pattern (Butterick 5220) lying around that includes a bib, how about that one? The pattern calls for cutting two pieces of a soft fabric, sewing right sides together, and turning. That's pretty simple, and I have a bib-shaped thing pretty fast. But oops, I forgot the velcro. Umm, it's a baby bib, nobody will notice that I sewed it on through both pieces, right? Bib #2 is a little stiff (kinda like the Target bibs), but it is nice and big.



Bib #3: Ok, how about something a little smaller? This pattern http://nested.typepad.com/blog/2007/07/something-to-ma.html looks like it would be big enough. But maybe I should make the neck part a little longer; nobody likes a too-tight collar, right? So I sew around the bib, almost forget the velcro again, but stop in time to add it, and it's looking good. Then I try to turn it. Uh oh. This vinyl tablecloth stuff is thick! The neck parts are thin! There's no way that two pieces of velcro are coming out through the top of the neck piece. Time to get out the seam ripper. I opened it up along the neck piece to turn it, then topstitched it closed. Oh well, close enough. It fits around the neck, but overall I think this bib is a little too small.

I think that's enough vinyl bibs for now. The care instructions for the vinyl tablecloth say to wipe clean with a damp cloth, but bibs are definitely going in the laundry. If they don't make it... oh well. Oh wait, maybe I can make some washable bibs?