A bow tie for the birthday girl

Conversation with Adelaide the morning of her birthday:
Adelaide (pointing to her bear): Bow tie!
Me: That's right, bear has a red bow tie. Do you like bow ties?
Adelaide: Yes! Add like bow tie! Add have bow tie soon!

Conversational takeaway:
1. We cursed the kid with a long name, and she won't be able to pronounce the entire thing until she's seven.
2. I should totally whip up a bow tie for her birthday.



My method was two parts this tutorial, one part this tutorial, and a dash of winging it because I didn't feel like reading the tutorials all that thoroughly. It took about 30 minutes and less than a third of a yard of fabric, plus a bit of interfacing and some velcro. Highly recommended.

The birthday girl was a happy bow-tie-clad camper, as evidenced by this video, in which she is dancing to one of her other birthday gifts: a Tears for Fears CD. That's right. And she loved it.


A new bow tie and some Tears for Fears: Best birthday ever from Sarah Ross on Vimeo.

But bow ties aren't all fun and games, my friends. Bow ties can also be serious business. In this case, Adelaide needed to get serious about watching a music video with her dad on the iPad while still in her pajamas, but you can tell from that face and the crossed arms that she is FOR REAL about it.

Sewing from December: felt food!

Adelaide received a play kitchen for Christmas this year, so, of course, I needed to make some felt food! I made a few things, but the farfalle turned out the best, I think.



Just cut a few rectangles, trim the short edges with pinking shears, and scrunch and hand-sew the centers.  The little colander is something I picked up from World Market for $2 because I was there buying candy for our stockings and thought the pop of blue would be just so darn cute.



And, because our girl loves her cookies, I made some chocolate chip cookies. And yes, she did try to stick one in her mouth at first, before we had sufficiently gone over the "this is PRETEND food" concept. I didn't stuff them at all, so they're just flat, which I think works.

I also made some fried eggs, but for some reason I don't have any photos of those. Maybe someday.

I consider the farfalle, the cookies, and the eggs my victories. Easy, but also pretty good looking. On the other hand: I also tried a doughnut. There were going to be multiple doughnuts, but I wasn't happy with the effort to results ratio on the first one, so I quit.



The felt food  and the play kitchen are getting a lot of use so far (and even some good, lengthy independent play! pinch me!), so yay!

The kitty

It is my goal to make Adelaide one thing for each gift-giving occasion.* The Wee Wonderfuls book has been helping me meet that goal so far. There was the mermaiden for the first Christmas, and for the first birthday I gave "Katie Kitty" a whirl.



Adelaide is kind of obsessed with our real cat (the cat, let me take this opportunity to say, is not likewise smitten), which is what led me to choose this project.

It came together quite nicely, I think. The only change I made was to follow this suggestion with the legs.



I do so little hand sewing that when I start a project that requires it, I remember "Oh, I hate hand sewing!" But as this project progressed I found myself thinking that hand sewing isn't so bad after all. Maybe. At least, I seem to be improving with practice. My ladder-stitched attachments may not be the prettiest of all time, but they aren't glaringly bad and the parts seem like they'll stay on when subjected to abuse from the kiddo. Which is the whole point, I guess.



The body fabric is some wool (I think) herringbone I grabbed a ton of at a thrift store quite some time ago. And the dress fabric is left over from ... something. I had a heck of a time finding any nice colors of wool felt locally, but I finally found some wool scraps at a local quilt shop that seemed like they'd work (not really felt, I think, but the edges didn't unravel at all after me picking at it quite a bit). So far, so good. I didn't make the shoes. I ran out of time before the birthday and haven't felt the need since. So she's shoe-less, possibly forever.

Anyway, stuffed kitty verdict: I am pleased.



*This is easier than it might sound to some people, because Christmas and birthdays are pretty much the only regularly scheduled gift-giving occasions I am into. Every Hallmark-recognized event need not be an opportunity for more "stuff." If feeling gifty, an out-of-the-blue gift on a random Tuesday is much nicer.

The Mermaiden

I always think I'm going to make things for Christmas (gifts, decorations, cards, etc.). It will be fantastic, the things will be beautiful, I will feel all accomplished, and so on. Of course, this rarely works out as envisioned (see this post over at Made By Rae, which pretty much describes my issues exactly).



I did manage to make one thing this year: the Mermaiden! I've had the Wee Wonderfuls book since, I think, September. I've been planning which delightful dolls to make for Adelaide, but this is the first project I've actually managed to do.

She's a wee little mermaid for a wee little girl. And I think she's pretty cute, if I do say so myself.



I had to do the fin differently than instructed, though it was entirely due to my own areas of weakness and inability, not the instructions or pattern. I just don't hand sew well at all. And I also usually hate trying it, which doesn't help. Also, the decorative machine stitching just wasn't working out for me. So I gave up and formulated my own plan, which worked fine for me and made me happy.



I wish I had been able to make more of these projects by now, because there are so many cuties. I hope to get moving on some more of them this winter, once we settle in to the slower pace of January and February.

The problem with books

The problem with books is that they make me want to ditch all the practical, everyday things I am supposed to be doing with my time. You might be tempted to believe that the problem seems to be with ME rather than with books, but I assure you that you are mistaken.

I went to the library last weekend. God, I love libraries. Lovely places just bursting with books (and movies! and music!). And they let you take things home! For free! And if they don't have a book you want just hanging around, they will have one delivered from another nearby-ish library. Also for free! It is a magical place, I tell you.

But the point is, I checked out some "just for fun" books. And started reading. And didn't want to spend any time over the weekend without a book in my hands. And, to be frank, the book I was reading wasn't even that good (it was fine, but not great, not a real page turner). But reading is just so delicious.



Speaking of delicious: cookbooks. Specifically, the newest addition to my collection: Love Soup. Now, you might think that a cookbook would not give me the problem mentioned above. After all, cooking ends with food. To eat. Which is pretty darn practical. But then why did I spend all my post-baby-bedtime time last night looking at cookbooks and even cooking food, only to realize around 8:30 that I had no plan for dinner? I do have an interesting little eggplant and roasted garlic dip as an appetizer for tonight. (Why did no one tell me roasting garlic was so easy? Seriously, people. I needed to know that. I could have been roasting garlic all this time, but I have not been!) And I have plenty of new plans for future (soupy) dinners.



Another problematic book I'm dealing with right now: Wee Wonderfuls. So much awesome! Why would I want to spend time sewing nice practical things like a tablecloth or curtains when I could be sewing the cutest little toys ever? I hope Adelaide likes stuffed toys, because she's going to be getting some.

Though I am proud to say I actually did pull myself away from my bookish world this weekend long enough to sew the tablecloth. Which is good, because it was terribly easy and should have been done long, long ago. But more on that another time.

Papercutting and a story about cake

Yesterday was Adam's birthday! Happy birthday, darling!



Here's the gift I was hinting about last week: a special papercutting project! This is really the first papercutting piece I've done, and I'm quite pleased with how it turned out. Though I did discover that I need a better knife for next time!



I may have mentioned this before, but every year I try to make Adam a birthday cake. He loves chocolate cake with chocolate frosting, so that's what I do. And every year the cake has been an epic failure. I mean, I will eat nearly anything with sugar and/or chocolate in it, and even I have not been able to eat some of these cakes. I haven't been able to figure it out, though I suspect that at least part of the problem has been overbaking.

Anyway, this was going to be year number six (I think...that seems right) of my chocolate cake attempts, and if it didn't work out, I was ready to finally give up and start buying his cakes from a local bakery or something. Because, seriously, how many times can a girl force her husband to eat really bad cake on his birthday just because she has a crazy thing about baking cakes from scratch?

So this year I decided to avoid the recipes in all my fancy-pants cookbooks and go with a more populist cake: the recipe on the Hershey's cocoa box, also available on the website. (I just saw this morning that Angry Chicken posted a link to this recipe over the weekend, too. If only I'd had her recommendation earlier, I could have saved myself years of heartache!) Hallelujah, we have a winner! It wasn't dry! It tasted good! Adam voluntarily had a second slice, and I didn't even prod him in that direction! Success is mine!



I also used Hershey's recipe for frosting (again, available on the cocoa box or on the website, on the same page as the cake recipe). It was pretty good, but maybe a little too sweet. I'll probably stick with this cake recipe in the future, but I might mix it up on the frosting front.

More hot pads

Another Monday off work. Wow, I love that.

I made more hot pads. Now with finger pockets!



Someone over on Flickr gave me the idea to try these with finger pockets on the back. It's a fairly easy modification. Pretty much just cut another full circle instead of a middle piece and don't quilt down the side pieces.



Kind of cool.

But most of the afternoon was spent working on a little project for Adam's birthday. Since he reads this sometimes, it'll have to be super-secret until next weekend, though. Well, semi-super-secret. Here's a hint.

Homemade gifts, part V

Okay, I promise that this is the last one of these Christmas updates...

For my sister Rachel, a painting.



I made one of these for myself years ago and have made several more since then. I think they're really fun to make because half the work is just mixing up different pretty colors, which I love.

I just draw out the name freehand with a pencil directly onto the blank canvas. Then I do the background color, saving some of the color I've mixed for any touch-ups that might be needed at the end. Then it's letter-painting fun time!

I use acrylic paints, which dry really quickly, so this is an easy project to get done in half a day or so. And did I mention fun?

These are the first two I did (one for me, one for my other sister). Mine is pretty sloppy! I've done a couple for my nieces that I really like, but you'll have to take my word on their awesomeness. I know you believe me.

Homemade gifts, part IV

For Adam, I tried to learn a new crafty skill.



He has liked these Chicago-centric quotes (by Frank Lloyd Wright and Louis Sullivan) since he came across them and liked the idea of having them on the wall.



So I decided to try my hand at some calligraphy. I picked out two photos Adam had taken of the city (while on our boat tour) and some paper to match. Then I tried a million times to write the quotes out, thought I'd finally nailed it, then realized the 5" x7" photo spaces I was planning to stick the quotes in were actually only 4.5" x 6.5", so I had to do it all over again. And while this probably doesn't qualify as calligraphy proper, it is at least semi-fancy, semi-pretty writing.

Homemade gifts, part III

For my dad, hot drink mixes.



There are recipes for this type of thing all over the place. I mashed a few together and tweaked them a bit to get what appears below. I was taste-testing these as I mixed them up and ended up drinking about five mugs of coffee in a couple of hours. I don't drink coffee (or soda or tea) very often, so all that caffeine had me feeling a little twitchy for the rest of the day!

Swiss Mocha
1 cup instant coffee
1 cup sugar
2 cups nonfat dry milk
3 tablespoons cocoa

Add all ingredients to food processor and process until uniform.

To use, add 1 to 2 tablespoons to one mug of hot water. Stir well.


Cafe Vienna
1 cup instant coffee
1 1/2 cup sugar
1 1/2 cup nonfat dry milk
1 1/4 teaspoon cinnamon

Add all ingredients to food processor and process until uniform.

To use, add 1 to 2 tablespoons to one mug of hot water. Stir well.

Homemade gifts, part II

For my mom, a little trio.



The pouch is the zipper pouch from Bend-the-Rules Sewing, made slightly larger.

The tissue holder is like the others I've made.

And the envelope is of my own recent invention.

Homemade gifts, part I

Now it is time to drag the Christmas season out for ages while I show-and-tell all the stuff I made as gifts. Up first...

For my sister, a bag (like my traveling bag, but a wee bit smaller) and coordinating tissue/handkerchief holder.





I love making those tissue holders. They are really quick to make, and I can't get enough of that I-just-accomplished-something-in-a-matter-of-minutes feeling.

An easy project

It is another very gray Saturday here. Gray and rainy is perfect sewing weather, but it is not so good for trying to take photos of the finished products.



This is the Simple Bib from Bend-the-Rules Sewing. (No, I do not have any big news. It is a gift for a baby shower I am going to next weekend.) It was, as the title claims, simple. So that was nice. Especially since the dinky little project I was working on yesterday was a total bust. The front is quilting cotton and the back is flannel. I think I'll make a couple more to go with this one. I do have a lot of that blue dot fabric still, after all.

And! I got to use my new snap-setting pliers! This is the first time I've tried snaps that are not of the sew-on variety. So that was exciting. (Although, with the snap close-up here, you can see how wonky my topstitching is around tight curves. Yikes.)



I bought the snap-setting pliers yesterday. I had the day off work, so I made the trip up to the fabric store. I also came home loaded up with fabric for clothing-type fall/winter projects. Woohoo!

Freezer paper stencils

A few days ago was our anniversary (3 years!) and I made Adam this T-shirt as a little gift (it is a college basketball thing). I love decorating shirts with freezer paper stencils. It is so easy.



1. Print or draw design on the paper side (as opposed to plastic-coated side) of some freezer paper.

2. Use a utility knife to carefully cut out design.

3. Lay out T-shirt with a piece of cardboard between the layers of fabric to keep the paint from bleeding through.

4. Position the freezer paper stencil on the T-shirt, plastic-coated side down, and iron it. Use the hottest setting appropriate for your fabric and make sure the stencil is stuck securely to the shirt all around the edges of the design.

5. Using a medium or large brush, stipple your fabric paint all over the stencil until it looks completely opaque.

6. Let the paint dry completely and then carefully peel the stencil off the T-shirt.

7. Heat set the paint by ironing on the reverse side of the fabric. I like to put a piece of cardboard between the shirt's layers again just in case I missed a damp spot in the paint or something.

Simple tote

Wow, it is really gift-giving season around here. This weekend we were downstate again, this time for a five-year-old neice's birthday party.

I decided to sew up this little tote bag to hold the copy of The Lorax (on recycled paper! how nice!) that we got for her.



It is based on the Simple Tote from Amy Karol's Bend-the-Rules Sewing (errata here), but I resized it to fit the book and made the handles the same length. I should have made it even a little bigger, but the book just fits. I also added a little linen patch on the front on which I embroidered our neice's name (uh, yeah, I blurred that because I'm not sure how her parents feel about having her name on this here little blog, sorry).



I feel like the flannel used as facing between the outer fabric and the lining fabric makes the bag a little thick and bulky, especially since it is so small. But I'm not really sure how to fix that, since I think the quilting cottons I used for the outer fabric and lining fabric would be too thin and wispy on their own. Maybe just using some heavier fabric and omitting the flannel facing would work a bit better.

I bought the fruit fabric maybe a year ago at JoAnn's with no project in mind. I figured it was too cute (and on sale) to pass up, and I'd find a use for it sooner or later. All the rest of the materials came from my little stash, too. Except the embroidery floss. That came from the stash of old craft/sewing goods at my parents' house.

Stationery set

My little (yes, I can still say that even though he's a towering giant now) brother is graduating from university this weekend. And then he is heading into the wilderness way out in the western states, where there will be no phones.

Therefore, I am expecting letters. Sure, he'll have email, but that just isn't as cool. I mean, no form of communication is as completely awesome as real mail, you know?

So I got it into my head to make him some personalized stationery. By carving a stamp. Which I have never even tried before. And I decided to start this project with only two fairly busy after-work evenings of time to work on it. Yeah, that seems pretty well thought out.



The carving went fairly smoothly, thank goodness. I didn't zing off any important chunks, I didn't injure myself, and I knocked it out on night number one. Sure, there are zero straight lines where there should properly have been many, but, hey, that's the beauty of a hand-carved stamp, right?



Amazingly enough, the printing went smoothly, too. Whew! Just roll out the ink, roll it onto the stamp, press the stamp to the paper, and carefully peel it off. Easy peasy.



And I'm pretty darn happy with the finished product, so yay! Unfortunately, I don't have a photo yet of the whole set (with semi-matching envelopes) all put together in its storage folder because the ink was still tacky at bedtime last night and there was no time for that before work this morning. But I'll snap a shot of the complete set before I give it away.

By the way, my reference guide for this project was Lena Corwin's Printing By Hand. Lovely and informative book out of which I hope to get more use soon.