One Inch World

I’m not supposed to be blogging right now, I’m supposed to be meeting my deadline. But it’s been a week! My house is getting messier and messier and older daughter spent an unheard of amount of time in front of the computer today. So here, here is something I whipped up before I was sucked into this One Yard Wonders 2 thing.

Birthday. Mother suggested that she would appreciate play acting props, careers other than ‘princess’. I chose mail man. This hat, other than being too small, worked wonderfully from my imagination to implementation!

The bag, well, it is recycled from a shirt in the rag bag. I got a new serger! Named Sammy. This was practice using it, quite a different thing than I’m used to, it was quite fun! I made the strap about twice too long and tried to just lap it and sew to make it shorter, but that was a disaster, ended having to undo the bag seam, remake a bunch of it, but it was still a quick satisfying project. So what if I did write the letter shapes with permanent marker rather than erasable marker… It is still quite good for play acting, not going to be winning any design comps with it though!

I had a problem with timing this year, the call for submissions to the second One Yard Wonders book came out while I was packing to move, and with the approaching deadline last month at the end of March I was still unpacking. I was not very happy about this. So a week before the deadline, desperate to submit *something* I made this fairy skirt and play silk. And I told them about all these other brilliant ideas I had that I didn’t have time to make before the deadline.

Long story short, they did not take this skirt, unsurprisingly really, but they *did* extended the deadline for everyone for another ~2 weeks, one of which my little sister was visiting playing au pair. So I got three more projects sewn, although one was a little late, and they were accepted! The down side being that now I have to finish writing up the instructions for three projects and re-make them with the soon-to-be-provided fabric for the final versions. So along with making things for Rebecca’s birthday party next week, I’m going to be pretty busy for the next month! And here I was wanting to get back to working on patterns for my sadly neglected Etsy shop. But life just is. I’m doing what I love, so I can’t complain.

And here’s a picture just for fun:

This picture sums up what I love about my bounce flash. Is that shallow? Okay, silver lining lifestyle comment: since our mattress was saggy and pokey by a year after we bought it, 8 years later Rebecca is allowed to jump on it whenever she wants. Bonus. She jumps on the couch too. It’s a nice couch, but we got it for free from family, and jumping always seemed more important than preserving the couch. It’s holding up so far.

We needed something to do, so we made this clothes line out of a pipe cleaner and some cardboard triangles, and some paper clothes to hang up. I cut out the clothes and Rebecca drew on them, then hung them on the clothes line with mini clothes pins. To get the clothes line to stay up we had to put some rocks in the cardboard triangles, maybe someone has a better idea for how to make a clothes line? This one is pretty simple.

Today, through Kiva.org, I loaned $50 to a sweet maker in Mexico. Join me in my December drive to give a helping hand to people in poverty.

I’ve been trying to clean things up in our work and play space, call it nesting if you want, and for me that usually means finishing or discarding or, ahem, hiding, unfinished projects. Finishing is usually the most satisfactory, but of course it takes the most time. The particular table I was cleaning off yesterday had several clothing repair or alteration projects on it, most went in the discard pile, because they were for Rebecca, and thus since I’d put them off for a year, I could just pack them up in the too-small-box. They primarily needed to be altered for head size, since she had an enormous head, but who knows what the next baby will need. Probably the same thing, but I’m going to cross them off the list for now.

I just added these pants this morning though, so I got them done. They had a stiff corduroy draw string, which caused panic and unhappiness when Rebecca tried to use the bathroom herself. Obviously an untenable state of affairs, I don’t like clothes with buttons or snaps in the back either, kids should be able to reach everything themselves, and fasten everything themselves. But I liked the pants. So rather than chucking them into the donation bag I pulled out the drawstring and added some elastic. Now they are much more functional, although I should probably do something about the ankle ties too.

Also in my project pile was all of the materials and a sketched paper pattern to make these produce bags. (The design is heavily borrowed from Linen, Wool, Cotton although I didn’t actually use their pattern.) I wanted to make more, but I’m going to put the rest of the fabric back away and see how these hold up, I doubled the loose weave fabric, but I’m worried it’s going to fall apart. It’s really suited more for curtains, which is what I bought it for ten years ago, rather than being a workhorse. It’s just loose woven cotton, not an actual net fabric. I really like how it wrinkled and shrank up when I washed it though, I should have taken another picture. They survived one trip to WholeFoods today, and if I never try to put an artichoke or oranges with stems into them they might last…

And that table is mostly unburied now, hurray! There are just a lot of whole and partial thrifted clothes that I need to fold into my fabric stash, and a couple things I haven’t figured out what to do with. I really should have taken a before and after picture!

This straw hat has blown off my head a few too many times, and there were large holes and cracks developing in the brim. But no more! Now it is cute. Or, it is at least me, eclectic! And I don’t need to spend the money on a new hat. More importantly to me, really, I don’t have to throw this hat away. I hate hate hate throwing things away.

If your style is eclectic, then patching a straw hat with cloth is easy peasy. Just slap some patches of fabric down and run your sewing machine backwards and forwards at 3/8″ intervals, or whatever suits your hat. (Backwards because you probably can’t get the crown of the hat through your sewing machine’s throat.) The most important detail is that you don’t want to chew the straw up more than you have to, so set a good long stitch length. If you use a really tiny stitch you will be essentially perforating the page, and your hat will probably crack along the stitch lines. Counter productive. Your hat probably already has a stitched edge on the brim, I guess that’s the cheap way to make straw hats, mine looks like it was stitched at about 4 stitches to the inch. My darned patches vary from 4 to 8 stitches per inch, I’m betting the longer stitch lengths will hold up better, but I just started figuring all this out, so we’ll see.

You could get fancy and turn the edges under, I would do that before darning the patch down to avoid unnecessary stitching on the straw, but I just left the edges raw. They’re random patches from my scrap bag, I think they would look silly if I got too fussy about it.

If you have a really bad hole you can darn it every which way to hold everything together. This hole under the brim was the one that finally drove me to sewing my hat. About 8 inches of the brim was about to fall off.

But now I have a happy hat again! In time for my two week Maine Island Vacation. We leave Saturday! Hurray! So things may be quiet around here for a while. (Does this count as a tutorial?)

First a dress. I don’t know why I never thought of this before, but it is so much easier to get a doll into a dress whose straps snap than get their arms through fiddly little sleeves, and also this gives the gapping back with huge velcro pieces a miss too.

I avoided the tiny tiny turned seams by just making the whole bodice fully lined, sewing it right sides together and turning it right side out. Okay, so turning those long skinny straps was a bit of a pain, but less of a pain than my usual route of tiny plastic doll dresses. (I think this is Barbie’s little sister, but I’m happily clueless and we got her at a flea market.) So now I can make as many dresses as my daughter wants, with very little hair pulling. Woot! And I bet I can even add sleeve caps to the strap shape.

Next, diapers, necessary for any well turned out baby doll. This is the first one I’ve made, but it came out pretty well, and now I have requests to outfit the rest of her baby dolls. This one is reversible, partly to reduce diapering frustration, and partly because I couldn’t decide which should be the inside.

Whenever I take off Sali Doll’s diaper Rebecca comes after me, exclaiming ‘What are you doing? Sali Doll is pooping all over everything!’ I had to take this picture fast.