These pictures are six months old. That’s what happens when I stop taking pictures of what I’m doing now! Swimming mostly, but we just built an air rocket launcher. Clearly I have been taking pictures of the wrong things…

I love this skirt though. I need to work on the lines a little bit, it is/was a little too long for Penelope, but I like the flaired morning glory-ish skirt. I may have to do something like that for me, but with a yoga waist. I am SO IN LOVE with yoga waists right now, they are cleaner than an elastic waist band, and so much easier than a zipper + button/hook/whatever. I am all about easy when it comes to clothes, my button holes are, um, appalling. I don’t care if I have a machine that is ‘automatic’, they just look awful once you cut them open. So snaps or hooks. But the problem with zippers is you have to go and buy them, and I never do, and then you have to put them in, and frankly I’m pretty bad at that too!

But I adore the little mermaids on this skirt. (I think I got it from Jo’s etsy shop, she is so sweet.) Oh, and it is a double gauze! Double gauze is so nice! It has such a nice weight, and it’s breezy! (exclaim exclaim exclaim!!!) I have a bunch of it to make me a skirt (Alice in Wonderland and stripes that I got from Purl Soho, a story in itself), but I haven’t and I haven’t. Maybe the yoga waist will get me back on track. Have to think about that. Not sure I’m brave enough to do the knit yoga waist + woven skirt. Think think think.

Texture Blocks. I brought home all these interesting leather samples in different textures and finishes, I think originally I was planning on doing something Montessori-ish, like texture matching cards, or perhaps I was going to make a book. I don’t remember, and that’s for the best, because I came up with something much simpler, that I actually finished!

I have a bunch of wooden craft blocks that I was using to make little houses, which incidentally is where the name for this blog really first came from, (you can get them here) and I cut up the different leather scraps to the same size as a block face, and glued them on with a paint brush and some ModPodge. I could have cut them so that the edges of the leather overlapped, so the block would come out as a perfect cube, rather than a cube with all the corners missing, but I wasn’t confident I could pull that out without it looking like a mess, so I went with the corners-missing ‘style’. I’m a total cheater.

All of the textures are fun to investigate, especially the hairy one. It’s hard to see, but the sides in that black row above is actually covered in stiff, flat, cow hair. That’s the real deal! The other textures are embossed, I’m pretty sure, but still very cool to touch.

These bags have been really useful, especially since my husband has started collecting rocks like a mad man! He can fill a bag up with dirty rocks and leave it in a creek to wash off, hanging off one of the many fallen logs around here, and then sort through his clean-ish rocks before carrying all (five pounds of them) home. Really that just lets him find the right five pounds of rocks to carry home. Good thing orange bags are sturdy. I love you sweetie!

These will be fabulous for carrying our sand toys to the park too. (The sand toys do *not* come in the front door, they live outside in a plastic basket.)

Materials:
• one mesh (orange or other) produce bag
• a foot or more of canvas strapping or salvaged car seat belt
• 8″ x (length around top of bag + 1″) piece of fabric for top binding –
  or duct tape, brief alternate discussion at bottom.

Start by stretching your bag vertically, this will compress it horizontally. Decide how long you want the mesh part of the bag to be, and trim it straight across. Look, I’m being good and using my paper scissors not my fabric scissors. I probably shouldn’t admit how may pairs of scissors I have. I gave one to my husband and he immediately wrote ‘no cutting fabric allowed’ or something like that all over every surface. I was impressed with how many places he managed to fit it in, both blades, each of the handles possibly more than once, three star job. If I wasn’t in Vermont I’d go take a picture. But anyway. Trim your bag, or not, either way give it a vertical stretch though.

Gently flatten the opening out without stretching it much if you can, and measure the width. If you stretch the bag out too much before you sew the binding on it will go all lettuce-y around the top edge when you try to carry something heavy in it. It doesn’t much matter structurally though, it’s just an esthetic thing.

We are going to make a 2″ wide binding next, I went with the grain of the fabric rather than cutting it on the bias because I am cheap and we aren’t going around any curves. Since the binding is going to be double fold we need the fabric to be 8″ wide by the circumference of your bag + 1″ for rough seam allowance.

Cut your fabric 8″ x (width of bag * 2 + 1″)

So if you measured the width of your bag at 6″ you would cut your strip 6*2+1 or 13″ long.

Press your fabric flat. I hate ironing too, but you can’t make clean double fold binding without some ironing.

Fold it in half (hot dog bun style!) so that it is 4″ tall and press the fold.

Unfold it and fold one edge up almost but not quite to the middle crease and press the fold (don’t press out your center fold.)

Fold down the other edge almost but not quite to the middle crease and press that fold. (Bet you didn’t see that coming.)

Re-fold it in half and give it one more press all together.

Unfold all your careful creases and pin the two short (8″) edges wrong sides together. Sew together with a 1/2″ seam.

Open up the sewn seam folding it open or to the side with your fingers, and then re-fold the outside edges of the binding to the center.

Slip the binding into the opening of the bag, lining up the top edge of the bag with the middle of the binding. (It’s hard to see the purple on purple, but there is netting over the lower half of the binding in that picture.) I found that pins didn’t work very well to hold the bag in place, so I used removable scotch tape. Whatever your device secure the bag evenly around the binding. Sew the binding to the bag 1/4″ to 1″ above the bottom edge of the binding – it will only be visible from the inside of the bag, so pick where you want the extra seam. Remove the tape as you go, if you sew through it it will get your needle gummy. I learned my lesson with the duct tape…

Fold the binding over the outside of the bag, along your handily pre-creased fold line.

Stitch around the binding 1/4″ or so above the bottom edge for structure, and 1/4″ from the top for pretty.

For each end of your strap fold the edge under and pin on the inside of the binding.

Stitch a square with a cross through it over the end of your strap for that ‘I know what I’m doing’ kind of look. Preferably do not use a needle covered with duct tape goo, because it will skip stitches. I’m hoping I don’t have to clean out the inside of my machine now…

and play!

For the duct tape version, the instructions are pretty much the same, except instead of making a binding, wrap (gently) one piece of duct tape around the outside of the top edge, one around the inside of the top edge, and then one folded over the top edge. I sewed the strap on the same way, but frankly that was a dumb idea because I trashed my needle, I cleaned it, but I still couldn’t get the tape gum out of the eye, and there may be some inside my machine. If I made it with duct tape again, (which was great and quick and really satisfying) I would probably give it a tape handle too.

The end! And I can’t wait until I get back to the land of internet, where I can actually open multiple pages simultaneously in links, rather that one every five minutes! Ironically, DSL is finally coming to these sad lands, due to be installed three days after we leave!!!

What a cute fairy! (I’m allowed to say that, right?) This took about an hour, the perfect easy project. And I’ve learned that if you want to make a tiny dot with needle felting, just don’t move your needle, keep jabbing it up and down in exactly the same spot, and the random clump of fuzz you stuck on top of your project will eventually all get sucked into that exact spot. Eyes! And what is that amazing pod she is in?

A Bottle Tree pod! (Brachychiton populneus I think.) These are so cool. Fortunately there is a bottle tree across the street from our library! And another more productive one up the street. Unfortunately they are covered on the inside with tiny cactus like spines that are apparently used for itching powder. Yuck! Luckily they are pretty easy to scrape out with a tooth pick. I am so in love with these things right now. I planted some seeds in our yard before we left, but I doubt they will actually germinate magically all alone while I am gone. When I get back I will have to see what I can do with any of the seeds left.

They make such great bases for needle felting little things! This sprout was a little tough, the first time I tried to make the leaves I totally over-felted the joint in between them trying to make it nicely narrow to join with the stem, and it weakened. I ended up just pulling the leaves off the wonky middle and re-felting them together and to the stem. I need to remember that felt is not clay, and it can get over-worked and fragile. With the do-over this probably took me more like an hour and a half. And I did some random wet-felting of it in the middle. Because if you can’t mix up your techniques… um, that is boring?

And here is a prosaic half hour project, a lavender rice bag, except it is made out of more of that cashmere sweater. I was immediately required to make two more for Rebecca and Penelope (this was for a sick little friend) and they started carrying them around everywhere calling them their snugglies. I need to find another Goodwill cashmere sweater, because this one is starting to run out!

The bodice is a shirt pattern, Imke from Sewing Clothes Kids Love, and I really should have raised the waist. It’s a fine waist for a shirt, but makes the dress look like it is about 3 sizes too big. Okay, lets be honest, the dress is also just three sizes too big. The skirt is a circle skirt, kinda obvious from the twirl! It has a layer of sequin fabric on top, then three layers of tulle, then a bottom layer of the same blue jersey as the top to keep it from being scratchy. I used a ribbon hem for the top layer, and the jersey bottom layer I just serged.

You can see that I cut it a little too far into the selvage, there is a bit of the skirt that doesn’t have any sequins at the right of the photo. Oops!

Given how big I managed to sew this dress, I’m hoping she loves it for a very long time. Since most of her dresses have to be pried out of her fingers when they are stretched tight and the hem doesn’t even make it to mid-thigh, I don’t expect that to be a problem!

The dress is loved, and I am happy.

Start with a box. Actually we finished with the box, or maybe it came in the middle somewhere. Really, my husband saved me with the box. I was sitting in the middle of the kitchen, in the middle of a whirlwind of scraps trying desperately to decoupage a shoe box into a nice sewing box. I had a vision, but it was sticky slow going, it wasn’t going well, and I was quickly running out of time. He pointed out a nice box I could re-gift instead, hurray! (Thanks Ma, your gift turned out to be super useful, and exactly what I needed, just not in the way you intended!)

Add some loose woven canvas squares (ours is thrifted, I think it is wool, it is super soft, but serves the same purpose as sewing on burlap, but much nicer.) and squares of cross stitch fabric you have lying around, and an embroidery hoop.

Gussy up an Altoids box with some fancy paper (I love double sided tape) and fill it with buttons. Buttons are great fodder for beginning sewers.

Turn a cardstock jewelry box into a great little embroidery floss box by wrapping it with scrapbooking cardstock to make it taller. (More double sided tape!) The lid still fits on fine, and it is just the right size now, hurray! I think this making boxes taller trick would come in useful lots of places.

Toss in other random bits and bobs because you always go overboard that way. A box of pink beads, because sewing beads on is fun (as long as you make sure the holes of the beads are sufficiently larger than your needle size, seed beads are not fun for 5 year olds to sew with, glass pony beads are great.) A spool of vintage cotton, um, string? Oh, some old fat knitting needles and a plastic baggie of scrap yarn balls. Yes, we are going too far, oh well, it isn’t like we need to keep any of this stuff.

Finish it off with something actually nice, (inspired by Pink and Green Mama’s Felt Needle Book), except for how you are desperately trying to finish it while your daughter’s carpool to the party is waiting, and the ribbon loop/button that holds it shut isn’t quite what it should be. And then PANIC that all of your needles you thought you had have mysteriously disappeared and start tossing things up into the air. Please skip that last part.

Rebecca also made her a bracelet, her first pattern bracelet, she counted 7 small pink beads, then two larger pink beads and repeated perfectly about six times. First time she’s made jewelry that wasn’t a random collection! And I didn’t even get a picture I was in such a rush, shoot!

I hope Anna likes her present, I know I would have loved it!

Okay, so maybe everyone doesn’t have crystal head pins in their stash, if not you can improvise with a sparkly pipe cleaner, or a piece of wire and some sequins or beads, or heck, sew it together with some yarn. Forget the title, it’s not important!

We made these for a few of Rebecca’s friends for Valentine’s day. I was trying to come up with something that she could make for her friends, out of materials that we had on hand. I did cut the hearts out though, and she ended up needing some help twisting the wires together, so the ‘make it herself’ part was only a little bit successful. She pushed the head pins through the hearts and barrettes, and helped with the design though. Also, since I’d started with the design constraint ‘something that a 4yo might be able to do’, they were easy enough to make a bunch without pulling my hair out. WIN!

Am I starting at the end of the story? Well, let me give you the basic instructions in case you haven’t already figured it out from the picture.

Take a heart button, a regular sized barrette, and a couple of crystal head pins or other type of wire. Put the button on top of some felt and use it as a template to cut out a larger heart shape. Stack the felt heart on some more felt and cut out a yet slightly larger heart. Stack the button and the two heart shapes, and (help your 4yo) stick the head pins down through the button holes and through the felt. Slip the pin wires down through the prongs of the barrette at the wide end, and twist the wires around the end of the barrette, making sure that the pokey ends get tucked in between the barrette and the felt heart. Ta Da!

I know, you got all that from the picture right? Did you figure out why there is one set of hearts that is a radically different color of pink? No, we didn’t run out of lovely naturally dyed wool felt. One of Rebecca’s friends is allergic to wool. Do not pass Go, do not go to Waldorf school, do not collect $200. Do get a sparkly barrette anyway!! Very important.

Here is a beautiful skirt we made based on the under skirt from the Insa pattern from ‘Sewing Clothes Kids Love’. This is the third time I have sort of used this pattern. (Here is the second.) I don’t think it really counts this time, because I changed the curves, and I realized at the end that it was basically a circle skirt (but sewn out of four wedges), with a straight waist. Not very fancy fundamentally, although there was lots of subtle pink ribbon trim following the book’s philosophy that more trim is better trim. The fabric is really the lovely part though, it is a cotton faux linen, covered with floral embroidery and sequins that I got half off with a coupon from Jo-Ann’s. (Really it seems that their entire business model revolves around getting people back in their stores to use coupons, and if you pay full price for anything it is ridiculous… Not my favorite game.)

Hey, I never posted the first one either, this one was for a friend’s daughter, I probably wouldn’t have picked these fabrics out for a skirt, but I really liked it when it was done. You can’t really tell from the photo, the red fabric is a fine corduroy, actually the same that I made my own red skirt from. It made a nice skirt the first and second times, corduroy has a nice weight.

Did I make either of these recently? No. My life for the past two or more weeks has been devoted to reading the good, the bad and the crazy about Waldorf schools (no black crayons? Anthroposophism? There seem to be some pretty bitter ex-waldorf parents, but everyone I’ve met involved with Waldorf has been really really nice) and trying to decide if we want to go through the admissions process. Most of it seem very cool, and a lot of it aligns with our personal values, we actually have no TV, (we do watch movies on laptops sometimes), but it is so expensive here. Maybe we could get financial aid, but I’ve always *hated* bargaining. Also our lease came up, so we had to re-evaluate the whole rent/buy thing. Where we live the rent/buy ratio still makes it much cheaper to rent an equivalent house than buy (using the simple numbers OR factoring in all those headachy numbers like maintenance and property tax exemptions.) Major life decisions and uncertainty. I’ve been getting pretty depressed with all the uncertainty. The other kindergarden we’d like, Stevenson PACT, is a lottery, and we won’t know whether we got in/where we are on the wait list until the end of March. Bleh. Maybe I should make some more twirly skirts for morale? I have been making fermented pickles like crazy, using a new-to-me no-mold-skimming fermentation lock process. (I know, mold on your pickle brine is fine! No. I do not feed my family things with mold on them, or near them, or whatever. I can’t get over it. Yuck.) Two thumbs up for no mold and yummy pickles. Something to be positive about anyway.

Is it unseasonal to post this now? I should start pre-dating all my holiday activities a year in the future so people see them at ‘appropriate’ times. Whatever. When my kids are older I’ll magically become more organized…

Also, there is no gingerbread or actual marbles involved in this… it should be titled “Graham Cracker and Everlasting Gobbstopper Run”, but…

Every year (okay, maybe every other…) we build a gingerbread house, usually at a big party with our friends, which we used to host, but due to living in a tiny house this year Chris hosted it, which was AWESOME of her. This year we couldn’t get inspired over any particular architectural undertaking, although there are some awesome modern gingerbread houses, and super realistic ones, and, oh dear, prison yards and peep shows… But, gizmos are always good around here, so we went for the rolling candy castle. We ran out of time (carefully mitering gingerbread strips takes time!) to really decorate this, so it’s not very candylandish, but it does run! And that’s the important thing around here, or is it?

Proof (here’s the straight link if the embedding is being flakey…):

Hopefully that video link thing works for you.

Awesome? We think so. And I should clarify, we is me and my eternal partner in gizmology, my awesome husband Jesse.

Next year, unless we do something totally different which is probably what will happen, it would be cool to go for taller, add tunnels, and some ^ points where the ‘marbles’ can split directions. How about plinko? Perhaps a rolling car? So many possibilities once you get away from just ‘house’.

Oh yes, it’s hard to see, but I also made matching corduroy bows! Ah yes, the skirt is corduroy from my stash, along with some vintage cotton(!) ricrac that I just picked up at an estate sale, and some old black lace I had in my lace drawer. The bottom ruffle was supposed to be longer, but I ran out of red corduroy. And I am loving my serger, I got some extra black on red detail by serging the bottom and top of the bottom ruffle rather than hemming them. Way easier and cheaper too! Well, not if you count the price of the serger, I haven’t done nearly enough sewing to amortize that cost yet!

Also, I am re-in-love with my ruffling foot. Gathering foot? Pleating foot? Whatever. It is awesome. I used it to gather my skirt, and it is so much easier than basting and hand gathering! Which I had to do for the bottom ruffle since I ran out of corduroy and the one downfall of ruffling feet is they are hard to tune exactly. Gathering the bottom ruffle was not fun. (Yes this picture is from a different project.) But the extra thrilling part? This is an antique Singer ruffling foot, but it seems to fit and work just fine on my antique Elna. SO HAPPY! I thought I was going to have to invest in all new feet for my new/old sewing machine, but the old metal Singer ones I have seem to more or less fit. YES!