Is out! I am (not) famous! And I have three projects in it this time! Especially lucky since I was so busy before the submission deadline that I only submitted one rather easy (but cute! really!) project which they didn’t take, but I also included some other ideas I had, and they gave me an extended deadline to work on them. (More time, a blessing and a curse!) I’ve hinted at them over the last year and a half, and now you get to see them!

Do you remember these felt doll house chairs? (Complete with tutorial) And the pondering about whether they would scale up?

Wait, I’ve blogged about that before! But now you can see the final project. I must be going senile! I bet you forgot too. Whew, safe!

Since this is from a year and a half ago Rebecca is 4 there. I was watching a video linked on Spincushion, and Rebecca Yaker says she thinks it would be good up to 2 or so, (and she called it a ‘wow’ project, so heady!) but I think she’s underestimating children’s desire to fit into little things. So while I probably wouldn’t make it for a 4 year old, my 4 year old would disagree. And my 5yo too probably. I should have asked her what her favorite project in the book was. The hedgehog book ends? No, that’s probably me. I’m betting on the Domo-kun backpack.

Rebecca & Trish (the authors, not my daughter) expressed amazement that this chair could fit into one yard when I suggested it. Here is the logic puzzle that I played with over and over to figure out how deep and wide and tall I could make the chair, and still fit it into one yard of home dec fabric (so 36″ x 56″) and keep all the main elements with the fabric print facing a desirable direction… it was both fun and headachy! I think I’ll do another post too on how amazing it is that they took all my sketchy illustrations and turned it into such a pretty book! That was what amazed me most with the first One-Yard Wonders book, the gulf between my input and their output, as a novice contributor last time I was bewildered that they were going to make a book out of what 101 people like me sent them! But it came back so pretty!

On to my second, in no particular order, project, the book holder. This is definitely the most practical, and I’ve had to make one for a friend already.

This is the prototype, slightly saggy, as it is before I increased the pocket dowel diameter. Although any version will sag with enough weight. Not the most glamorous or novel project, but totally the most useful. I love having this on our wall, it is a great place to keep track of all of Rebecca’s library books, and when I am going through her book shelf I will pull books we haven’t read in a while and put them up there to tempt us. The design lets you see almost the entire cover of the book, which I really like. (And you get more book area for less fabric, hahaha, gotta fit it in one yard, and I wanted it BIG.) Also I love looking at this fabric! I got it when we were visiting Tokyo so it always makes me happy. Rebecca and Trish wanted me to send them this original, but some of the screen printing came off when I pre-washed it (for all I know I bought it from a bin ‘clearly’ marked (in Japanese) “Flawed Fabric, discount!”)

So I made them another one with this Ecco print. I like it too! (It is a little bunched at the top because I hung it on the same nails as my original which is a little bit narrower.)

Third and most, um, ‘unique’ project:

You’ve probably seen the folded cloth flowers on traditional Kanzashi (Japanese hair sticks), well, I was thinking about my fabric origami project (Origami Organizer) that they had liked last year, and I had a clock movement that I was going to use to fix an antique dysfunctional clock, and well, I don’t think it is quite the ‘wow’ project that the first was, more like, hrm? Ha! I envision it adorning the office of some of the more interesting admins I’ve known. I designed it for brocade – wait:

Also totally flamboyant, but more Rococo/opium den than the modern print in the book. I should have fussy cut the pieces for the book version of the clock, so that the spots would have all come out in the center of the petals, or something, but I thought that might be cheating, since it would *technically* use more than one yard of fabric. I know, I can’t believe myself, I am such a rule follower! I follow rules that I think might exist. Ha! And I worry that my oldest daughter is such a rule follower… I need to work on me before I worry about how to help her!

So, which would you make?

And, oh, the giveaway, Storey publishing is generously giving away a copy of Fabric-by-Fabric One-Yard Wonders as part of their promotional blog tour, comment to enter. (This draw­ing is for US res­i­dents only, sorry!) [edit: giveaway will be open until Friday the 6th, because that is when I will have time to close it. ] So do tell me, which one of my projects would you make? I’d love to know. Or if you’ve seen the book, what project most strikes you?
Giveaway is now Closed!

Hmm, what would I make? There are a lot of bags and clothes in this One-Yard Wonders, much moreso than last time it looks like. Having never sewed a purse, maybe I should give it a try. Probably not though. Maybe the Drawstring Tidy Caddy (practical), perhaps the Tuffet Inspired Ottoman if I could find the space for it in our tiny crammed house (I really like the funky but simple geometry of the design), mmm, The Monster Backpack (Domo-kun!) would be very popular around here (super cute opening mouth with glottis!), the art (Toddler) smock would be pretty useful around here too, although I am *not* making all that bias tape. The Pig & Piglets! So cute how you can stuff the baby pigs in the mom, and they have little velcro noses to nurse! (But so much sewing!) Also squee worthy is the Little Girl’s Capelet! I wonder if I could talk Penelope into that… So what about you?

And don’t forget to check out some of the other blogs in this tour, past and future, for more chances to win copies of the book, and just for some good inspiration! The ikatbag review is especially nice if you want a review, & I just LOVE her blog! So much crafty cardboard goodness.

12/12/2011 Becka’s Project Journal
12/13/2011 Craft Buds
12/14/2011 Patch Work Duck Designs
12/15/2011 A Spoonful of Sugar
12/15/2011 Nifty Kids Stuff
12/16/2011 Nom Nom Nom
12/16/2011 Quaint and Quirky
12/17/2011 ikatbag
12/17/2011 Two Brown Birds
12/18/2011 Sharon Sews
12/19/2011 LBG Studios
12/19/2011 Carolina Fair Designs
12/19/2011 Under Construction
12/20/2011 Little Blue Cottage
12/21/2011 Craftzine
12/21/2011 Neuroses Galore
12/21/2011 Emily Steffen
12/22/2011 Jenna Lou Loves You
12/23/2011 Spincushion
12/27/2011 One Inch World
12/28/2011 Sew Sew Etc.
12/29/2011 While Tangerine Dreams
12/30/2011 Studio Cherie
January ’12 Lu Lu Carter
January ’12 Fiberosity
January ’12 Zuhause
January ’12 Obsessively Stiching
January ’12 No Bad Days
January ’12 Craft & Cackle
January ’12 AfricanKelli

One of the projects we did for my textiles class was stamping on canvas bags. Before that class I made this example piece of stamping a leaf and custom sponge stamp. Stamping with leaves is so much fun! I put a bit of acrylic paint into a baking tin, brushed it think with a brush, then rubbed the leaf in it. That kept the paint mainly on the leaves’ rib and veins which let me get a good print. I didn’t even have to use a brayer, I just pressed down evenly with my fingers. I was surprised that it worked as well as it did with as little fuss.

One of the other things I tested for my class is cutting sponge stamps, but I wanted something light enough that little hands with little scissors could cut it. I found these lightweight sponge-cloths, and they worked pretty well. They are about 3/16″ thick and pre-moisened, so they are soft. They are a little fiddly to stamp with, because they are thin, but they are nice to cut stamps out of and worked fine with just a smear of paint on my tray. After stamping the tree branches I went back later and drybrushed in the foliage.

Here are some of the kid’s bags, in addition to leaves and sponges they had pre-cut potato stamps, lemon and apple halves, pine cones and other fall detritus, and of course, their hands.

In other news, I survived my spinning class yesterday. It went pretty well, there were a couple of kinders and first graders who needed more hands on help than I could give them, but really everyone managed it, in the end I think there was just one kinder who refused outright to spin, and one first grader who in the end had to hold the end of his wool up while I gave his drop spindle a few mighty spins and we twisted up the whole (3′) length at once. Sometimes you just need to move on to the next project. Out of 23 though, that’s not too bad, I think that means I made my 90% success goal. (We used this method if you’re curious.) It also means that there were several kinders who with a few minutes of personal attention actually did manage to successfully use a drop spindle with pre-drafted combed top. I learned it’s not actually called roving, unless it has some twist. But I need to be further educated there. So many new words! Diz, hackle, noil, long draw, short draw, rolag, woolen vs worsted, drafting, combed top, roving, sliver (rhymes with diver!?) so many words! If you are curious there is a lot of great information about spinning at the Joy of Handspinning. But like the snap of fingers, now I am on to weaving, because that is what I am teaching *next* week. I am learning SO much teaching this class! And weaving, it is so cool! Go read/watch this introduction to backstrap weaving! Now I want to make a backstrap loom, but my living room is currently full of a bajillion different table looms from school that I have to figure out and warp, so I don’t think I’m going to be doing that! At least, not this week.

Okay, not a great picture. But we did have fun with these peg dolls! I made sure to actually get out the hot glue this time! The kids had fun drawing faces on them, and I showed them how to use the ruffling foot with the sewing machine to make ‘skirts’, that we then glued on.

Recently we drove into San Francisco to go to the Cherry Blossom festival, why? Really because I LOVE TAIKO. Something about hitting something as hard as you can, while also making something beautiful. Jesse thinks it is super boring. I promised the kids I would do whatever they wanted next if they just sat through it, and they did. Then we spent the rest of the festival at the Sanrio booth playing little carnival games and making sand art. I’m an adult, I can compromise!

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!

Last year was not a great one for my development of my Etsy shop. I did not get a single new pattern in! Last year I wrote up three patterns for the next One Yard Wonders, half finished two soft electronic patterns that I gave up on because I didn’t want to deal with possible people-shocking-their-children liability issues, worked on some doll house food I never finished that I’d still like to re-visit, went through a ‘sticks and string’ dreaming-about-a-book period that I don’t think even made it to the blog, and then there was that doll pattern that has been sticking me up for months. Not one of those made it to my Etsy store, and in December I shut the whole thing down until now, because I was so depressed about it! But it is open again! Hurray!

Obviously the One Yard Wonders patterns are not a ‘failure’, but it was several months worth of working on patterns that were *also* not going to my Etsy store. 2010 was a sad year for that store, no progress! 2010 was also the year that Penelope went from 6m to 1.5yr, so there were lots of reasons for no progress, but I still felt bad!

But by picking a reasonably small goal though, I’ve made it from start to finish on another pattern, which is good, because I’m probably going to be going back to work for several months now, and getting very little done other than basic house and child survival. We will see how the blog fares through that, if I suddenly disappear completely until June you will know why! I still don’t know exactly when my contract will start though, so I’m in an odd holding place, trying to get things wrapped up so we can survive being a two-working-parent household, briefly anyway. I am so rambling right now. But YAY, new pattern in my Etsy shop.

Also, YAY, we won Rebecca’s school lottery and will be going to our local progressive hand-on parent-participation PUBLIC school. Which means FREE (almost), which means we will not be (trying to) save 20k (and then 40k for two kids) to spend on private education (that was going to be a difficult budgeting problem!), and I am SO glad we don’t have to choose between a great school and retirement. Maybe we will go to Egypt (NOT right now) and see the pyramids instead of paying for private school… Stay tuned, six years from now I’m sure I will be stressing about this all over again for middle school…

Singing don’t worry, about a thing,
’cause every little thing, it’s going to be all right…

Two weeks ago we built a puppet theatre out of 3/8″ dowels, rubber bands, 3-4yds of sari fabric and an old curtain. It was pretty cool! Although shortly after it was built Rebecca declared that it was actually a ballet stage, and showed how the curtain slid back for the show, proceeding to our ‘outermission’ and ‘intermission’ entertainment. ‘outermission’ being the show part of course!

It was a really awesome structure for minimal construction time, I think it took about 10 minutes, and it is now folded up and broken back down into six dowels for our next project. Flimsy yes, but it lasted two vigorous weeks, bending but not breaking. Pretty cool. The bookcases behind are sort of what holds the whole thing up. I made the face frame out of four dowels, two uprights and a cross piece at the top and one across the middle for the curtain. Then from each of the two top corners I attached another dowel, going out and back toward the book cases, to end tucked under a foot of books on a conveniently located shelf. The roof is tucked into a tent shape from the top shelf of the book shelf, and draped over the dowel structure. I was a little worried that someone would pull a shelf of books down on their head, but nothing shifted the whole week, so I guess it was okay!

The second week we added a table and cash register, plastic shopping basket, and put out the bins that our play food gets stored in on top of some cardboard boxes we keep for playing. Practically instant Farmer’s Market/Grocery Store.

Now I’m wanting to get more 1/2″ to 3/4″ dowels for more temporary play building construction. Dowels + rubber bands + light drapey cloth = lots of fun! And as a bonus it doesn’t involve all the chairs in the house being commissioned for forts and us eating dinner sitting on the floor…

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.

This is something I’ve been working on for a while, soft dolls printed at Spoonflower. I managed to fit three dolls into half a fat quarter of organic jersey (which is larger than a fat quarter of quilting weight woven, happily) so I was able to order six little dolls on one fat quarter. I made one rag doll, which was my goal, that I haven’t sewn yet, and then along the bottom I fit two swaddled babies. One is the one above, that I think is okay, but I’d like to fix it up.

The other is one that Rebecca drew – I printed out an oval for her, and she scribbled a face and other bits all over it. Here she is sewing around the edges, and in quite a bit from the edges…

And here you can see her finished doll, isn’t it cute! (along with the second print that she is cutting out.) She did the cutting, and the sewing and the turning and the stuffing! I still have to thread her needles and knot them, I keep meaning to work on that with her, and I had to sew the doll shut for her because she was getting tired. Can you tell, I am so proud of her that she can sew a simple doll mostly by herself at 4?