Posts Tagged ‘fabric’

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New Pattern! ‘Tree Bowl’ on Etsy

Monday, March 28th, 2011

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…

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Posted in Crafty, Life | 2 Comments »

Dowel Construction

Monday, March 14th, 2011

We’ve started rotating major toys through the living room about every week. I’ve never managed any kind of toy rotation, so It’s been pretty cool. Also, as I allow my living room to be devistated by blocks, it’s also relatively easy to clean up, unlike when I was trying to keep the living room clean. The blocks all get tossed into the same bin, but if there is ‘nothing’ in the living room, it fills up with stuff from all over that takes much longer to clean up. So by embracing the disaster, I have overcome it? It’s working pretty well so far.

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…

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Posted in Crafty | 8 Comments »

Twirly Skirt

Friday, February 11th, 2011

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.

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Posted in Crafty, Life | 4 Comments »

Spoonflower Dolls

Tuesday, December 14th, 2010

We survived our brief trip back east, and I am tired! And I have no real plans for the holidays, not even sure which ones we are celebrating. We celebrated St. Nicholas day in Vermont, that was fun. We will celebrate solstice and the new year I guess. How exactly I don’t know. But Penelope actually slept all last night, so I’m running out of excuses for not having any brains!

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?

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Things to Do, Things We’ve Done (Not Sleep.)

Friday, November 5th, 2010

I haven’t been getting enough sleep, which means my life starts falling apart and I start throwing mommy tantrums. Usually I’m pretty good at avoiding those. Must get more sleep… We’ll see how the weekend goes.

So anyway, here are some fun things we’ve done over the last several months that I never got around to blogging about.

We’ve done fishing with paper fish with paperclips and magnets-on-a-string, but this is much cooler. Valerie over at Frugal Family Fun made her fish out of pipe cleaners, which makes them easy, cute, and their whole bodies are ferromagnetic! (I had to look that term up… ferromagnetic materials are the ones that are strongly attracted by magnets and can be magnetized. Now we know.) Since the pipe cleaner fuzz keeps the magnet from directly contacting the wire you need a relatively strong magnet to put on the end of your string to go fishing. We cut our pipe cleaners up into different lengths, and made lots of fish! Now they are living in a fish patterned tea tin on our game shelf.

Here we made a stamp pad out of felt and wet it with acrylic craft paint. Then we stamped Totoro and Hello Kitty all over a pair of pants that were already in sad sad shape. Be sure to clean your stamps promptly afterwards or the acrylic paint will gum them up. Acrylic craft paint is great for painting clothes, you don’t really need fabric paint. This activity is an easy way for little kids to personalize their clothes by themselves. Getting out the letter stamps would be fun too.

Play dough with your feet. Why should hands get to have all the fun? This is home made glitter play dough. More sparkles is better. Rebecca had fun kneading the sparkles in. That may have been where we started using feet, I can’t remember!

If you get a box in the mail and it is full of bubble wrap, put it in the driveway! It is super fun to zoom over. Then you can revert to the traditional mad stomping dance to pop the rest of the bubbles. At our preschool they buy a big roll of bubble pop just so the kids can do this once. The environmentalist in me cries, but the kids loved it.

You can tell I’m tired from the preponderance of short declarative sentences. I’ll go work on that sleep thing now.

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Posted in Crafty, Homeschool | 6 Comments »

Traveling Fabric Design

Friday, July 9th, 2010

Do you think this design is cute? Then you should go vote for it (and whatever else you like) at the Spoonflower weekly fabric design contest. I designed it. I’m having fun with their themes. I don’t think I’m going to enter next week, but the collage theme after that sounds like fun.

In other news, we had a great Vermont day today. It started with my waking up at 5am. That’s okay, I probably fell asleep around 9, and Penelope only wakes me up 3 times at night now instead of 5 or something. Those first four hours are the really important ones for not being a zombie, so I’m grateful. I got sidetracked.

We dropped Grandma/Nenny off at work, then went and played in the river for 45 minutes. It’s a lovely wide shallow river, so we waded out into the middle where there was a huge rock to climb on. Rebecca got soaking wet of course, and ended up in her underwear. Then we went to a happy cafe for morning snack. Then we went to a bigger-on-the-inside-than-the-outside antique store, where we bought Jesse’s sister some willow ware for her collection. Then we had a lovely lunch and Jesse had a beer sampler at the Long Trail brewery, sitting right next to the same beautiful river. One more antique store, the grocery store, and we picked up Nenny and went home.

Rebecca, D-Pa and Nenny went out to an evening concert and ice cream on the village green, but mom and dad and Penelope were too tired!

Don’t forget to vote for my fabric design! :-D

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