Category: finished projects

Weekend Project No. 2

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I made a skirt.
I made a skirt from a pattern I drafted myself.
I made a skirt from a pattern that I drafted myself that was not an elastic waist.
I made a skirt from a pattern I drafted myself with a zipper(!!).
With sweet orange lace at the hem, which picks up the hint of orange in the leopard print fabric.
I know from experience that heavier fabrics do better with proper enclosures versus elastic waists.  I tend to shy away from zippers, although I have gotten decent at putting them into clothing.  I realized that until this weekend, I had never used the zipper foot or the button hole function of my 3 year old machine. I am definitely a lazy sewer. Both are incredibly easy to work with – you can actually lock the proper buttonhole size in, which is a function I have never had in any of my old Singer sewing machines.  I cannot tell you how much easier this makes the process.  
I’ve made my own skirt patterns before, using elastic at the waist, which means the only thing that needs to be precise is the length of your elastic. I read a few tutorials about drafting my own A-line skirt pattern, both online as well as in some of the sewing & clothing design books I have on my shelves.  It’s a fairly easy process, one that if anyone would like me to share, I will. Otherwise, I will spare you the details and just let you admire my cleverness. I added a little too much ease into the waist and had to take it in.  It is still just a wee bit too big in the waist, but that’s fixable.  And bigger is always better than too small. I think my next skirt (because there is a small pile of fabric laying out on top of my ironing board right now, with several skirts planned because did I mention I’m sick of my wardrobe and have been sick of it since last October?  Well I am). I’m going to try using some darts to see if that gives me a little bit better shaping in the waistline, which I’m going to make smaller.
While I’m at it, I think I finally gathered up the courage to take this in:
Yes, I made that too, a number of years ago.  And it’s now far too big. This pattern actually served as a model for the new skirt.  I need to take it a few inches, but then it should be wearable again.  Which is good, because it’s awfully cute.
See?  Cuteness. 

Weekend Project No. 1

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Friday afternoon I broke into my fabric stash – notably the big trunk at the bottom of the pile that is chock full of winter fabrics – the wools, the fleeces, the corduroys.  (I not inclined to show you the pile either, as it’s not really a nice, neat pile, more like an corner that is piled and crammed and overflowing with ‘supplies’ for all my crafty endeavors that could be mistaken for a hoarding house.)  The shot I posted Friday is really not even a drop in the bucket – that was just what was speaking to me that day as far as wardrobe makeovers go.
This purple plaid has been kicking around in the stash for some time.  I think I got it at either an old SPCA rummage sale or Focus Flea Market (both of which are no longer to my great sadness.  More than half my house and wardrobe came from those two places over the years).  I’ve never seen anything like it.  I think it’s a wool fabric.  It’s woven and two layers – the plaid on one side and a solid purple on the other.  It’s a funky size too – a 35″ x 37″ square.  For years I’ve wanted to do something with it that would show off both sides, but couldn’t come up with a satisfactory answer.  Until Friday.  I was playing around it, bemoaning to Edie that it just wasn’t big enough for anything fun, that I didn’t particularly want to put a seam in it, but maybe that was just what I needed to do when it hit me.
I cut a 6″ strip, hemmed the raw edges, added a very large button hole and voila:
 A fabric cowl.  Instant gratification.
And it’s reversible.  I pull one end through the button hole on the other end and it’s attached.  I’m utterly amazed at my brilliance.  Needless to say, I’m absolutely loving this.

January is anything but boring around here.

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A hawk got itself trapped in the chicken coop this weekend.  The girls were out eating bugs in the yard, so there was no harm done really. And I got some close up shots of a hawk.

Edie’s birthday meant a dinner/slumber party for more girls than our house can reasonably hold. And there were still some friends she wanted to invite that I put the kibosh on because well, our house is only so big. 

Our dining room is almost the exact same length as our table with 2 leaves in it. The chair at the head of the table is actually in the hallway. And you can’t pull out the chair at the foot.

When inviting 8 girls, it helps to include your daughter in the final head count, which is actually 9.

There is a high pitched roar when you have 9 girls in your house.  It stops for exactly 10 seconds when they eat.

How can they eat and talk at the same time?

When a cake recipe says it’s perfect served with milk, that means 9 eleven year old girls will drink an entire gallon of milk with the cake.

9 girls at a slumber party don’t sleep.  Neither do you really.

11 year old girls are more than happy to have Martha’s Moist Devil’s Food Cake for breakfast too.  I used some strawberry jam as filler in between the layers, so therefore, it counted as a fruit serving.  Or so I told them. I also told them they had to eat that entire cake so that I could bake another one for Pat’s birthday the next day. 

One can only have so much cake lying around.

I love how good Pat looks in his sweater.

Peach Pound Cake also makes an excellent breakfast.

Edie managed to find a way to upstage Pat on his birthday, two days after hers, yet again. It’s always something, starting with when she was born and came home from the hospital on his birthday.  This year it was strep throat.  So while we didn’t get a date night like I’d hoped, we still managed to find some time to celebrate.  And I made him a fantastic dinner – Lamb Curry from my More with Less cookbook and a peach pound cake, with the lamb coming from our friends the Roystons, no doubt some lamb that a member of our family helped bottle feed at some point, or at least we imagine so.  We’ve bottle fed a number of lambs at their farm over the years.  And enjoyed eating them.

And with that, our holiday season that started with my birthday in October just before Halloween, is over.  I am not baking another cake until at least March, so help me.

DONE.

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Two years ago next month, I blogged about how I had started a sweater for Pat.  Over the last two years, I’ve occasionally posted on the progress as it’s happened.  I threw out his birthday as a goal date to have the whole thing finished this past summer, half jokingly.  Then the other day, I realized I could actually make it happen. Yesterday afternoon when I stopped to do a stitch count, I realized I was rows away from being done, really done. So I sat and knit until I bound off the last stitch.
I still can’t believe it.  All those piano lessons.  Soccer practices.  Roadtrips.  TV show marathons.  Movies.  College football AND basketball games.  Bowl season.  Everything I’ve sat through but felt guilty about sitting still for, I picked this up and kept my hands busy.  Everything I’d had to sit through and wanted to use the time to be productive.  This is what I have to show for it.    I’ve not felt so proud of an accomplishment in I don’t know how long.  I set a long term goal and hit it.  Pat’s birthday isn’t until Monday, so I even have time to block it and properly wrap it.
Last night, as soon as I bound off the last stitch and cut the yarn, he tried it on.  At some point yesterday afternoon, it started looking too big.  A few months ago, I worried the arms were too short.  All worry for nothing.  It fit beautifully.  I snapped a few shots of him wearing it last night, but I managed to combine the photography skills of both my grandmothers and so I have a few blurry shots with his head cut off.  No matter. It needs to be blocked before he wears it anyway.  
I want to shout from the rooftops that I’m done.  I did post a shot of it to Facebook last night as well as emailed it to a few friends not on there or known to not check it regularly, which I suppose is the modern day equivalent of shouting it from the rooftops. I keep high-fiving myself.  I finally finished the sweater.  
The pattern is from Elizabeth Zimmerman’s Knitting Without Tears, with an assist  from this Knit by Numbers article on Knitty’s website.  Once I got over my math hang-ups, it was easy.  It’s knit in the round, from the bottom up – so there were no seams, just weaving in ends.  I’ve knit scarves more complicated than this sweater. It just took time and patience.  Lots of it.

Fall Purge.

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Last week when I shoveled out the bottom of the chicken coop to put on my garden, I couldn’t help but notice that my tomatoes had the end of season blight.  Having given up the bulk of the harvest to the psycho squirrels this summer, I was very grateful for the late season comeback, only to be disappointed by what I called the funk. 
Sigh.
So, Saturday I commenced to ripping out my tomato plants, leaving my pole beans, tomatillos and malabar spinach.  Along the way I pulled up some volunteer butternut squash plants too.  I yielded 6 squash (with a few more left in the garden), a nice size basket of green tomatoes for us, the bulk of which I pickled (of course) and a really nice size bucket of tomatoes with blight for the chickens.
I always like to wait until first frost to rip out my tomatoes – they will produce until then and I hate to think of any tomatoes I won’t get.  This year though, it was just too pathetic looking. 
Maybe I can put in a little fall crop though.
Sunday morning, I got up and decided it was the day to finally clean out the attic, a task I’d been putting off for some time.  Years to be honest.
Cleaning out the attic is actually part of the greater list of projects I have lined up for this fall. Technically, it was the last one on the list, but since it was the one I could do by myself and cleaning the attic meant making space in our room, I decided to jump on that instead.
I have a bad habit of just opening the door to the attic space off our bedroom and shoving stuff in.  It had gotten so crammed with stuff, you couldn’t just open the door and shove in.  So, sitting outside the door, spilling into our bedroom was a collection of suitcases (from all the roadtrips this summer), as well as Edie’s camp trunk, the cover for her upright bass and countless other items that didn’t fit in there. 
As I made my way to the back of the attic, I realized I hadn’t gotten rid of any of Edie’s clothes since about the time she finished up preschool.  (She started 5th grade last month.)  Worse, there were infant things I had been hanging onto – her crib mobile, a bouncy seat, the toddler bed rail she used for all of about a week before she convinced us she didn’t need it and a baby gate.  I’m sure I was saving most of this for when we had visits from friends with younger kids, but the fact is, they were totally inaccessible in the back of the attic and by the time I got them out, I realized they just needed to go elsewhere.
A few freecycle posts, a facebook post, an email or two and a shout to the second grade girl across the street and I had those 17 bags of clothes and miscellaneous baby gear out of here. 5 bags went to a refugee family a neighbor is collecting for, one went to Li across the street (including some pieces that have been passed around this neighborhood from little girl to little girl to little girl, like the purple chenille cardigan with fringe that is most beloved) and when Mo came by to take a bag, she offered to haul it all away.  Score!  Thanks Mo.  Still left are the pieces of plywood, 2x’s and tile grout I pulled out of the attic, left over from when we built it out, when I was pregnant with Edie almost 11 years ago.  Pat says he will find a use for them.  I’m seriously eyeballing at hauling them to the habitat store, as we have a basement full of things we might use.
It felt great to purge. I kept a few things – mostly dresses I made Edie or some of her favorite pieces I couldn’t bear to part with, like the seersucker skirt she insisted on sledding in a few times and the adored BabyGap faux fur leopard print jumper that is too fabulous for words.  A few favorite toys and books.  And the rest?  Gone. I was able to put her trunk away and find a spot for the suitcases not piled on top of other stuff and still have room for more treasures.
Meanwhile, Pat was outside doing his own fall purging.
He pruned the peach tree.
It’s supposed to help it put out more fruit.
Considering the squirrels get all the fruit, I applaud him for trying.
Although a smaller tree will make it easier to net and keep the rodents out, so maybe we might get a peach off that thing one of these days.
He also trimmed the saucer magnolia back.  He removed one of the trunks and trimmed many of the lower branches off, so that you don’t have to duck to walk under the tree.
By the front porch there you can see the piles of plywood and bouncy seat I dragged down from the attic, never to be in there again. And the window we replaced last fall that needs to become a coldbox for my garden.
Clearly, getting things out of our house is my happy place, while cutting things is his.
Up next is the basement cleanout.  We need to make room so that the ping pong table can be opened up down there, per Edie’s requests, so she & her friends can hang out down there when the weather is subpar per my request.  I also need to get going on refinishing the desk I got for her room, but I need space to work (which is what really is spurring on the basement cleanout, while the things coming out of her room is what spurred the attic purge.) It seems to be a never ending cycle of get rid of stuff to make room for more stuff, with one project leading to another and another…. Does it ever end?

Welcome gifts that are easy peasy. Really.

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Despite the fact that we are moving into the middle school years, we have plenty of friends who are still just starting this little ride we call parenthood.  I like to give handmade gifts, no matter the occasion. With the number of babies we know coming into the world lately, I haven’t had time to sew or knit something special for each babe, but I wanted something with a handmade touch.  Here’s my latest inspiration – freezer paper prints on onesies.
Gender symbols for a set of twins.
His first facial hair.
Freezer paper stencils are quick and easy to do.  You can find Freezer Paper at the grocery store.  One side is coated in plastic – so if you put an image on the non-plastic side (either draw it freehand or an image from your computer – you’ll need cut the paper to fit in your printer), cut that image out, iron it plastic side down on your fabric and it will becomes a great stencil!  I use either fabric paint or acrylic paints, whatever I can find that won’t wash out.  I let the image sit for 24 hours, remove the paper, then iron over the paint to set it.  Wash it and you are set to go. 
We know of at least 5 more babies set to arrive in the coming weeks, including another set of twins to our across the street neighbors, so there will be more where these came from!

Our favorite room.

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We have this room on the back of our house that when most people enter, they immediately fall in love with.
We call it the sunroom. 
It is three walls of 4′ tall windows. 
Considering the room has a ceiling height of 7’6″, that’s alot of window.
The windows are old steel casement windows. Some of the don’t quite shut anymore, some don’t open anymore.  They are quite simply glass and metal and energy efficient is not one of their qualities, so we can only use the room three quarters of the year.  But for those three quarters of the year, it’s lovely. And the quarter of the year we can’t use it?  Well, it still gets used, just not in the same way.  That’s when things start collecting out there, because I can throw something back there, shut the door and out of my eyesight it goes. It also works as a fantastic walk-in fridge when it’s cold enough.
It’s really sort of a glorified porch, one that stays dry. The room faces south, with windows on both the east and western walls.  It has a glider sofa, glider chair, stereo and ceiling fan, everything you need to hang out.  Every spring I deep clean it, wiping down the floors, walls, ceiling, getting rid of all the dust that accumulates in there, the spider webs, the stuff that collects.  I do a decent job of staying on top of that room the portion of the year we use it, but then, every spring when we first open the room back up, I am taken aback by the state of things.  Stashing things you don’t know what to do with and closing the door can add up.
In the last few years, Edie’s art supplies have found themselves a home out there, so there is now an easel and bins of paints, pastels, crayons and other implements of artistic endeavors out there. She works out there year round, not letting the chill bother her. I have to say, having just spent the last 24 hours cleaning it and putting it freshly laundered slipcovers back on the furniture, it is a dreamy space.

From out of nowhere.

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Remember how I said I seemed to be missing some photos of a scarf I had knit and I suspected a certain smaller person who lives in our house that likes to play with my camera to be responsible for their going MIA?  Well, I owe her an apology.  I took some shots of the magnolia tree in our front yard yesterday, which is now opening up and gloriously pink and when I uploaded them to share here with you what came up instead were the missing shots from our Baltimore weekend.  My camera has been on the fritz lately and I’ve been worried it was the camera – I’ve been saying when this one goes, I’m moving up to a fancy camera and not another point and shoot, and quite frankly, that kind of toy is nowhere near our current budget.  But after a few different incidents, I’m starting to suspect that my memory card has gone bad, which is actually a much cheaper fix.  Phew. 

So, since they showed up from nowhere, I thought I’d share.  First up, seen on a front porch on Falls Road, near Hampden hon, in Baltimore as we ran around town one day during our visit there last month.

Yes, that’s a Christmas penguin hanging out with a member of the nativity, who is wrapped in a feather boa, with a half full (or empty, depending on how you look at things) large malt liquor beverage under his chair. 
I love Baltimore.
Also suddenly back were the pictures of the scarf I had knit my cousin’s girlfriend for her birthday.
Ginger, as we call her, is a lovely gal and has built quite a relationship with Edie.  I’ve told my cousin Mark, her boyfriend,  if it doesn’t work out with Ginger, then he is the one who has to break the news to Edie, because that is not going to go over well and he is going to suffer her wrath.  We hope it doesn’t come to that though.
I have a scarf I knit for myself a few years back in this style – just loose and freestyle, changing yarns as the whim hit me.  I thought Ginger might appreciate one, so I whipped this up for her the week before the party.
While most of the yarns were white, I did throw some pink and green eyelash yarn in for color.

I also did some cables, as I find them fun and I find when I knit cables, the process seems to go faster.
This section is in the eccentric cable pattern.  ( I used A Treasury of Knitting Patterns by Barbara G. Walker.  Which was also one of my best thrifting scores ever.)
There you can get an idea of the different yarns used – green eyelash yarn, a bulky chenille, a pink eyelash yarn with bumps of color mixed in, a boucle, a fingerweight yarn, a multicolored eyelash yarn I mixed in with the fingerweight and lastly, a worsted weight cotton.  (If you need a reference on yarn weights, look here). I kept to just a knit stitch outside of the cabled sections.

That’s the basketweave cable stitch. 
I’m knitting a scarf in a similar vein for the silent auction at the annual luncheon for the Jed Foundation, using primarily blues, from the stash Kristin gave me.  February has been quite conducive to knitting, as the second sleeve on Pat’s sweater is really coming along as well.  I’m almost up to the elbow on it.  I’m even starting to kick around ideas of what my next big knitting project is going to be. 
Meanwhile, the shots I meant to show you.  What a difference a few days make!
What I call the tulip magnolia, Pat calls a saucer magnolia.  It’s the pink magnolia in the front yard.  It’s the first thing to bloom every spring and it’s starting to bloom.   Now let’s hope it gets to open up without a hard frost, which will turn the beautiful pink blooms brown.  The top is opening up, but the lower blooms have a few more days I think.  (Clicking on the image will give you a better view of the glorious pinkness.)

The peach tree is also starting to show some opening buds.
I love looking out my windows at the pink trees in the front yard.
Such a nice sight.
Hello spring. 

Recent Knitting Projects.

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My friend Kristin got rid of her stash and gave me a big bag of yarn when I saw her last summer.  I wanted to say thank you and so I knit her a scarf out of some of that yarn.  Here it is:
The ends are this are knit out of a fun chenille pom-pom type yarn, with the main body of the scarf being this very soft, almost suede-like yarn.  I got a number of compliments on it while I was knitting it.   It was very  easy to work with and did I mention soft?  A good hunk of it got knit when we were driving to Alabama to visit the in-laws over the holidays.   Nothing like 10 hours in a car, one way, to knock out some knitting projects.   I’ve started another scarf out of her gifted stash as a donation for the upcoming silent auction for The Jedediah Thomas Smith Foundation annual luncheon, which is another way to say Thank You to her.
This is one I knit for Edie for Christmas – also from Kristin’s stash.  It’s a fingerweight yarn.  I’ve knit this pattern several times over, it’s quick and easy and turns out quite cute.  I think I got it out of the Sunday paper a few years back – it’s all knit stitches, where you  increase every stitch every other row to make the ruffles.  I have two HUGE cones of this yarn and this scarf didn’t make a dent.  I’m thinking it might be a lovely shaw at some point.  It’s quite soft and well, purple.  Our favorite color next to orange. 
My friend Bonnie worked on this scarf one night, when our knitting group had gathered after a particularly tense PTO meeting at school.  In her haste to remember the wine, she had forgotten her knitting, so I lent her one of my projects, since you know, I always have a few I’m working on.  She couldn’t stop commenting on my tight little stitches.  Indeed, there are 1600 stitches in the last row of this scarf with a finished length of 32″.  I knit this on size 8 needles and wasn’t sure how the finished product would turn out.  It’s actually just the right length to wrap around a neck.  It’s quite darling on Edie. 
What intrigues me about knitting is how different yarns and needles create such different results.  I have a heck of a time with gauge.  When I knit scarves, I don’t have to worry about the final measurements as much, I just knit until it looks right.  You can’t do that with sweaters.  Speaking of sweaters….

Serious Progress has been made with Pat’s sweater.  Sleeve No. One is done.  (Okay, so it’s an inch short in that shot, but it’s much farther along than it was here.  I’ll be starting Sleeve No. Two this week and at this rate, I might be able to start putting it all together by sometime mid-summer.  Pat’s hinted it would make a fabulous Christmas gift.  It’s definitely taking me longer than I had anticipated – the yarn is on the heavy and stiff side because it still has a good bit of lanolin in it.  Which means it’s perfect for him to wear out on the river on cold days.
I also knit a really fun little scarf for my cousin’s girlfriend, but a certain little someone who likes to play with my camera may have deleted the photos.  Oh well.  It was white on white, mixing up all the white yarn I had on hand, with some pink and green fringe yarn thrown in for fun. I gave it to her without all the ends woven in (I finished it a few hours before her birthday party and realized I hadn’t brought my needle to work the ends in and didn’t feel like running out to get one.).  I threw some cables in here & there for fun and because I like knitting cables.  They seem to make the process go faster for me for some reason.  Hopefully I can get a new shot next time I see her (and work those ends in!).

Because I have so many other things to do.

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‘Tis the season and while I suppose I should be busying myself with getting ready for the upcoming holidays, I instead chose to take time to finish new potholders I had started a few weeks back.  To be fair, I was trying to make a path to the fabric stash in order to make gifts when I suddenly decided I needed to finish this project first.  The ones I have are so worn out that I might as well just use my bare hands when pulling anything out of the oven these days, so I really should have done myself a favor and just finished them when I started them.  Darn you girlfriends stopping by for a quick glass of wine!  (Actually, you’re welcome anytime.  I love a distraction.)
All materials are from the stash – a cow print cotton on one side, black linen on the back.  I like for my kitchen things to be black & white with little hints of color, so these fit the bill perfectly.
I machine quilted a thick layer of fleece to the back of the cow print, sewing around the edges of the black marks.  I added another layer of fleece when I sewed the black linen on and some red gingham ribbon and called it a day.  The cow print I picked up as a remnant probably at Joann’s, and the linen is leftover from a pair of pants I made myself a few summers ago.  It’s quite thick and durable.  I suspect it will hold up much better than the cowprint. I was a little fast & loose with the whole quilting thing, not really taking the time to ensure that all was flat and smooth and properly laid out.  (This is what my Aunt Loretta would call a typical Becky job.).  They faded in the laundry, because no, I didn’t wash the fabric beforehand.  (I’m really a lazy sewer, in case you hadn’t figured that out by now.)  I’m happy with the way they turned out though, because they are still pretty cute and in better working shape than the last pair. 
Now I suppose I can get back to working on gifts.  Or not, as I seem to recall some pants of Pat’s that need to be hemmed…..