Category: finished projects

My New Orange Scarf.

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Remember the orange yarn I bought at the Fall Fiber Festival?  I finished the scarf I knit for myself out of it this weekend.  I promise, it’s not as glowing as it is in that photo.  Although it is pretty darn orange.  And pretty soft.  And pretty much just right.
The pattern is this from Knitty.com.  I’m on Ravelry, but honestly, it’s just one more website for me to keep up with, like Goodreads, which I’m also on and completely neglectful of.  Occasionally I will remember to look on those websites for ideas, but I spend more time tracking down where I wrote my log-ins than I ever actually spend on the sites.  Sigh. 
Do you know about knitty.com?  I love it.  LOVE it.  I have gotten alot of ideas and patterns from there.  It never steers me wrong. 
Anyway. 
The scarf.  It’s bamboo yarn and incredibly soft to the touch.  It knit up pretty easily.  I only had 2 balls of yarn, so I didn’t make it as wide as the pattern called for, nor did it turn out as long. I didn’t gauge it, I just played around until I liked how it looked and then hoped I had enough.  When I got to the end of the first ball, I measured the length to make sure it would be as long as I wanted.  I’ve been known to knit and reknit scarves until they are *just* right using this highly scientific method.
I made some progress on the scarf I started for Edie too.
Lots of football viewing makes for getting a lot of knitting done. And our Thanksgiving weekend was definitely in excess of that activity.

So pleased with myself.

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Instead of throwing things away or donating them to say, Salvation Army, I seem to be rich in friends who instead think, Oh, I’ll give this to Becky and she can do something with it.  Over the years, I’ve been given an assortment of goodies- old aprons, quilts, quilt tops, shower curtains, sheets, duvet covers, and so on.  Some of them I pass along.  Some of them sit in a pile, awaiting inspiration.  And some, like today, actually get used.
I bought these black linen capri pants at Old Navy eons ago.  I loved them.  They were comfortable, fit well and went with everything.  I have worn them out, but can’t quite bring myself to part with them yet.  I have attempted several times to remake these pants with no success.  I can do skirts with no pattern, but anything else, forget it.
A friend gave me an old duvet cover a few weeks ago.  I dumped it on top of a pile in the happy corner and debated what to do with it.  The fabric was light and seemed like it might be really comfy during hot weather.  And there was alot of it.  Today, while trying to figure out what to do with myself (unemployed stay at home motherhood when your kid has been shipped off for 3 weeks is a strange place for me to be in), I decided I was going to attempt to make a pair of pants out of the duvet cover, using my treasured, tattered old navy pants as a pattern.
Voila!  The finished result.  I cheated and cut the pants out on the seam instead of the fold.  Same idea really, yes?  Since the original pants are a bit too big these days, I didn’t add a seam allowance, hoping that would fix the ‘baggy’ problem.  It did for the most part, but I definitely need to make some adjustments. However, for a new pair of lounging pj bottoms, they work.

I love this fabric – a floral paisley?  Yes please.  I had a pair of pants in high school out of a similar fabric that I adored, so I was really sort of excited about a new pair out of this fabric.  The duvet cover is pretty big – I think it’s a queen or a king, so I have alot more fabric to perfect my pattern.  They are as comfortable as I thought they would be.  I started and finished something in an afternoon – not such a rarity for me these days anymore I’m proud to say.  And, I successfully made my own pattern.  Yes, I need to tweak it, but it fit! I’ve not always had such successes with sewing without a pattern.  Hell, I’m not always successful with a pattern.  But that’s another story….

It’s Finished and It’s Alive!

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Edie requested I make her a skirt, one of my whimsical tiered skirts.  Of course missthing insisted on approving the design, ie, fabric selection.  I laid one out and had it approved, only to discover I didn’t have enough fabric to make it as promised.  Which led us back to the drawing board.  After going through a few versions that were deemed “Not ‘Alive’ Enough.”, we reached a compromise that would use all the fabrics in the approved ‘ALIVE’ design, but in accordance to the amount of fabric I had on hand, all of which were from the stash.
Apparently “ALIVE” is Edie’s new phrase.  I like it. 
Here is the skirt in question, finished!
The bottom has a small ruffle out of this really great striped seersucker type fabric.  It was supposed to be the bottom tier in a 4 tier skirt, but I realized I didn’t have enough of it, so we compromised and made it the ruffle. The bottom tier is a pale pink, with white raised dots that don’t necessarily like to show up in photos.

The middle tier is a solid purple linen and the top tier is a fun pink striped paisley pattern.  Paisleys were definitely my most favorite part of the 80’s and I still have a fondness for them.  Edie thought this fabric was ‘wild’ and she loved it with the polka dots and stripes at the bottom.

I drafted the pattern myself, something I don’t usually do with success, but I have found with elastic waist skirts, I can do it if I follow a certain formula.  So, I measured her waist and her length between her waist and knees and took it from there.  I made it a little big, so she had room to grow into it, planning to add elastic to the waist as needed.   Pat thought I was making myself a new skirt at first, because it’s not little girl sized anymore.  Then again, our girl is 4’9″, which is getting to be pretty tall.  Her new flip flops are women’s, sized 7/8 and quite frankly, there’s not as much room as I think there should be for her to grow into them.  My baby is no longer a baby, and not so much a little girl anymore.  She is definitely becoming a tween, as evidenced by the list of music she left on my desk this morning that she’d like for me to add to her itunes.  Heavy on the Taylor Swift.  Oh my.

That is as close to modeling the skirt as I’m going to get from her.  For now, it hits her mid-calf and is quite cute.  I’m hoping this will fit her for a few years.  When she was younger, she had a big aversion to anything ‘plain’ which she called boring and demanded I make fancy, by any means necessary. Then she went through a phase where she only wanted me to make her solid colored clothing.  A white linen blouse.  A purple linen dress.  I was quite excited to meet her demands for a skirt that was “ALIVE”. Even more excited to see her pair it with a patterned shirt.  It makes me happy to see her so fearlessly put patterns together with patterns because she pulls it off so well.  For a while there, I thought she’d outgrown that. 

I hadn’t finished a sewing project in what felt like forever.  I have a number of projects halfway done, or laid out,  but never find myself finishing them.  It felt good to finish something.  It’s pointed out to me that I finish lots of other things I set out to do, like gardens and cakes and canning, but it really nags at me that I have such a hard time finishing sewing projects.  I’m trying to be better about this and this was my first step towards it.  It feels good.

Joint Effort.

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Edie wanted to make Pat a t-shirt for Christmas.  We bought the shirt, but then ran out of time to get it done, so I suggested we do it for his birthday.  Which she was agreeable to.  Of course, giving us an extra month didn’t mean it got done earlier, because it waited until 4:30 the afternoon of…..
Edie, being my dream child that she is, of course has had the drawing done since the day we brought home the t-shirt.  All I had to do was scan and print.  Ahem.
When I make t-shirts like this, I like to print it onto an iron-on transfer, apply it to muslin and then sew it on.  I think the transfers I had were old, because the first two didn’t iron on correctly and then I was horrified to discover I was out of them.  EEEK!  It was 6:30, night of Pat’s birthday and I had until they got home from soccer practice at about 7:15 to get this finished.  Thankfully, I rememembered I had a few pieces of ‘printable’ fabric on hand and I ran that through the printer and was able to get that to work.  Phew.

 Edie drew the picture herself.  Robots on the dance floor.  It actually turned out better printing directly on the fabric than the ironed-on version.  I’ve read somewhere about ironing freezer paper onto muslin or duck and sending that through the printer and I think I will try that one of these days.  I’m not wild about the quality of the fabric you buy to print on, not to mention it’s a little pricey.  Anyway, another day….

“Kiss me I’m a robot”.
Turned out pretty cool if I do say so myself.  Edie was happy with it and Daddy was happy with it.  And that’s all that matters.

Sick Day.

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Miss Thing has a cold and couldn’t quite bring herself to get out of bed, so I caved and let her stay home from school today. When she finally managed to get up, she kept herself busy working on her Ancient Greece project and I got some sewing projects caught up. You know, the ones that are so simple that just sit there for months on end? Like sewing a new button on Pat’s brown cords. Fixing the trim on that doll dress that been sitting there for ages. Finally fixing Edie’s stash of ‘big hankies’. And Mo’s skirt. I’ve had the last 5 days off work now and I swore I was going to start making Christmas presents. Laundry is almost caught up, I have started washing windows in my house (A serious procrastination move), the house, including both bathrooms, is relatively clean and I even scrubbed out the dishwasher this weekend. And, as of today, I have gotten the biggest pile blocking my way to starting holiday presents out of there.

So maybe when we get back this weekend, I’ll start on Christmas presents…. unless of course I think of something else that I need to do, like clean the chimney. No, that’s too crazy and ambitious even for me.

Garden Notes Upon the End of the Season.

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I had every intention of ripping out the dead garden yesterday, as we got our first hard freeze on Tuesday, but after spending the morning teaching my friend Rebecca to knit and playing with her sweet twin baby girls and not sleeping well the night before, I decided a nap was a better idea. And then I got caught up doing stuff around the house, like putting laundry away and cleaning bathrooms, even though I swear, didn’t I just clean them both? How does a room that you’re supposed to get clean in get so dirty so fast??!?!
Anyway, Pat got home from work on the early side, and Edie was at soccer practice and then going to dinner with friends (That girl really does have her own, very busy social schedule), so we decided we should take advantage of the afternoon and walk up to McGrady’s and have pitchers and nachos. You know, the same thing we do every time we get a few kid free hours together. As we headed out, I took the opportunity to survey the grounds. I saw this:
New growth on the lilac. I have long wanted a lilac, just as I want rose bushes. Our property gets light, in certain spots. Mostly, by the side of the road. The best spot is reserved for my vegetable garden. The rest is sort of hit and miss and always getting rearranged. I planted that lilac a few years ago in what I thought would be a good spot, but it didn’t do much. At one point, I thought I’d killed it. I moved it this spring into what I thought would be a better spot, and then, after both freakishly weird microbursts this spring that brought down about half the trees in the ‘hood, and definitely a few around it, it did seem to be happier. I watered it daily for months, carrying a bucket out there every day. And yesterday, as we headed out, I saw it had new growth. Yay.

Out the back door, I noticed a spot of green in the middle of where I know I’ve planted nothing, Pat has worked hard to cut back, rip out and cover with mulch. I realized I must have thrown some big garden clippings down there at some point, because it looked suspiciously like arugula:

Indeed, upon closer inspection it was! How flipping cool is that? Perfect to cook with or make into pesto. I love volunteer gardens. I love that it sprung up somewhere previously unclaimed. Perhaps that’s where I start digging a new bed next?

And then Pat pointed out that it might be time to rip out the vegetable garden, which I assured him that it was on my agenda for the weekend. (Never mind that I had Thursday off because it was Veteran’s day and Friday off because that’s always my day off and both days, I was home alone until he got home from work about 5 each day, because Edie went home with friends after school both days and yet, had managed to not accomplish that.).

So, this morning after soccer, I went out there.

Definitely time. Oh, my beautiful, bountiful garden….ripping you out every fall is the cruelest part of a season I already don’t like.

I realized I hadn’t checked my radishes lately. They were ginormous.

And deformed. They will probably taste very woody, but hey, we’ll try them anyway. I also pulled all my carrots out, the last of the beans, pulled every tomato off the vine, the last of the squash and peppers and bonus, I found one small golden cherry tomatillo that I’ve already cut up to harvest the seeds to bolster what I already harvested this year. All told, here’s the harvest:


Not too shabby. It must be close to 10 pounds of those stupid roma grape tomatoes I planted by mistake. Oh well, I’ll do something fun with them, even if they are little. Probably chutney. Most of them are green, so that’s probably my best bet. I’ll wrap some up in newspaper for us to have homegrown tomatoes for a little bit longer. Two nice sized crossbred butternut squash – I had a volunteer pumpkin, volunteer gourds and a volunteer butternut squash plant pop up. The gourds turned out okay, I got one pumpkin and then a slew of butternut squash that are pumpkin shaped on the outside with the butternut skin and coloring. And I must have forgotten to thin the carrots last spring, because there are mostly small ones. When they say those miniature carrots you buy at the grocery store don’t grow in nature, they lie, because I grow them quite well thank you very much. Sadly, only one row of carrots made it this year and I didn’t realize it until today. I plant my carrots inbetween my tomato plants. I read somewhere they make good companion plants and they really do. Since my garden is small, I like to utilize it as much as possible and plant everything on top of each other. I have a 9′ x 25′ plot and by the time I’m done cramming, you just cannot walk through it anymore, you can only access it from the sides by July. Once the tomatoes start spreading out, I don’t bother with the carrots until I rip out the entire garden and see how they did this year. I still have a decent enough crop to cook, puree and freeze for Edie’s birthday carrot cake. And that’s really all I expect out of my carrot crop. Anything else is just excessively delightful.


And there it is. My garden. *sigh*. I do have some baby greens in there, but everything else is done for the season.
A few notes and ideas for next year. The way the volunteer wandering squash plants grew, they did pretty well, without too much crowding other things out. I need to remember that and plant it that way on purpose next year. I need to be a bit more careful about reading the tags on the plants I buy, so I don’t end up with a billion roma grapes next year. And I need to remember to thin the carrots. The zinnias in the bed in front of the living room window attracted hummingbirds and butterflies galore all summer long. It was so nice to look out the window from this computer desk to see. It was an experiment that we decided last August was a permanent fix.
I still need to plant the yellow cone flowers I got last weekend from Mollie, so I still have some digging to do. And I should plant some bulbs…. a maybe a handful more lettuce seeds to pop up next February and March. And then, we’ll call it a season.

Kid’s clothing week challenge.

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It’s Kid’s Clothes Week Challenge over here this week. I really was going to give it a go, but here is it Tuesday and I haven’t done a thing. I did bake cupcakes for Rebecca’s birthday last night, so that’s something nice and productive and thoughtful, right? And tonight I ordered some kid’s clothes from Land’s End (I got her the jacket she’s been asking for for months), so while I didn’t make anything, I did get her some clothes and that counts for a wee bit of something, right?
I’m going to go with that. And tomorrow I will try again to make something. After all, tomorrow is another day.

For Jed.

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I’m a big believer in divine intervention.

Months ago, Jed’s mother and sister announced the Jedediah Thomas Smith Memorial Luncheon with all proceeds to benefit the Four Diamonds Fund to help conquer pediatric cancer. Sadly, Jed lost his battle with pediatric cancer last January and Kristin & Savannah are holding this in honor of what would have been his 13th birthday. I wanted to do something to help and told them I’d donate something for the silent auction. It’s being held Saturday, October 2.

I have since then considered many ideas for this donation and in typical me fashion, have put them off time & time again. I’ve had all summer, but of course waited until the very last minute to sew anything. Worse, I confused the day I needed to have my item to Savannah. Sweet thing that she is, she said it was fine, she knew I would come through. (It was pre-Labor Day for those wondering.)

I promised myself I’d do it this weekend. I’m tired of it hanging over my head, I feel like I can’t get anything else done until I do this one. I spent yesterday canning oodles of tomatoes so today was it. IT.

First I had to clean up my cutting table. Instead of just moving the piles that had accumulated (mostly clothes that I have a bad habit of just throwing there), I folded and sorted and put them away. In the process, several quarters, Jed’s signature means of communicating, came flying out at me. OKAY, I got it I muttered to myself. Got the space cleared and got to work. I had the radio on and considered coming downstairs to get some new music. “Some Black Keys would be good, I’ll just run down and grab some to listen to” I thought to myself. Bingo! The Black Keys came on the radio. I figured Jed was politely trying to tell me to stop farting around and just get it done. So I did.
I knocked it out in about an hour. I realized I should just keep it simple, so I used some Laura Ashley purple toile I still have from making our master bedroom window treatments. It’s nice, durable fabric. And tomorrow I will mail it to Savannah, finally.

For more information on the luncheon or the Four Diamonds Fund, check out Savannah’s blog. In my humble defense though, it took months of putting this off and a missed deadline to really figure out what I thought would do well at the silent auction. Don’t you want one of these? I do think it turned out well if I say so myself.

Two in one day.

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I had just finished posting about the dress I finished for myself when suddenly, someone decided she needed a new dress for the first day of school the next day. It was 4:15 in the afternoon and I was about to crack open a bottle of wine….but how can I say no to that?
So, in a burst of super productivity, I whipped this out.
It was going to be chocolate brown linen at first, then I realized that she is no longer of the size that I can scoop up remnant pieces from the fabric stores and whip it up into dresses for her. Her legs are simply too long. So, I reached into the stash for some purple linen that I’d been waiting to make something for me out of. Admittedly, I scooped it up on sale somewhere and made myself a skirt quite a while back, so I suppose I could share and make her something too. And purple is her favorite color now as well. I really should share.
And share I did. I whipped that thing out in a matter of hours – it’s really quite a simple dress and thanks to not only the stash, but my love of the color purple, I had everything on hand to do so.
She claims it’s ‘pretty good’, but a little too long. Given the way she grows, it might fit her halfway through next summer….she’s already told me how great it’s going to look with T-shirts and leggings underneath.
And as for the super-productivity required to make it as well as my dress? “It’s not like you’re that productive every day Mom.”
Thanks kiddo.

What Long Strange Trip It’s Been.

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I can’t even remember when I started this dress. It was summer, and it was before we had a baby, or even a thought of one, so that places it at least 10 years ago. A friend convinced me to make myself a dress out of Liberty of London fabric. And since we had no kids, I had plenty of time and we were a full time double income couple, it seemed reasonable. I bought a pattern and without double checking any measurements on the sizing, jumped headfirst into the project.
After I finished what was hands down the best zipper job I’d ever done, I finally stopped to try the dress on for size. All that was left was the hem and the shoulder seams.

It didn’t fit.

IT DIDN’T FIT. The best damn zipper I’ve ever done in my life – and I avoid them like the plague, a small fortune spent on fabric and the most careful sewing I’ve ever done in my life and IT DOESN’T FIT.

It was too small in the chest, I couldn’t get the zipper to close. Frustrated, I threw the unfinished dress in a bag in a closet, that got moved upstairs when we built out the attic and I moved my sewing area to a corner in our new master suite. It sat there until earlier this spring, when I went looking in that crawl space for something and found this bag of forgotten fabric. And apparently projects. Having just lost a good 30 pounds thanks to the removal of my stomach tumor (and part of my stomach with it) and knowing I was thinner than I had ever been in my life, I decided to try on the dress, just to see….

It fit.

IT FIT!!!

I managed to find the original pattern and the directions I needed to finish it. I realized that I was going to have to finish the shoulder seams by hand, in a blind stitch – definitely not my strong point. So, it sat some more. Until the other day, when I was procrastinating on some other projects and decided to just give it a whirl. The shoulder seams didn’t look too shabby, so onto the hem.
I will admit, I do have fabulous legs, but there wasn’t much room for a hem and still leave the dress at a respectable length. After all, I probably cut this dress out when I was in my 20’s and now that I’m in my 40’s, I do like my skirts just a little bit longer. (But not much. Did I mention I have good legs?). I played around with different ideas and then noticed a long hunk of scrap fabric from this dress in a box of scraps I’d given Edie to play around with. I’ve been digging some unfinished ruffled edges lately, in fact, I just finished a skirt with one, so I thought I’d give that a try.

I vaguely measured the strips of fabric, didn’t even make sure the gathering stitch was evenly in the center, just ran it through the machine and went with it. I did finish all my edges, so I have that going for me, and then I simply tried to make sure the gathering stitch was at the edge of skirt fabric. I really like it. The skirt hits just at my knee – perfect.

I still have to wash it, tack down the facing in the back around the zipper, but it’s done. And it fits. I do believe a celebration is in order.