by Sherri Sylvester | Apr 18, 2013
First off, we had the third meeting of our sewing club last Saturday night. Hooray! We’re planning another one for the end of May and maybe I can convince everyone to come on a field trip to our nearest “fabric district” with me in June. It’s been so much fun getting together with everyone and being able to talk all about SEWING! I still can’t get over how fun it is when you find people who enjoy doing what you enjoy doing!
For this meeting those who wanted worked on making a Peek-A-Boo Toy Sack. I recently talked about Toni’s great tutorial from Make It Perfect here. These bags are addictive! I cut enough fabric to make 3 of them and it was amazing how quickly they came together (it helps that I have made 6 or 7 of them in the past!) Here are all of our finished products!
This camouflage print is really fun. We all kept talking about how it reminds us of G.I. Joe. It would be perfect to hold the figures as well. Love the retro feel with the brown dot fabric Laura used on the casing.
Love this print too! fabricworm happens to have this one on sale (go and get it!) – it is Birch Fabrics Organic, Mod Squad, Rally in Pool/Grass. Oh, and it comes in Cream/Coral too! The bag looks great with the stripes on the back. Jenn was able to make the whole thing with several fat quarters.
Just as an aside – this (below) is my all time favorite scooter print. I used it to make a lunch bag, and I’ve got a tiny bit left just waiting for the perfect project. Can you find the bird sitting on the scooter seat? Too CUTE! And it is still available at fabricworm – here.
Image courtesy of www.monaluna.com
My toy sacks need a bit of explaining because it looks like I forgot what “trendy fabric” is! The black dot is a large piece from my stash that I hadn’t been able to find a project for as yet. The binding and casings are happy scrap busters from the finished edge of a piece of fabric, folded just the right way. The elephant fabric is a print of one of my favorite childhood Little Golden Books – The Saggy Baggy Elephant. I finally found a project for it, and I really like the stripey casing.
The third is special, and has a story. My husband took the girls to our local fabric store at Christmas and each picked out a “fabric for Mommy”. This one is made out of the fabric my youngest picked out! Despite it’s dubious beginnings – I actually like the bag. It turned out okay, and might be the perfect place to store our dress up clown costume! I can’t wait until our next meeting in May!
And… new and exciting things are happening at Thread Riding Hood!
I’ve finally signed up for a Thread Riding Hood Facebook page. Come on over and like me (pretty please?!) Follow along (click on the logo below for the link)and get updates on posts, questions and answers from tutorial comments and great links to other wonderful sewing stuff going on around the web.
And, with a sad goodbye to Google Reader – which is going to shut down on July 1st, I signed up for Bloglovin. Turns out I didn’t need to be sad at all! This is a great little invention that emails you when your favorite bloggers put up new posts. The emails are really well designed with photos from the new posts and arrive based on your settings – once a day, or whenever a new post shows up. It’s a really good way to keep track of all of your reading. And (bonus!) it will import your blogs straight from Google Reader if you’re already on there. So, click the logo and follow Thread Riding Hood (you know you want to)!
In other news, my husband is having knee surgery tomorrow. So I may or may not be posting anything this weekend – family trumps all! I will be back for sure on Monday with something fun! Have a wonderful end of your week. Lately I have been feeling that “happy spring” feeling you get when the weather starts to warm up! (thank goodness!)
by Sherri Sylvester | Apr 15, 2013
Ottobre Blouse Top + Skirt = The Hula Hoop Dress!
I have been planning to make this dress for about a month now. I am always looking for good ways to use clothing that I don’t wear anymore and re-purpose them for the kids. So… when I saw the skirt for a good deal, I also remembered that I had a perfect purple (too short, shrunk, ack) shirt of my own in the sewing box. And… tada… an idea was born!
It would be fun if that was the end of the story, but I have a much more random way that this dress finally came about….
A few weeks ago we bought a (standard Ikea) shelf on Craigslist. Nice shelf, nice people. While we were moving it into our vehicle my husband told me that the lady of the house liked to sew. This (of course) was very exciting to me, so I asked him to give her my Thread Riding Hood card and thought maybe she would like to come visit the blog (I know – shameless self promotion!)
A week or so later I got an email from her, she said she was moving out and selling off some of her fabric stash and would I like to come and see it? Turns out I was excited and so were 3 of my friends – so we all trooped down there on Wednesday night of last week to take a look.
Long story short she was selling A LOT of fabric! We got some really great deals and I scored some Ottobre magazines for FREE! If you have not heard of Ottobre, it is a sewing magazine designed in Finland. Each one of their issues has about 40 patterns in it, a clothing sewers dream!
I got home and immediately thought I should find a kids shirt pattern I could shorten to empire waist length and use above the skirt I had found. The pattern went together really well, and I am so excited to use another one! Once I had the dress bodice I took the skirt, opened the casing to shorten the elastic to fit my daughter and stitched it to the bottom of the bodice. Perfect!
Since the skirt has pockets, the dress does too – and my daughter loves them! The drawstring adds a cute detail to the front and I was able to use the extra length to add a ribbon detail to the neckline so the whole thing looks more matchy and put together.
Just a note for posterity! My daughter wanted to call this the “Sparkle Dress”.
So, my random fabric adventure turned out to be pretty useful! A bookcase led to some fabric which gave me some free magazines that had the pattern to the top of this dress in them! It also shows how you can “recycle” adult clothing into cute stuff for your kids. Seeing as how it is Earth Day next Monday maybe you want to try too?!
by Sherri Sylvester | Apr 13, 2013
Thanks so much to everyone who entered the giveaway!
Congratulations to entry number 23 (as picked by random.org)
You are the winner of the 7 gorgeous fat quarters from Double Decker Fabric!
I will be emailing you soon!
Come back Monday to hear about my random fabric adventure from last week! Hint: It involves a Craigslist bookshelf, a sewing stash and 5 Ottobre magazines!
by Sherri Sylvester | Apr 11, 2013
Before we get started, just to make sure you know – tomorrow (Friday, April 12th at midnight) is the last day for the giveaway! Don’t miss out on your chance to win the 7 fat quarters Double Decker Fabric is giving away! Click here to sign up.
My oldest daughter has become more interested in sewing lately, hooray! So the other day we decided to do some sewing. (Yes, the kids were still in their pajamas and fancy dress up skirts!)
I started out with some “awesome” Dora fabric that I accidentally promised myself into buying last Christmas. I was attempting to bribe my kids into being excited to stay in the fabric section. Unfortunately it backfired when they saw the licensed character fabrics. I try to stay away from them, they usually feel a bit tacky – but in this case, a promise is a promise and a 1/2 yard came home with us “to make something” with.
LOVE that she needs a stool to reach the foot pedal!
I think I have finally found a good use for it. The kids can stitch whatever they’d like with it and I won’t feel bad if it gets ruined! Thankfully though the sewing went really well.
I started my oldest out with a square piece of fabric and drew some straight lines on it with a water soluble marker. She practiced stitching down the lines. After that I figured we could fold it in half and make a little pillow for her Teddy. So she got to practice back stitching and pivoting at the corners.
Looking at her while she was sewing on “Mommy’s machine” was amazing! And the look of concentration and pride in the fact that she was doing it all by herself! And she really was, it was fun to see how well she figured it out.
My youngest got involved too, we made a pillow “together”. She sat on my lap and held the back stitching button down when I needed her to. She also got to fill the pillow which was a big hit. My oldest also loved using the spray bottle to make the water soluble pen lines disappear.
I think Teddy is pretty happy with his new pillow too! Apparently the next project in line is a pair of red pants for Teddy – but not just any red pants, they need to have heart knee pads… has she seen this on Made by Rae? or did she come up with it herself?!
by Sherri Sylvester | Apr 8, 2013
One little kitten lost her mittens and she began to cry,
“Oh Mama dear, I sadly fear, my mittens I have lost”
and Mama said,
“Don’t worry dear, there’s a great mitten pattern on ikat bag and some fleece that I’ve been trying to use up in the closet downstairs.
I’ll have new ones for you by tomorrow!”
The ikat bag Mittens
So, it is spring here – and has been for a few weeks now. Problem is, the weather is not cooperating! It keeps getting a bit warmer and then cools down again. And we’ve had wind… not a nice calm balmy wind – freezing cold angry wind. This leads me to this post. I found some great thin fall/spring mittens at our local Dollar Store, and I usually stock up with 5 or 6 pairs in the fall, but somehow, by spring they are usually mismatched and lost (maybe even in our house – how irritating!)
I don’t want to have to go back and buy more at this point. So I decided to make some myself. I remember using this pattern by ikat bag before (so I’m not sure why I still continue to buy mittens at the Dollar Store!) I’ve got one pair down and one more to go for my youngest. I might get them done tonight even, if I can clear the too small or “storeable-for-later” clothing out of the middle of our newly made playroom and get the dishes done with time to spare before bedtime! (Who am I kidding, it’s afer 10pm already. And “Yes” the dishes are still not finished!)
Anyhow, the pattern is great. It includes sizes 2, 4 and 6 – and is easily adaptable to other sizes as well. The way LiEr designed the pattern even makes it possible for the mittens to be reversible. I also got to use up some extra fleece from the lining of the “It’s a Hoot” coat I made for my oldest last fall. It’s nice to be able to get some more fabric out of the closet – especially seeing as how I have some more coming (this week I hope?!) for a project I’m super excited about!
The coat and mittens also look cute with the pink “Wrapped in Bows” scarf I made this winter after reading Disney’s tutorial from Ruffles and Stuff. (Which I think I found through Sew Can She – it’s a small world!) It is so much fun when you send your kid off to school in a (mostly) handmade outfit – even down to the coat – it’s very satisfying to say the least! I think tomorrow I will try to get a photograph of her with the whole thing on and put it on twitter.
By the way – if you need some mittens for yourself I have used this tutorial from The Purl Bee to make some from felted wool. They are the warmest, most amazing (and comfortable) mittens in the middle of winter! Because I can’t knit (and because I felted my own sweater to use for the mittens) I was able to use the felted ribbing on the bottom of the sweater to make the cuffs for the mittens instead of having to knit them myself. More on felting your own wool here.
Don’t forget – the Double Decker Fabric giveaway is still on, but this Friday is your last day to sign up! Don’t miss your chance to win 7 gorgeous fat quarters! You can also use the discount code included in the post to buy fabric from Double Decker until Friday. I’ll be posting and emailing the winner on Saturday morning – be sure to watch your email so I can get your address if you win!
Update: My husband just got home and says all of the mittens are in the backyard – ack!
