Made in 2008

Here's most of the things I sewed this year, along with 5 pictures of baby Lauren, who was my most important creation of the year. I felt pretty crumbly most of my pregnancy and had next to no energy for sewing for a long time. But now I'm feeling much better and have lots of plans for sewing cute baby girl stuff, things for the boys, and clothes for myself too. Today I've been making more of those churn dash blocks in just blue and red, and also sewing up bunches of tiny scraps into a future quilt top. I'm probably going to cut out some baby clothes and a sweatshirt for myself.

last minute

A couple of last minute projects from the last week and a half or so...

I decided on the fly (and the night before the last day of school this year) to make one of the storage cubes from Crazy Mom Quilts for my son's 3rd grade teacher. She has Jayhawks all over the classroom so we fused a Jayhawk on some white cotton and stitched that onto the denim cube. I had the perfect lining fabric for a Jayhawk cube.

I had been thinking about making a knotty doll for my baby girl and I decided the night of December 23rd what I was going to do. I got up and started dyeing the velour fabric in the morning on Christmas Eve, and then started sewing it later that evening. I finished sewing it up after we opened gifts on Christmas morning. This was one of those projects that turned out so well and I was just so happy with it. I love how the LWI dye job turned out and the doll is just so cute and snuggly. I already made another one for a baby friend and will make more in the future.

My 8 year old and I decided to make these recycled crayons yesterday. I couldn't remember where I'd seen them, was it OMSH? Not exactly. Was it Balancing Everything? Hmm, no. I checked my starred items in google reader and found it, at CraftSanity. (Check out her podcasts, they're awesome.) We had plenty of unwrapped broken crayons and made a dozen of these yesterday and a few more with friends today, too. It's a super cheap and easy craft. They're cool to color with, too.

hoodies, churn dash, with a side of pouty baby

I made some cool hoodies for the boys last week, from Ottobre 4/05. They went together quick and easy and I'm still loving my coverstitcher.


I also made a hat and some pants for the baby. The hat is from the wonderful NCBE pattern, but I made the newborn size and it's too small already. Pants are from Ottobre 5/2006 and I don't really like them. I'm thinking about drafting a footed pants pattern from the NCBE pants pattern.

Honestly though, baby isn't going to be going out much this winter--she was hospitalized again for a week earlier this month for bronchiolitis and apnea related to a viral infection (yep, a cold). She's hanging out at home in a shirt, diaper, and blanket most of the time. I might make it back to church by February, we'll see. Here's a picture of her making a funny pouty lip face. I love it.


I decided to start something from fabric I have on hand and here's what I've got so far:

At first I was thinking it would be another charity quilt but then I decided to make the churn dash blocks and now I want to keep this one, at least I think so. But I'm not loving it at the moment. The idea was to use up the red, white (really cream), and blue that I've got in my stash/scrap bin, but I'm pretty sure I'm going to need more red. I might go to the quilt shop tomorrow. I'm also trying to figure out how to set the blocks; I could do square-in-a-square blocks to alternate with the churn dash blocks, or just plain sashing. Or come up with something else. I don't know.

Finally, I'm looking for suggestions for Lauren's baby quilt. I've got the fabric for the top, and I really love the paper doll fabric, but I don't know how to put it together.

By the way, I really like how the coordinates I picked out all have different textures. I'd like to use fairly large squares of the paper doll fabric and I had a couple ideas for the colors--I could just alternate plain old paper doll squares with 4-patches of the other fabrics, or put sort of scrappy sashing around larger squares of the paper doll fabric, or... that's all I've got. So, let me know if you have any other ideas. I saw a couple of cute baby quilt patterns in an expensive book at the quilt shop, and if I go back there soon I might have to look again to try and refresh my memory.

I have a long, long sewing list, a few orders of fabric on their way to me, and my non-pregnant energy is back (although I'm still tired a lot) and I hope to be back to more regular posting here soon!

t-shirt remodel + baby clothes modeling shot

My inlaws gave a "little scout buddy" t-shirt to ds a few months ago because his older brother is in Cub Scouts. The shirt got too small really quickly so I remade it into this:


I cut out the design from the original shirt and zigzagged it onto this shirt front and then made a new shirt for him. I like it with the olive ribbing and stitching. I used the Ottobre raglan pattern from 02/05. It's size 110, the boy is 4.5 years old, and it fits pretty well. The fabric is a really stable jersey without much stretch though.



And here's the baby wearing one of the outfits I made for her.