Month: March 2011

Toddler shirts-to-be

I came across this quilt block today, and was smitten.

I don’t need an entire crab quilt, necessarily, but I have a toddler who could certainly use a crab shirt! So I started pulling out fabrics.

You’ll see two shirts in that photo because I got all excited and decided to maybe also make him a plane shirt (since he spends so much of his day pointing out each plane that passes).

It probably would have been smarter to finish one shirt rather than perpetually working in parallel. Oh, well. The fabric is starched and ironed, and now I just need to figure out how to copy the pattern and learn paper piecing… neither should be hard, just takes more than five consecutive minutes. Learning from past mistakes, these are both 3T shirts (not the 2T ones that fit him today) – even though this should be a VERY quick project, I’m sure I can manage to stretch it out for a few months.

Rock Layout, v1 and v2

Due to all of the lighting and plumbing progress recently, I pulled out the “tank” batch of homemade playdough and some freezer paper so that we could start drafting rock layouts. Fun. The top three are Kevin’s, and the bottom three are mine. Each one is constrained by the tank layout, plus the two return lines that will run along the tank bottom.

The top left was the preliminary winner. Next step was using old boxes (and a school bus, and a container of little people) to build the structure in the tank.

We had to add some extra nodules for visual interest – the initial idea was functional but not interesting. I’m excited about the new plan.