I brought the sewing machine in to the family room so that I could start sewing H’s lion costume while we watched TV. (We’d been holding onto a Netflix DVD since March, and finally despaired of ever being in the mood for it and sent it back. Now we’re watching season one of Mad Men — it’s such fun to have an “active” Netflix account again!) Putting the sewing machine on the side table while I sat on the ottoman worked surprisingly well, even if it doesn’t promote perfect posture.
Lots of little paws, a tail, and then cutting and sewing the body and fashioning a hood. I winged it instead of using a pattern which generally turns out reasonably well. (Not professional by any means, but close enough for a Halloween costume). I used a sleeper as a rough guide for sizing on the body. Unfortunately, though, it seems that all of the nursing and sleeping craziness in the last few days must have been a growth spurt (the well known 9 week one?? He must be on his own schedule) since all of the three month clothes are suddenly too small. Lion costume included. I have thoughts on how to add length and girth, but it’s going to be several more hours of sewing and won‘t be ready in time for the parent baby Halloween class. Luckily, Kevin’s parents and grandmother are arriving in two days so there will be plenty of hands to hold H while I finish his costume.
Category: sewing
40 weeks, 3 days
We had to document the impressiveness of full-term me:
Seeing this photo, it makes sense why all of the maternity shirts have suddenly become too short in the last week.
In the background, you can see the curtains I made for the baby’s room last night. I reused the fabric from the curtains that I made for Kevin’s office, removed the blue border, and added a new border that matches the crib bumper and ruffle that I’m making. Here’s a too-bright, rather green partial view – I’ll get a better shot once the rain and clouds clear up a bit.
New territory
Sometimes the crafting is for the baby, and sometimes the baby is just an excuse to try something new. 🙂 Today was completely a case of the latter. I bought a lightweight jersey fabric, and decided to try my hand at sewing a baby hat and pants. The hat was from the SouleMama pattern here, and the pants are based on the instructions here. All of the stretchy stitches on my sewing machine are uncharted territory for me, so it took a lot of reading the manual before I felt confident in my stitch, needle and presser foot choices. For the hat, I sewed the side seams using the serger stitch. I have thought for ages that you actually needed to buy a serger to manage this – I didn’t realize my machine was already capable of it until I sat down and read the manual for the nth time. Very exciting!! I used the overcast presser foot, which is a marvel. It’s the oddest looking thing, what with the pair of center bars and the little fronds on the right side, but I’m so impressed at the cleverness of it.
To hem the edge, I used an overcast stitch right at the edge. (I had to rip my first effort where I’d tried to set the seam in about a ¼ inch – the stitches and hem margin couldn’t have been more variable if I tried – straight seams and stretchy fabrics aren’t a skill I’ve mastered yet, apparently.) I should have hemmed first, then sewn the side seams so that they would have lied flatter – something to remember for the future.
The pants were much faster, since I didn’t have to rip and redo nearly as often. The casing for the elastic is a little bit wonky, but they’re pretty good for a first attempt, and as Kevin pointed out, we don’t think the baby will notice that the stitches aren’t perfectly even. 🙂
A pretty cute set to go over a onesie!
I have a few more cuts of jersey, so I may make more if I feel inspired. The biggest question mark from the whole experience is whether my tension was off. The serging stitches pulled through a lot to the back, and the fabric was puckered together in a ridge under the stitches. I’m curious if using the zigzag foot would have prevented the pucker? Or different tension? The jersey was extremely light-weight, so it wouldn’t surprise me if the settings I used would be ideal for a stiffer fabric, but just not for this one.
Decorating
We ended up with quite the stash of plain white onesies. A few years ago, I’d needed some sort of baby clothes as a size reference for a sweater I was knitting for a gift, and the packs of white onesies were the cheapest option by far, so I bought five short sleeve and five long sleeve. Then Kevin’s mom sent us two more packs of four in newborn and three month sizes, and it started to feel a little bit too institutional. My original plan was to applique cute things by hand.
But it took way too long and looked sort of wonky, so v2 was geometric shapes and the sewing machine.
Here’s the first batch:
And the second:
Not professional grade sewing, but colorful and happy. I realized after the fact that I probably should have used a walking foot (or something along those lines?) because it was very hard to keep the stretchy onesie fabric lined up properly with the non-stretchy cotton. Oops.
Blank slate
My knitting friend Diana is due in October, and she decided to have a sewing get-together on Sunday to make maternity pants. I’m actually in good shape for pants, but it wasn’t hard to come up with a list of other baby-related sewing projects. I ended up bringing over this fun:
A few years ago, I bought onesies to use as a size-gauge when I was knitting baby sweaters as gifts. The packs of 4 plain white onesies were cheaper than the singles, decorated ones, so now I have a small stockpile of baby clothes that could use a bit of color. I figured I’d try an appliqué-meets-embroidery mix. I don’t have any after photos yet, since the hand-sewing wasn’t terribly speedy, but it was a fun afternoon and the colors made me happy.
Singing the praises of the sewing machine
Probably the most persistent pregnancy symptom that I’ve noticed is near-constant hip and lower back soreness. I’ve been stiffer than normal for months now, and sitting in most chairs is difficult after about fifteen minutes. On the whole I’ve adjusted, but after the afternoon of gardening on Sunday I was too sore to find a good spot.
I thought of the microwavable heating pads I’ve seen online. This turned out to be one of the highest payoff craft projects ever. The entire thing took seven minutes to make, and that included scrounging in the kitchen for a good filler (we didn’t have enough lentils, so I used white rice), choosing pretty fabric and thread, and both ironing and pinning the fabric before sewing. I used a fat quarter (folded in half, it wraps around the base of my back perfectly) about a pound of white rice, and a lavender sachet (I bought mosaic mirrors from Etsy as a bridesmaid gift, and the woman who made them included a few sachets of the lavender she grows. I love Etsy.) I double-rolled the edges before seaming to make them sturdier. It gets nice and warm after about 3 minutes in our ancient microwave, and the heat lasts for a good half hour. Blissful. 🙂
Kevin’s curtains
I was so flattered when Kevin said that he wanted curtians like I’d made for my office, just “not with the lace.” Yay! Totally!
We went to Joanns so that Kevin could choose a color, and bought plain white cotton and blue ribbon for the edges. Turns out that ribbon was completely the wrong thing (too stiff, yet won’t hold a pressed edge). Oops.
I found bias tape in almost the same color as Kevin’s ribbon choice at $1.99 for 3 yards and decided to spring for two packages. The ribbon can now get relegated to gift-wrapping. A success!! Here they are open to the view of the rhodedendron and all of the little birds:
And closed for privacy:
Not bad for essentially a 25 minute, $12 project. 🙂
A chess bag for my brother
My brother lives in NYC, and he and his roommate occasionally take a chess set down to the local bar and play. Aside from thinking they were cool to do that, this news made me think many things – that game boxes are hard to carry, that spilled beer would warp one of those cardboard game boards, and that I’d been seeing lots of “checkerboard” sort of quilting patterns recently. So I took some of the remnant cotton print fabric from the Olympic Mountains quilt, and made him a chess bag.
It’s machine washable and dryable. It has a zipper and a lined pouch to hold all of the pieces.
And there are two handles, which can slide into fabric slots to fold the bag in half and make it smaller/easier to carry.
I’m pretty pleased with the way it turned out. The bag, lying flat, is about 14½” square. Dave got it last week, and actually seemed quite pleased about this little bit of unsolicited crafting. And at least even if it only gets used occasionally, it’s tiny to store. 🙂
Mostly for my reference, since I’m sure I’ll find occasion to make this again:
To make a zippered chess bag:
Materials:
- 9″ x 18″ light fabric for the light checks
- 9″ x 18″ dark fabric for the dark checks
- 4 1″x15″ strips accent fabric
- 15″x15″ fabric for the back
- 15″ by 28″ fabric for the lining
- Zipper (12″ or cut to 12″)
- Bias tape or 2″ strips ironed in half for handles.
Steps:
- Take your light and dark check panels. Cut 4 strips in each color: 2¼ x18.
- Sew together alternating strips to form a striped rectangle (14¼x18”) . Press. (Note that all seams were ¼”.)
- Turn the rectangle and cut 7 times against the stripes to make 8 multicolor strips that are 2 ¼” wide.
- Lay these strips in an alternating fashion to for a checkerboard.
- Sew strips together. Press.
- Add a border of accent fabric. Press. The top is now complete.
- Place the checkerboard top and the plain back right sides together. Fold the lining around them, right side facing out, and seam along the lining fold. You now have a clean seam along the bottom of the bag. The whole ensemble looks kind of like a book with a cover and two pages.
- On the edge opposite the seam, sew the zipper. Turn each half inside-out to sew. Use pins. I added a strip of fabric with each seam, pressed lengthwise, to hide the zipper when it’s closed.
- Turn the bag right side out again and zip the zipper closed. Fashion two tubes of fabric (mine were 2″ wide and 10″ long before seaming) for handles. Slip them into place at each end of the zipper, and sew them into place as you close any gaps between the zipper and the sides of the bag.
- Make two more little tubes (the length of your handle width plus ¼”) and sew the two ends to the edges of the back of the bag, near the seam opposite the zipper. The handles will slip through these to fold the bag in half for carrying.
- Now you have two ends of the bag closed. To closed the sides, you can open the zipper, turn the bag inside out, and sew all four layers of fabric together on both sides. This is easiest, but you have a ragged edge on the bag inside. Add bias tape (or just fabric tape, it doesn’t need to be bias for such a short, straight seam) to finish the edge if it bothers you.
Curtains
I’ve been meaning to figure out curtains for my office. My desk is set up right in front of the window, which is generally lovely, but on dark days and at twilight it seems to lack privacy. I had a bunch of white cotton and lace curtains that I bought at my church’s annual rummage sale for my Boston apartment. I just went on a massively nostalgic photo tour to find shots of those curtains in action, and here they were in my Boston Bedroom, circa June ’04.
(All I can think of is the T, the Red Sox on TV and the game day crowds, Kevin’s thesis, tulips bought on the way home, carrying groceries up three flights, and the way that the air smelled after dinner while everything cooled off.)
For Boston, I’d sewn sets of curtains together so that they would be longer. For this house, I pulled out those seams and sewed a channel for the curtain rod at about 2/3 the height. I found a spring-loaded curtain rod at Ace Hardware for about $4. Now, I can sit behind them and see the trees and sky, but anyone in the road or the neighbours can only see the top of my head. Perfect.
Or, during the day, I can slide them open and watch all the goings-on in the front yard.
I’m all pleased. 🙂
More closet voyeurism
One of the shelves from our closet had this little waffle insert thing. I’m not sure what it’s intended use was (tie storage? Socks?), but I didn’t just want to toss it. I mulled it over while I was unscrewing and rescrewing the doors, the bars and the sliding tracks, and then inspiration hit.
It’s a three bedroom house, which means that for the time being Kevin and I each have our own room, and our own double closet. His is filled with old electronics equipment and mine is filled with yarn and fabric, and now thread. 🙂 I’ve been still trying to keep all of my thread in my old sewing kit, but it’s been getting more and more crowded in there. I was sort of amused when storing it away to realize that 18 of those spools are from 1990 or earlier, and 19 are from the last three years… apparently middle school, high school and college were NOT the thread-buying years.
PS. I can’t tell you how happy the closet keeps making me. Wide open spaces!!