A picture and a thousand words

I spent a while trying to find a baptism outfit for H, to no avail. The traditional gowns and outfits are outrageously expensive ($85 and way, way up), and even if he is the first cousin of this generation it seems very unlikely that all the other babies would be fitting in 12 month sizes by the time of their Christenings. As my hopes of finding the perfect thing online faded, I toyed with the idea of making an outfit. It seemed like potentially too much work, but I found time to go buy white dupioni silk (I had a good lining fabric in my stash from the time of my wedding), and then used a pair of his overalls to make a pattern on brown paper bags. The actual sewing was fairly simple. Sewed three pieces of the exterior together, repeated for the lining, then sewed the lining to the silk all the way around. I used two straps for the sides as closure and to add a bit of interest.

I used my automatic buttonhold attachment to quickly add the six buttonholes to go with the fabric-covered buttons I made.


(What a neat trick that is! Enormously satisfying.) And, done!

(You’ll have to imagine how cute this looked without the wrinkles. Re-ironing this for the blog sadly didn’t make the cut on the weekend to-do list, so it still has all of the wrinkles from five hours of wear and then the flight back home.) The fit is perfect – roomy enough that he can move well, but he wasn’t swimming in it. And I’m excited to potentially use this pattern again – I think that tracing it out in the first place was the most time-intensive part and that it would be much, much speedier if I did it again now that step is complete.

One last photo of the back:

Back in the fall, we got parsnips in our last CSA bag. I’d never had them and didn’t entirely know what to do with them, so they just sat. When we got back from Christmas, I finally decided to do something with them (the wrong thing, it turned out – I pureed them with milk and cinnamon, don’t know why, and they tasted like wallpaper paste. Next time, use a real recipe.) The tops had tiny little new green sprouts, so I cut them off and put them in water. Now they look like this:

Such cheerful growing green things to have on the counter in January. They’re growing tiny roots – I wonder if ultimately they’ll be replantable? I suspect I’ll lose interest or forget to water them before then. But for the moment, such a fun thing to see each time I enter the kitchen!