roly poly pinafore blog tour

Rachael, the maestro of Imagine Gnats was kind enough to send me a copy of her new PDF Roly Poly pinafore sewing pattern, and invite me to join her blog tour. Yeah! I have cool friends with real blogs! ^_^

So here I give you my roly poly pinafore:

The pattern is a reversible pinafore style tunic that can be used as a top or even as an art smock. It's straightforward with two big pieces that you sew together and turn right side out. Add buttons and buttonholes. Boom. Done. Unless you want to do pockets. Then you have a few extra steps.

 Originally when I was dreaming up what I was going to do with my version, I planned on using a neutral linen and spattering it with paint to make an art smock, which my wild two year old could definitely use. But this bee themed thing popped into my head as Violet ran around playing "bug squad" with Clover (something they got from reading Ladybug Girl and Bumblebee Boy....cute book series...anyway) 

Hexies have been on my mind for quite some time, but this is the first time I've ever made any. Don't look too closely.....they're far from perfect but I like 'em as a honeycomb for my little "bunglebee"

 Violet is of the opinion that I wasn't literal enough with my interpretation of a bumble bee, and would have appreciated some stripes.

I sewed mine up according to the sizing given in the pattern and not her age, so a 12 month size for my almost three year old. Not surprising at all given how she usually sizes in patterns. It fits her perfectly, though I could have made it the 2T length and was just too lazy to fiddle with the pattern. And if I make a smock I'll probably do a 3T so it fits over clothes well.

For the wings, I created a design for a bee wing in a notebook and then replicated it with disappearing ink on one back flap of the pinafore. Then I went over that with fabric sharpie (my new friend), traced the design from the first wing onto paper, exacto knifed the lines out and flipped the page to use as a stencil for the other pinafore flap. I'm sure there are way better ways of doing it, but it worked this way for me.  

After laying down the sharpie I also stitched over the lines in black thread just to quilt it a little bit. These pictures were all taken after a trip through the washing machine and the lines all still look great. 

The outer fabric is a mustard yellow linen used in these pants for Kids Clothes Week, and the sickeningly adorable and perfect floral is a cotlin. 

This pattern is one of those simple ones that serves as a great base for showcasing fabric and design elements. And I can't be the only mom out there who adores seeing their kids' sweet little bodies peeking through their summer clothes. Honestly. What's more delicious than their tiny backs? Put thy child in a pinafore! 

Thanks again to Rachael for letting me join in on her blog tour! Go check out her pattern here if you want to make one of your own. And check out the lineup of all the other bloggers joining in on the tour. There are some super cute and creative versions of the roly-poly out there!

homemade furniture wax

I didn't take any pictures of the process while I made or applied my homemade furniture wax for this kitchen table project, but I thought I could throw the approximate recipe on here in case anyone else wants to experiment with it and avoid some fumes from commercial products. 

You need:

Beeswax - 1 oz

Paraffin wax - 1 oz

coconut oil - 1.5 c or less

essential oils if you want

For mine I took a glass mason jar and placed it in a pot of simmering water with beeswax and paraffin. You can do this in a double boiler (which I don't own) but since this involves wax it sounds like a labor intensive and annoying thing to clean up. Better to just make it in the container you'll store it in. 

I did equal parts beeswax and paraffin, one ounce each, and melted them in the partially submerged jar. This took a little longer than I expected. Various recipes around the internet called for differing amounts and types of oils, but I went with coconut because it won't go rancid. 

Surprisingly, making furniture wax calls for a lot more oil to wax ratio than I would have thought. One recipe said 1.5 cups per ounce of wax, but that sounded like a lot to me. I think I did 1.5 cup total instead and wouldn't mind it being even more solid with less oil next time.  I think I would start with 1/2 c and add more oil to adjust if it's too hard to work with.

Keeping the jar in the simmering water I added the oil and stirred for a while till everything seemed to come together. You can add some essential oil to make it smell nice too. Lavender smells great. 

Once it looked emulsified and had no chunks I set it out to cool and stirred it periodically to make sure nothing separated. 

Then when the wax was cool, I grabbed a cloth diaper, dabbed it into the wax and rubbed a very thin layer all over my piece of furniture. Enough to see that it's there and to give it a hazy dull look. Leave that for a few hours and come back with a clean towel to buff the crap out of  the wax. Work it in circles and straight lines till everything looks beautiful and shiny and doesn't feel tacky. I think you're taking the oil off and setting the wax in when you do all of the rubbing. Your hands will feel really soft after you get done!

I'm pretty sure this was a lot more pleasant than breathing fumes from miniwax while heavily pregnant with a vulnerable baby.

Furniture refurb projects

Spring is here. A baby is coming soon. Our house has been buzzing with projects lately! Three pieces of furniture have been acquired cheaply/free lately and reinvented before making their way up into our living space.

Unfortunately, I spent quite a bit of time working on redoing my furniture, and almost none of that time was dedicated to taking very good pictures. Oops. But I have a before shot of the top of my new kitchen table here. This is after I sanded the living hell out of it for quite some time in an attempt to even out its complexion and remove a bunch of markings, stains, and writing indentations. 

This was obviously used by kids and teens before my neighbors got evicted and had their stuff tossed out on trash day. Lots of inane words and phrases, and plenty of colored marker stains. My eyes got all wide when I saw it sitting there on the street in the middle of a heap of junk, looking massive and solid and sort of.....Amish style as I drove out of the neighborhood in the morning. By afternoon I had my sister in law there to help me haul it down the street to our garage. I was pregnant. Not very smart.

 My hope was to just sand it down and refinish it with stain and varnish, but the marker and other writing wasn't coming off even as I removed quite a bit of wood with the sander. So instead of grinding it down to nothing, I just went with paint. My imagined color for this was supposed to be charcoal. By the time it was done and in our house it was obviously not charcoal. Or even close. But it's pretty! I used Martha Stewart zinc in case you were interested.

I also made my own furniture wax out of parrafin, coconut oil, and beeswax after buying a tin of miniwax and then reading the "breathe this and you and your unborn child will die!!!" warnings on it. Somehow I didn't expect something that was supposed to be wax to be so toxic. So I sent it back to home depot and researched making my own. We already had beeswax and coconut oil anyway.

The top is made of solid plank wood and visible nails. Kind of neat! Bless my husband and neighbor for bringing it up a flight of narrow, twisty townhouse stairs (those stairs are the devil!) because it is insanely heavy. The drawer alone must weigh more than Violet. 

 

Here's a real life shot of it in the kitchen, taking up more than half of the dining space, and all of my mess to go with it. It's where the magic happens. I LOVE having a table to cut fabric on now. 

 

 

Next up is this gross looking dresser with potential that we got on craigslist for cheap. It's either vintage or antique, I can't really tell, but I liked the interesting design and the low price. We needed to replace the broken down ikea dresser that I had been using for the girls' clothes. Most of the drawers didn't work right, and some not at all. Had to go. 

 

A lot of obsessing over the right shade of gray went into this thing. There were paint samples all over the place from doing our living room, and I slapped all of them on various parts of the dresser. After all of that, I went with the obvious choice of yellow.

 

It was supposed to be more of a mustard, truth be told. But I'm terrible, apparently, at getting the color I'm actually going for. Every time I see the Martha Stewart paint chip card with this shade on it, I always see mustard. But on the dresser, not so much. 

Clover wanted pink. But I'm mean. 

There's another finished item for our baby boy, but yet to be photographed....

I think I'm going to miss sanding and painting and painting and painting in our driveway while my kids play in the neighborhood. Watching a piece of unfortunate furniture or a room transform with a little work, time, and some paint is something I find very gratifying. More rewarding than other domestic things that you do day in and day out, only to do again again. 

Honestly, I don't consider myself to be such a great "homemaker" as I struggle with organization, keeping things tidy, knowing how to decorate, cooking etc, though I do totally love that I'm able to be home to care for my family. Sometimes I feel bad that I really want to be that 50's era mom, and get to stay home to attempt it, while other women may want it but have to work a day job.....yet I feel like I'm reaaaally slow to get very good at it. But there are a few domestic things that I seem to gravitate to naturally. Mostly things that involve a paintbrush, a sewing machine, or my vacuum.

Ballet Sweater and a new sewing friend

In a stroke of self-perceived genius, I thought I had solved the perpetual spring sweater wearing problem with Clover. After seeing this adorable version of the Heidi and Finn ballet sweater on Flickr, I thought Clover might wear one of those without a huge fight. 

As it stands we have this routine of my telling her it's chilly outside and begging over and over for her to put on a coat or sweater, and her not wanting to wear anything over her outfit anyway, telling me defiantly "It's nice outside I think" before marching outside and declaring herself freezing. By then I've had enough and won't go back in to rescue her from her four year old stubbornness.

(yes, I took Violet out in public this morning in that outfit. and she looked crazy adorable, thank you!)

As you can see, she is NOT wearing her new sweater, which I started last night and quickly finished up this chilly morning when it seemed a good day to have one. 

There were a couple of problems I think. First, I tried to get her to wear her new green halter from kids clothes week, which she has turned on and says is "not beautiful" and spoiled her already testy mood towards getting dressed.

Then either because of the dress she was wearing under it being the wrong undergarment, her squirming and fidgeting, or the sweater really being undersized for her, she seemed uncomfortable and said it was too small. (though, had this been in pink with sparkly ties, I think she would have found a way to overcome.....just sayin) I sewed the 4T which is usually too big for Clover in kid's patterns, but unless I totally missed it I don't think the pattern came with kid measurements to go by. So I just went with her size by age. One thing was certain - the ties really are too short and wouldn't wrap all the way around twice like they are supposed to. They are even too short for Violet. 

The other thing was that the place the ties came out from out of the bottom band wound up being wrong. They are supposed to come from the sides, and they poke out from too low and don't allow it to wrap right. So I think I need to pick them out and re-situate them, adding more length. It would probably also be a good idea to add two little loops on the sides of the bottom band for the ties to loop through.

Despite the Clover fail, and it being too big on Violet, I still think Violet looks pretty adorable in the sweater. It's nice to have a kid who is still willing to get excited about most of what I make. 

This fabric was really nice to work with. I got it at Finch Sewing Studio in Leesburg, which I discovered during Kids Clothes Week. It's kind of the coolest thing to come from KCW for me, because I happened to click on a picture in the Flickr pool that I thought was cute and noticed that the description had "Loudoun County Sewing Studio" in it. Thinking it was just a different Loudoun county, but being curious anyway I went to the website and realized that it was in LEESBURG. I was like whaaaaaat?

Upon further investigation while I was looking for location and hours, I noticed the phone number for the studio had a Portland area code, and wondered if we had 503 numbers out here too. But it turned out that Nicole, the owner of Finch moved here from Portland. And not just that, she used to teach at Modern Domestic with Shelly Figueroa, right down the street from my fave fabric shop Bolt. We also have kids who are of similar ages, and she happens to have amazing taste in fabric. The couple of shelves of fabric in her little studio are packed with more I would want to buy than I think I've ever seen in Northern Virginia ever! Hello, she even has shot cotton!

How dangerous is it to make a friend who has gorgeous fabric available for sale every time you get together?......

She's got her fabrics for sale on etsy too, and the knits are all beautiful and high quality. For 9$ a yard. You can't even get ugly knits at Joanns for 9$ a yard (honestly, I've found some cute stuff there for good prices with coupons, but their knit selection makes me want to cry). And if you're a stripe lover like me, she's got some really great ones. This is a cotton/rayon, and feels very delicate but is actually kind of resilient to work with. It didn't get sucked into my feed dogs or stretch out all weird when I was sewing, pinning, or ironing.

That was kind of a long post about one little sweater that didn't quite work out like I hoped. But I think it has potential, and I want to make another with some tweaks. So much for being sick of sewing after KCW, right? I claimed to be "so done" and then must have been propelled by the momentum of the previous week. Plus I have this pile of knit that just wants to be made into things.

Kids Clothes Week day 6&7

Ta-Da! Not much for two days of KCW, but most of the time was spent fidgeting with my sewing machine. It's still on a zig zag/stretch stitch boycott, and nothing I did was making it any better. Thankfully I still have a loaner machine here from a friend who was kind enough to bring hers over when my previous machine decided not to sew buttonholes anymore. Last time I offered to give it back, she insisted I keep it here, which ended up being very helpful! That old Kenmore sounds like a freight train, and I can't hear anything going on around me when it's running, but it WORKS. 

 

These shorts were based off of the Shwin and Shwin Lovely Rita skinny jeans pattern, which I was a tester for a while back. I've got a nice hemp/cotton knit from Bolt here that I would like to use for shorts, but didn't want to use it until I knew exactly what I wanted to make and whether it would turn out fabulously. All I knew was that I wanted some slim looking shorts to show off Violet's tiny cute little bum, and they needed to have pockets. I'm not sure that I've really arrived at what I truly want, but these are cute nonetheless. 

The teal fabric is just part of an old Target dress that will never fit right again. Stripes are from my precious remnants of the bamboo knit. Rib knit from Joanns. 

Notes on a fail: When I decided to add the option of a drawstring, I started sewing buttonholes into the ribbing before attaching to the shorts. The ribbing is pretty thick so I didn't think it would be a problem, but the feed dogs sucked the fabric into the freshly resurrected Kenmore machine, and then a wad of thread accumulated in one spot because it wasn't moving. The thread wad was so big that it would. not. come. out......no matter how hard I tried, that piece of fabric was stuck to the machine. Poking it out with needles and pins wasn't working so I grabbed my old seam ripper, which makes an appearance just about every project, and started trying to pop the thread wad out from the bottom. Then SNAP, a piece of metal popped off of it and flew into the bobbin housing. 

Are you SERIOUS? 

Clover came up behind me and said that she thought I would have to cut the fabric out. So I listened to my 4 year old and finally just grabbed the scissors. Then I had to locate the thread wad that fell further into the machine someplace with the broken end of my poor seam ripper. All ended ok except for old Ripper. 

That closes KCW. I killed one sewing machine and broke my seam ripper, but we've got some cute new clothes!

Kids Clothes Week day 5

I've decided that making up your own patterns, and farting around with unpredictability and excess brain usage on kids clothes week is stupid.

Next time - I use reliable patterns. That being said, I started out with the Rae Geranium bodice and wound up changing almost everything in order to make a strappy tank tunic thing for Clover. Straps and Clover don't really mix well though, I've come to realize, and this ended up turning into a halter. 

The fabric came from one of a few shirts that were abandoned by my husband. It's a nice breathable cotton that's perfect for spring/summer. Clover took one look at the fabric before I even got started and said something like "I think that I'm not going to look so beautiful, and I need to look beautiful do I?" Pffft. I figured that if she hated it, it would just be one more thing passed down to her sister.

She seems to be ok with it now. Especially knowing she's wearing daddy's shirt. 

She insisted on wearing a skirt under her halter instead of shorts like I suggested, and then wore a cardigan on top when we went out today. With her pink rubber boots and polka dot leggings. Quite the hobo boheme chic ensemble, I say.

Violet joined in with her new goggle shirt, which she loves. 

The back is weird because I was making it with regular straps and wanted it to curve up a bit in the back by her arms. I'm choosing to just let that go. It's fun seeing her cute little back.

Somehow the story of my kids clothes week this spring has been "well it's not at all how I envisioned it, but it's still pretty cute". 

Things started going a little weird when this monsters inc night light was brought into the mix. 

I'm officially sick of sewing now!

Kids Clothes Week - Day 4

Brought to you by some sketchy shots from my phone - my results from KCW day four. This technically probably didn't take an hour. But I overdid it on other days, and it took time to go to Office Depot to get fabric sharpies. So, meh. 

Am I the only one who is way too excited by office supply stores? Even when I was a kid I loved when my parents would take me into the little Halls office supply in town. The sections with pens, pencils, art paper, kneaded erasers etc just sucked me in. Anyway.....

 

A couple of weeks ago I made this tee for Clover, who I knew probably wouldn't wear it. But the weather is getting warmer, and I was hoping she would lift her ban on short sleeves if I offered to put something cute on the front. She was less enthused than I had hoped, but her little sister is pretty wild about getting handmade clothes from me right now. So without being worn once, it was handmedowned to Violet. She then promptly put it on and dripped quesadilla grease all over it. Perfect.

It's a Made By Rae flashback skinny tee in 3T that I made out of a men's tee from Old Navy clearance. Hey, 75 cents for cotton knit aint bad. Somehow, I thought I could squeak two little tees from the one shirt, but it wasn't big enough and had short sleeves too. Oops. Guess I shouldn't have cut around the graphic on the front to save it for the second tee. 

So about the goggles, I had been floating this idea in my head for a little bit because Violet's nickname is Goggles, and I envision a pair of steampunkish goggles when I think of her. I traced an image I found on google and then made my version out of it on freezer paper, just using the bare outline of it. Jacquard fabric paint in yellow went on and mostly dried, and then I (gleefully and impatiently) ripped the freezer paper off to try embellishing the yellow blob with my brand new fabric sharpie. 

And there you have it. A shirt you will probably never see on another two year old. 

Her reaction when she saw it? "*gaaaasp* you made that for ME? Awww! Fanks Ama!" She calls me Ama. It makes me melt.