Count me in!

Count me in!! I've joined the Sew 5 Challenge over at Creative Maven!

The point of the challenge is to use the month of September to complete 5 sewing projects and blog about them. Molly, The Creative Maven, came up with the challenge as a way to motivate her to complete some of the many projects on her must-sew list.

I can sooo relate to the ever-growing project list and the need to mark some items off of it. This is why I'm going to join her for the month and finish 5 of my own projects and blog about them here. It's like a classier way of saying "Git 'er done!"

My own must-sew list grows every day. I'm sure it has a little bit of something to do with my gig at Craft Gossip and the hundreds (literally) of sewing blogs that I follow. I see someone doing something cool and I think, "Ooooh, I need to make one of those, too!" And then I see another cool project, and another, and another...

And then there are the donations to my project pile from friends and family members. Those stretched or stained t-shirts than can be made into something fabulous with a little bit of recutting or applique. The must-sew list grows...

First on my must-sew-in-September list is a t-shirt dress for my nieces 5th birthday. She wears the same size as my daughter, so this should be fairly straightforward. I'll post pictures as soon as I git'er done.



Toodles,

Lookie what Livvie made for her Grandan!

I have no idea why it is that I am perpetually unprepared for people's birthdays. It's not that I don't know ahead of time that they're coming up, that I should make a card, or get a gift or do something -anything- in preparation, but somehow I'm all the time rushing around at the last minute.

Yesterday was no exception as we prepared for my father's birthday. I had asked Liv the week before what she wanted to give her Grandan. Her response was a handmade t-shirt with a rocket and saturn painted on it.

This was my first time I used freezer paper stenciling and I am sooo hooked! It was easy to trace through so I was able to reproduce the exact shapes that Liv drew in her concept picture. The waxy back of the freezer paper ironed down to seal the edges of the stencil so we got nice, crisp lines (for the most part).

It turned out reall pretty awesome if I say so myself. I am lovin' that funky rocket and the wonky Saturn rings!

And like any post-crafting analysis, I'll follow my bragging with a list of all the things that didn't go quite so well.

1. Timing. Last minute crafting with a child is sooo stressful! I should learn not to do this to myself? We didn't even have time to wrap it. We took it to my sister's house still wet and let it dry during dinner.

2. Stingy with the freezer paper. Because freezer paper is so expensive??? I have no idea what I was thinking. I left enough a deep enough margin if I were doing the painting, but children don't have the concentration or fine motor control to keep things in the lines as well. There were several places with paint drips or brush slips that could have been prevented if I had left more freezer paper around the images.

3. Dark t-shirt. The navy made an awesome background for the space scene, but it also showed off alllll of those paint drips.

4. Melty freezer paper. Somehow I transfered some of the waxy stuff from the back of the freezer paper to the plate of my iron, which then burned and transferred to the t-shirt. The navy blue shirt. So it looks like someone wiped their snot above the sun. Luckily it seemed to chip off pretty easily - it should wash out.

5. Cheapy paint. Back in the day when stenciling was all the 1980's rage, we used cheapy craft paint on t-shirts all the time with great results. But it seems that the manufacturers have been watering down the paints since then. My textile paints worked great, but I only had two or three colors of them. The others were watery and runny. They seeped under edge of the freezer paper on the Saturn rings, and they took coats and coats and coats and still didn't cover. I finally gave up and put a base coat of white textile paint, and then covered it with a second coat of cheapy craft paint in the color I wanted.

And yet, in spite of all the self-wrought challenges, it DIDN'T turn out to be a craft fail. Quite the opposite. I'm proud of how Liv and I worked together to create her design on a shirt for her Grandan.

Oh, and in case you were wondering... My father LOVED his shirt!

Toodles,

This is what's holding me up

Thank you for the well wishes! The headache finally lifted on the fifth day when the front came through. And oh, what a huge weather change it was - one day it was in the 90s, and the next morning when I went to go get the paper it was actually chilly. No wonder I hurt so badly during the build-up.

Before the headache began I brought out a bunch of photos and pretty papers and made a huge mess of things getting some scrapbook pages put together. And then I started hurting and so everything stopped. Now that I'm feeling better I'm out of scrapbook mode and have a pile of sewing projects demanding my attention. But my craft table looks like this:

Bonus shot of the pile of knit scraps:


And my kitchen table looks like this:

Must get this finished! Little girl clothes and Barbie clothes and birthday gifts and more are calling my name.

Toodles,

Nothing crafty to show today...

...thanks to my headache that is now reaching into its fourth day. Yes, FOURTH day. I am so ready for it to be gone now.

So instead I give you a picture of my assistant, who makes the mornings I spend on the couch with the laptop doing school work and blogging (and lately, a sinus headache to boot) a little bit sweeter.

Toodles,

The child clearly needed another dress....

...like she needs a hole in her head.

And yet I keep making her dresses! If it weren't so much fun, I suppose I could stop. But when a couple of hours will yield a special new something for my girl, I just can't control myself.

It was supposed to have a peace sign on it, but when I got the applique shaped layed out on the tie-dye it just didn't look right. So I changed it to say "SWEET" instead.

I think it suits her.

Check out the sparkly kitty mask that her Aunt Catherine found for her.

Little girl LOVES her new dress! She tried it on Friday night and insisted that she sleep in it. She wore it all day Saturday and Sunday as well.

Toodles,

I don't know why I didn't think of this before

Lately - as in the last several years - I've been on a sewing kick. But I also like papercrafts, whether it's scrapbooking or collage or cardmaking. I was even a Stampin Up! demonstrator back in the day. And just like sewists hoard fabric, papercrafters hoard paper. Lots of it.

I have a good sized studio. But when you have to find space to store sewing machines, sewing notions, scrapbooking supplies, ribbons, yarns, collage materials, rubber stamps, ink pads, and lots and lots of paper, the space becomes quite a bit smaller. Every nook and cranny is used for storage. Take my 8 1/2" x 11" paper, for example. It's stored in milk crates underneath my craft table.

See?



The hanging files are a great way to hold my paper. They keep the paper from getting bent, but they're also easy to flip through. But under the table?

Every time I want some paper I have to either lean over really really far, or clear out enough space on the floor in front of the table to sit. Not exactly convenient.

I would have moved the paper, but there wasn't another surface in my room large enough to hold the crates.

And then it hit me. What if my paper wasn't craft paper, but important files that I needed to access? I'd keep it in a filing cabinet.

Of course!





The file cabinet takes up very little floor space. And it's soooo much easier to get to than on the floor! And better protected from the boxes that usually end up getting stacked on top of the paper crates.

I have no idea why I didn't think of this before.

Toodles,

More Livvie art

One of my favorite parts of the day is when I pick Liv up from school. That happy grin on her face as she recognizes her mama standing at the top of the steps. That excited look as she runs up the steps to meet me. And then when I get home I dig through her backpack for the artifacts of her day.

Being a first grader (can't believe I'm typing those words already!), the backs of all of her worksheets are covered with artwork. Her pictures are joy to me. They're a peek at the world through her eyes. What is the thing in her mind at that moment? Her perspective, her color choice, the details she chooses.

Here are a couple of my joys from yesterday.

A mama kitty nursing a kitten. She has a stuffed kitty with that has places for three little stuffed kittens to nurse. Notice the "pink magnets" that she included. hehehe...

And a "rainbow land of kitties."

What a happy, colorful, feline world my little girl lives in.

Toodles,