Kitty Cat Mini Quilt

Yesterday I tried my first mini quilt.  I needed a little mat I could put under my cats' food dish, and I figured I could do a whole lot better than the dishtowel that was doing the job up to that point.  I dug in my scraps for some fun Heather Ross (see the kitty/seafood theme?), and accented with some orange Katie Jump Rope.  I loved how quickly this project came together - very satisfying! 

Hmm... what else in my house would look better sitting on a mat?

Homemade Wrinkle Releaser

During the school year, I am addicted to this stuff. It's perfect for mornings when I don't feel like getting out the iron. My routine is: I wake up, grab my outfit for the day (I hang all my clothes and our closet is packed, so clothes inevitably end up wrinkled in there), spray it down with Downy, then throw it in the dryer. By the time I get out of the shower everything is toasty warm and nice and flat.

So that's the upside. The downside is that a bottle of this stuff can cost as much as $8.99 a bottle, and a bottle only lasts me a month or so.




Solution? Make my own! Here are the ingredients:

-water
-fabric softener

I got my fabric softener at Dollar Tree. You only need a couple of teaspoons of fabric softener for the whole bottle. I'm pretty sure that works out to like, 2 cents a bottle.

Have I mentioned how much I love Dollar Tree?

Quick Project: Ironing Board Cover

Oh how I love it when I finish a project that is both useful and beautiful! There really wasn't much to making this new cover for my ironing board. Last winter I accidentally ironed some Wonder Under onto the board, so every time I tried to iron something over that spot it got glued down.

Which didn't work too well.

This Alexander Henry print just makes me smile and smile and smile, so it was a natural choice to replace the old cover! I just pulled off the old fabric cover and used it as a pattern to cut my new piece. I even reused the drawstring cord that holds the cover tight.

Love it!

Pattern Holder

I just wanted to show you the cute new pattern holder I just finished for my sewing room. It's a vintage mail sorter that was in pretty rough shape- the paint was unsalvageable, so I got it for relatively cheap.



I gave it a new coat of spray paint, then hot-glued pom-pom trim onto it to add a little pizzazz.

Aaahh... is there anything better than a project that turns out just right on a sunny spring day??

A Lovely Little Fruit Bowl

Sometimes I am just amazed at what you can find in thrift stores. Several months back I came across Vanessa Christenson's blog, V and Co. One of my favorite posts on her site was one where she made this adorable fruit bowl out of a couple of items she had around her house.

From then on, I kept my eyes peeled for pieces I could glue together to make something similar. Imagine my surprise Sunday when I found both exact items she used - the silver basket and the glass candle holder - at the same thrift store!! Seriously, go look at her version, then look at mine. They're the exact same! How weird is that?

So all I can guess is that either she lives near me and made a donation, or the thrift store fairies were on my side. Should you wish to make your own, it couldn't be easier. Here's how:

All you need is something that can work as a stand, something that can work as a bowl, and crazy glue. It's really fun going to Value Village and stacking various bowls and wine glasses, looking for that perfect combination.


I like this crazy glue that goes on like nail polish - so easy to use!


Press together to bond.

Voila!

Button Tack Tutorial

Well, my fancy new bulletin board is looking so pretty that I just couldn't use plain old thumbtacks on it! So tonight I got crafty and made these button tacks to use, and they really add a nice touch! Here's a tutorial if you want to make your own. Look at me! I'm tutorial cuh-raazy!

To start, you'll need:

-thumb tacks

-buttons

-hot glue gun

-embroidery thread

-needle

-ribbons, rick-rack, other embellishments (optional)

This is a nice way to showcase your fanciest buttons!

To start, sew a few stitches of embroidery thread through your buttons. To do this, thread a needle, but don't tie a knot. Start stitching back-to-front, but don't pull your thread all the way through - leave a tail hanging off the back of the button. Sew a few Xs through the button, then finish up with the needle on the back. Use the tail you left in the beginning to tie off the loose ends, then trim.

Hot-glue a thumb tack to the back of each button. Press the tack down hard, and watch it to make sure it dries flat - the tacks kind of wanted to tip sideways, which would have made my finished tacks look wonky.

While gluing, you can also add snippets of ribbon, rick-rack, or whatever to make even fancier button tacks!

Let cool and dry, and you're all done!

A Pretty Little Bulletin Board

My first project for my sewing room is done! I wanted a bulletin board where I could tack up the patterns I'm working on, color swatches, inspiration photos, etc. Naturally, I couldn't use any old bulletin board, so I whipped this up using some of Amy Butler's Love collection I got at the Sewing Expo.

I started with a bulletin board I found at Goodwill. I think it's this one from Storables, although I paid much less for mine!

I sanded up the black frame, since it was pretty shiny and I wasn't sure the paint would stick to it. Then I put on several coats of ivory-colored acrylic paint. I didn't have to worry about keeping this neat, since I knew I'd be covering the cork part.



Next, I carefully measured the cork part. I cut a piece of my fabric to the exact size (or so I thought... more on that in a minute). I made sure to iron my fabric really really well before going any further!

Then, I masked off the wooden frame with blue tape and sprayed all of the cork with a good coat of spray adhesive. I laid my fabric down and smoothed out all the bubbles.

At this point, my plan needed some readjustment. I thought I'd be done after this step, but I should have known better. Despite my careful measurement, there were still weird gaps along the border of the fabric where the cork showed through. So I went to my handy-dandy ribbon jar (I don't have any photos of these last steps because I was kind of improvising).

I found a pink grosgrain that matched pretty well, and used fabric glue to glue the ribbon all along the inside of the frame. This covered the gaps up nicely.

Last, I glued 4 little green buttons in the corners, to cover up the places where I joined pieces of ribbon.

This board looks so great against my freshly-painted white walls. It's the focal point of the room at the moment, because it's so colorful. I'm planning to give it some little wall friends soon though!

Sewing Room Finished

Hooray! The sewing room is functional (if not completely done). I still have a few more projects to go - a bulletin board for my inspiration wall, a fabric cover for the chair, curtains... but my Singer is plugged in and ready to go. Remember, I started with this:

Here are a few more images from my new favorite room in the house:

The perfect spot for a stormy day like today.

What I've Been Working On

I'm not quite ready for the big reveal yet, but here are some sneak peeks into my big project this Spring Break:





I should be done in the next day or two, and DH has even offered to let me use his work DSLR to take the final pics, so stay tuned...

Sewing Table Reclamation! (part one)

Oh man... the dangers of being impulsive and having no concept of my own limits...

Sunday morning I got a wild hair and headed out to Value Village early. I was kind of tickled that because of daylight savings they were opening (what felt to me like) a hour early. Turns out that opening time is also when all the oddballs show up... like the creepy old man buying three music boxes and a volleyball, "for his girlfriend."

Anyway, I almost overlooked this desk, hiding as it was behind two metal filing cabinets and a cd tower:



Now, this photo actually camouflages the damage done to the desk, but wow - look at that potential! I just loved the shape and size. The finish was shot, and there were some beautifully tragic painted flowers that someone had apparently tried to gouge out with a butter knife, but there were no major knicks and the whole thing was sturdy.

It was $20 (pretty steep for a Value Village!), but I had a 20% off coupon from donating items that I used, and the cashier let me layer that on top of the 40% off yellow tag sale they were doing.



The weird thing was, I knew right away what I would do with it. After a quick stop at the hardware store, I got busy. First, two coats of primer. Can I just say that I love primer with stainblockers? It meant that I didn't need to sand or strip or do a darn thing before priming! Woot!



To be continued...

Springtime Table Runner

I got kind of obsessed with vintage-looking fabrics at the sewing expo on Sunday - most of the fabric I bought was definitely vintage-inspired! This table runner was made from a set of coordinating fabrics, but it caught my eye because of the look of the fabrics.

It was incredibly quick to make.

You just need 4 fabrics:

3/4 yard of your main/backing fabric

fat quarter of the outer border fabric

fat eighth of the inner border fabric

fat eighth of the flange fabric

Cut:

Main/backing fabric: (3) 10" x 24"

Outer border fabric: (2) 10" x 9"

Inner border fabric: (2) 10" x 3.5"

Flange fabric: (2) 10" x 1.25"

(1/4" seam allowance throughout unless noted)

Iron one piece of the flange fabric lengthwise, and sew it to one piece of the main fabric, 10" edges together. Press and repeat for the other side.

Sew one piece of the inner border to the main fabric, over the flange. Press and repeat on the other side.

Sew one piece of the outer border to the inner border. Press and repeat on the other side.

To add the backing: sew the remaining 2 pieces of main fabric together, 10" edges together, leaving a 5" turning gap. Use a 1/2" seam allowance.

Put this long piece together with your front, right sides together. Sew all the way around. Turn right side out, using the 5" gap you left. Press and slip-stitch the 5" opening closed.

Put it somewhere pretty and watch the daffodils bloom!

Springtime Kitchen Towels

I've made no secret of the fact that I am no cook. Thankfully, I lucked into a husband who really loves to experiment in the kitchen, and on top of that he's darn good at it.

To make up for the fact that I can barely boil water, I try to make sure he's always armed with the equipment he needs to get the job done. This includes lots and lots of dishtowels. Any chef will tell you that a cook is only as good as the number of towels he has available, not just for wiping things down but for covering dishes, protecting hands from the heat of the oven, and keeping countertops from scorching under hot pans.

About a month ago, I found these polka-dotted kitchen towels at Macy's:



The problem is, I like a tidy kitchen, and dishtowels laying all over the place does not fit into that vision. We don't have a good towel rack/hook in our very small space, so there's never a neat place to put towels. That leads to a lot of wadded up towels strewn all over the countertops.

But no more! Kleio's Belly to the rescue with her tutorial for hanging dishtowels. I was able to take my three very large (20" x 30") towels and cut them up to make three very functional new springtime towels. These will loop over the bar on my oven and button there securely.



Hooray for no more towel wads!

Organizing the Mail

Alright, be honest now. How many of you, like me, have a mail pit - a place where mail is dropped and forgotten? I get home, my hands are full of groceries, I have to use the bathroom, and everything just sort of gets dumped on the dining room table. Of course I sort through the groceries - after all, food must be refrigerated. But once I've scanned through the mail to see whether there are any packages, paychecks, or birthday cards, I pretty much just leave it there, where it mocks me for the next week or so. Eventually I'll do a quick sort through the pile, recycling junk mail, searching for bills, and shredding credit card applications, but 29 days out of the month the pit is there.

Enter Gina, of Bright and Blithe, and her fabulous mail sorter tutorial. This was a very simple project, and her tutorial even includes the printable labels you see above. Essentially, you are just creating a long pouch, then dividing it into 4 sections with rows of stitches.

Gina used unbleached cotton, which looks the same on both sides, and so her sorter was unlined. I used a cotton print that looks ugly on the back (which would become the insides of the pockets), so I lined mine with a pretty white eyelet cotton that I found at Goodwill.

She also uses a long piece of elastic to turn this into a sort of necklace for a door. I added fabric tabs to mine, so that it can just hang on a wall.

I mounted it on the wall right by the front door, and have notified the husband that there's a new system in place, so here's hoping that I've seen the last of the mail pit!

Personalized Bathmat

I just put the finishing touches on my new bathmat, which has taken me much longer than I expected it to. I got the idea from the tutorial at Montessori by Hand, and I only added a few variations along the way. However, I decided to document the process by taking photos along the way. So... this really isn't a tutorial, it's just a photo essay of this project!

To start, I had fun, fun, fun picking out fabrics at Pacific Fabrics. They've had a display of aqua and spring-green fabrics that I've been eyeing for awhile, and then I added in a little pink to add pop. The two polka-dot fabrics are left over from sewing Ellie, and the white fabric with the blue flowers was left over from a pair of pajama pants I made.

Next, I made a 2.5" square template out of cardstock (well, actually an old Lean Cuisine box), and used it to trace and cut billions and billions of squares out of my fabrics. Actually, I cut enough to make a 13 x 9 array. The tutorial I was using called for an 11 x 8 array, but my husband and I both have huge feet (more on that later), so I knew we'd need a larger mat.

Right after I finished this step, I went out and bought myself a rotary cutter. My hand was killing me after cutting all those squares with scissors.

Next, I laid out all of my squares the way I wanted them.

In the tutorial on Montessori by Hand, she warns you not to lay your squares out in a place where your cat might want to hang out. That was sound advice - I should have taken it.

Once the squares are just right, pick them up one row at a time, in order, and take them to your sewing machine. Stitch the rows together in strips, with a 1/4" seam allowance. After each strip is stitched, be sure to return it to the array so that you don't forget how you laid things out.

After I stitched each row, I ironed the seams down so that everything would lay flat. The tutorial said to iron the seams to one side, and again, that was sound advice. I thought that ironing them flat would make things look neater, but actually it just made it harder to sew over the seams. Things ended up looking pretty lumpy and gnarly:

About halfway through I wised up and started ironing the seams to one side, and it looked much better:

Once the quilting step was done, I started embroidering two pairs of footprints on the bathmat. I wanted mine and my husbands, side by side. Here's where I needed a larger bathmat. My feet are size 11, and my husband's are 15, so adding the extra rows and columns made sure that everything fit.

I used an air erasable pen to trace our feet, then got to stitching. I like the subtlety of the white thread.

The front was now all finished - time for the back. I bought a nice white towel at Goodwill for $1.99 - my first adventure in repurposing fabrics.

I cut off the edges of the towel, as well as those little stripes on each end. That made everything lay flatter. My fancy new rotary cutter came in really handy for this step, as did my gridded self-healing mat!

I laid the top facedown on the flat towel piece, pinned, and stitched all the way around with about a 3/8" seam allowance, leaving a gap for turning.

Then I trimmed the towel down to match the front.

Last, I turned the whole thing right-side out and top-stitched all the way around to make everything look finished. I didn't stitch around the footprints as recommended in the tutorial, because it looked hard. :)

Here's the final product!

A few lessons I learned along the way:

-Rotary cutters rock.

-Air erasable pens are nice, but mine started to disappear really fast, so I had to work quickly.

-Feet look weird, especially toes.

-Quilters are the most patient people in the world!