Sneak Peak - She werewolf

I will be doing a much longer post about the costume I made for my daughter this year, but I finished the hood today and just cannot stand the cuteness. She doesn't like the teeth, so I promised her I wouldn't post this on Facebook (mwahahah!) until I take the teeth off for her. But this isn't Facebook, is it? The costume has a full body with a tail, and I am thrilled with how it came out.

Child's Artist Beret Tutorial PDF

So, what's it been, a year?? And I finally found the time to learn how to make my tutorial into a PDF and make it linkable to my blog. Feeling very proud of myself actually!

So here is where you can find the one page version PDF.

And here's my daughter wearing her beret. She says it makes her feel very artistic!

On my way to 100

I hate it when so much time passes between blog posts. I feel like you all will think I'm just lazing around, doing nothing. But that's not the case. I've been busy at work getting the kids back into their school routines, starting horsebackriding lessons, and dealing with our regulator at my "day job".

But I've also been making more ConkerrCancer pillowcases. I'm up to 15, and literally have 10 waiting to be sewn up.

I'm finally getting to the end of the donated fabric. Some of it was really had to find a match for, but I dug through my stash and came up with some bright colors. It's interesting, we did seem to get a good mixture of boys and girls fabrics.





This fantastic sock monkey fabric came from Above All Fabric. My son loves sock monkeys and his favorite color these days is lime green, so he got one just like this, and the other got added to my pile for donating.



During the day, I work for a very large insurance company. They had a great volunteer day a few weeks ago, and a co-worker set up a table for us to try to get some help sewing up pillowcases. You can find Peggy's blog here. She did an amazing job setting up an appealing table, and we got 25 volunteers! We're really looking forward to seeing how many cases we can collect, and the goal is 100 for the first drop off scheduled in later October.



Next up...a she-werewolf costume. My daughter has convinced me to try to make her costume this year. I found a vintage pattern, that will have to be altered (because I could only find an 8-10 and she needs a 6), so it's quite an undertaking. I'm cutting pattern pieces this weekend, so wish me luck!

What the heck I've been up to

So I finally got to go on that vacation that I've been whining about. I took the kids and we went to visit my cousin, his wife and newly adopted son in Virginia. It was my daughter's first plane trip, and my son's second. He said he was too little to remember the first one, so he felt like this was his first too. We had a FANTASTIC time.

Our first day we spent at the National Zoo. It was close to 90 and just downright steamy. The kids are wet from the water sprays they have along the walkways to keep cool.



All that they cared about was seeing the pandas, which we did. From far away, but they were live pandas nonetheless.

The next day we spent at the Museum of Natural History and walking the National Mall. It was a wonderful day, but LONG for little legs.

The true excitement was being in a terminal at Dulles when the EARTHQUAKE hit. The whole terminal sort of slid side to side. Some pieces of tile fell from the ceiling. After a brief "huh, what was that?" my kids went right back to reading their books. Really. They are tough to impress apparently.



Now that we're home, I've been working on this blanket for a co-worker. I've made so many of these "a la Betz White Warm Fuzzies" style blankets now. They are really loved. I try to put some of my salvaged trims on each one. The blue on this one is one of my favorite and almost gone.



I usually put flannel on the back and they are just super soft and cuddly.





Last but not least, I am still on my two-per-week pace of making pillowcases for Conkerr Cancer. So far I've got nine. My goal is to donate a cool 100 over the course of the year. I'm hoping to find time to branch out and use different patterns as the year goes on. This one is just so easy and sews up so quickly, I've stuck to it for now.



What are you working on these last few days of summer??

Pillowcases for Charity - Conkerr Cancer

One of my jobs for the weekend was to sew pillowcases for Conkerr Cancer. A co-worker of mine got people at our company to donate fabric, and got a few of us signed up to sew the pillowcases. I used a great, super simple, quick to sew up pattern from the 1 Million Pillowcase Challenge website called "Roll it Up". There are loads of great free patterns there.

The first two I made are exactly the same...



Now all the rest have been washed, just need to start cutting.



The challenge with donated fabric is that you don't always have stuff that goes well together. And this charity is specifically for children, so we want as bright and cheery fabric as possible.



Conkerr Cancer commits to keep the donated cases in the local community where the donations came from. Unfortunately, we don't get to see them actually go directly to the hospital, but for what we sew, they will likely end up at CT Children's Medical Center. It makes a huge difference to me to know that the sewing will go to kids in my own community.

I'll show you the rest as soon as I get them done!

Baby steps back into embroidery & welovefrenchknots

Somewhere around a year ago, I began to notice embroidery making a serious "comeback" as sewing becomes more and more popular and mainstream again. I saw patterns for skirts, or children's clothes, embellished with some small amounts of embroidery. Then there were quilt patterns with embroidery on them. And then, full on embroidery patterns seemed to be everywhere all of a sudden.

Then my friend Bari texted me about a great new idea she had for a new blog, guess what...all about embroidery! That was it, I decided I had to give it a try. The cool thing is, I had done a ton of stitchwork of various kids as a kid. I LOVED cross stitch, and for years worked on project after project. Like so many things, when I became a teenager, it wasn't "cool" enough, so I stopped.

I was a bit intimidated, but I got some gorgeous floss from Bari's shop, some cloth, a cheap hoop, and some needles at Joann (ack!) and then I hunted around for something easy to start with. Here's what I chose.

I found some great, easy, BASIC, but cute iron on patterns at SewMamaSew, and chose this Aunt Martha's to start with.



The directions were clear, and the transfer worked super well. It was easy and took maybe a total of 5 minutes, including heating up my iron!

Here it is...my first "project" on the second stage of my embroidery life. I used only a split stitch, but by the time I was done I was feeling much more comfortable and confident enough to try other stitches.



Here's the back of my work. Not great, but not horribly messy. Again, I'm sure this will improve with practice.



One universal recommendation was to get this book. I got mine on Amazon here. I am so looking forward to my next project!



To see more about my friend Bari's new endeavor, head over to welovefrenchknots.com. She's got videos up already and it looks to be a super fun and exciting blog.

Starry Night BOM done?? It's been a YEAR already???

It's hard to believe. A year has gone by, right before my very eyes. How do I know? I bought and finished my 12th block for the Starry Night BOM quilt I started forever ago.

Here is my 12th block, and I can see a huge difference between my first and my 12th. Both my sewing skills and my quilting skills have come a long, long way in the last year.











Here are the only filler blocks I've managed to make. 2 of 13. Ouch. But I have started to cut for them, and I do think they will go quickly because I can do them "assembly line" style. Yet another technique I've learned this year.













I think the next one is my favorite block, and it was the 3rd one we made. I really love the diamond placement.





This is the photo that they gave us when we started. I'm really looking forward to getting mine all together because I think it will look so much better. The colors are so much brighter in real life.



Which one is your favorite?