Runaway October

I have decided that I must have this apron pat­tern and then I must make at least 7 of them…

Isn’t it gor­geous? And it also can con­ve­niently tie in the front and be all cute and such.

This lovely lit­tle num­ber is the brain­child of Meg at Montes­sori by Hand, and I’ve been drool­ing over it since she released a pic­ture of her first pro­to­type. I even tried to get in on the pre-order but money was too tight. Then I checked out her Etsy shop — Montes­sori By Hand — and found even more adorable pat­terns. So many pat­terns, so lit­tle time.

But don’t fret my dears. The Apro­nista is hav­ing a draw­ing for your very own Emme­line Apron Pat­tern. Yes, that means free! Just drop by and leave a com­ment and you could make one of these beau­ties for yourself!

I usu­ally stick with some­thing tried and true like Orange Chicken, Sweet and Sour Pork or Beef with Broc­coli. Absolutely noth­ing with seafood. I don’t trust seafood in Arizona.

It’s rain­ing again. While it’s so amaz­ing to have this much rain in Ari­zona, it kinda ruins plans… like my plan to get Declan dressed and let him roam the back­yard with Fable all day. Yeah, that didn’t hap­pen. We did all go to the gro­cery store today. I had the boys in their match­ing Skullys and we were approached and told that I should sell them. Do you think any­one would buy a “recy­cled” hat? Maybe they’ll sell bet­ter because they are recycled?

Matt and I talked about get­ting some things posted to my Etsy store, but this is where I must make a heart­felt plea. If any of you are con­sid­er­ing pur­chas­ing any­thing for us, please let it be a new dig­i­tal cam­era. There’s no way I could sell any­thing with the low qual­ity pic­tures that my mom’s cam­era takes. Well, I could try I guess. You can find our “cho­sen” cam­eras in this post or view My Wists in the side­bar (but any­thing that takes crisp pic­tures will do), or if you have any artis­tic ideas to make my cur­rent pho­tos work please let me know! I’d greatly appre­ci­ate it.

Oh yes!! I must post about my Valentine’s. We’re tight on money, so we decided to make all of our gifts, some­thing we really should strive to do any­way. Matt got his favorite din­ner and an IOU for his favorite cook­ies — Oat­meal Choco­late Chip Cook­ies. I got a beau­ti­ful card and a pro­gram. Yep, a pro­gram from my in-house lov­able Linux guru/nerd. See?

Isn’t that just the sweet­est thing!?

If there are any fel­low nerds out there who’d like the source code for the pro­gram, lemme know. You should be able to fig­ure it out your­self though.

We’re sup­posed to get our taxes done soon, and we’re already day­dream­ing about what to do with the return money. Real­ity is telling us that we need to keep it and just use it to live off of but we can always dream big right?

In all hon­esty though I am hop­ing that both Matt and I can splurge a lit­tle on our­selves. I really really really would like to get my hair done again. I was secretly hop­ing that Matt had some how found a hair­styl­ist and befriended them before Valen­tines in hopes of finagling a free cut and color out of it. Alas, it did not hap­pen and my mane of bi-color curly locks still hangs sadly from my head. I’m afraid to chop it myself. :S

I also have a run­ning list of projects I’d like to com­plete, includ­ing but not lim­ited to:

• New Iron­ing Board Cover
• Clothes Pin Bag
• Some­thing for my nephew that his mom wont tear up or throw away. His birth­day is soon
• Some more “recy­cled” items
• Duct-Tape dress­ing form
• Apron (or two)
• Try out some of the Bur­daStyle pat­terns, as well as some vin­tage pat­terns, I’ve acquired. I think I’m on a jumper ben­der. I’m afraid to find out if Jumpers will work with my body shape or not.
• Don’t tell any­one, but I also am slowly piec­ing together ideas for a quilt. Get it… piec­ing? Ha!

Don’t hold your breathe though, things take time in this house.

On my final note, I’d like to leave you with this link. Have fun!

Step One: Choose an accept­able shirt — such as the long-sleeved one hid­ing in the back of your hus­bands dresser that you’ve seen worn once for 5 min­utes. Even then it was obvi­ous that the sleeves were much too short. Make sure it’s stretchy and warm — knits and fleece are great for this.

Step Two: Mea­sure your child’s, or your own, head. Take two mea­sure­ments — One around the biggest part of the head, where the brim of a hat nor­mally sits. The sec­ond mea­sure­ment is taken from between the eyes over the head to the base of the skull. Don’t worry about being exact, we mainly are mak­ing sure that we make it big enough to fit prop­erly on the nog­gin and isn’t too small.

Then add an inch for seam allowances to both mea­sure­ments. If you are going to reuse the seam along the bot­tom of the T-Shirt these are your final mea­sure­ments. If you need to add your own hem, add an extra 1″ to the eye to nape measurement.

For exam­ple:

Reusing hem — Declan’s head cir­cum­fer­ence is 20″ and the eye-to-nape mea­sure­ment is 15″, so after adding seam allowances I have a mea­sure­ment of 21″ x 16″. Now divide that mea­sure­ment by 2, which equals 10.5″ x 8″.

Not reusing hem — Declan’s head cir­cum­fer­ence is 20″ and the eye-to-nape mea­sure­ment is 15″, so after adding seam allowances I have a mea­sure­ment of 21″ x 16″. Then I add an addi­tional inch to the eye-to-nape mea­sure­ment which is now 21″ x 17″. Now divide that mea­sure­ment by 2, which equals 10.5″ x 8.5″.

Step Three: Lay out the shirt you found and cut two rec­tan­gles using the size we deter­mined above. If you don’t have the child around to mea­sure, Declan has a pretty stan­dard sized 2yo head. I like to iron the shirt out flat and cut the two pieces at the same time using a rotary cut­ter. Make sure to feign inno­cence when your hus­band finds you shred­ding his old “paint­balling shirt”. You’ve never seen him go paint­balling anyway.

Step Four: With wrong sides together, sew together one long side of the rec­tan­gle. Now grab a ruler and make a mark 3/4″ in on the unsewn long side of the rec­tan­gle. Make another mark 1/4″ in at the top. Con­nect the marks using a ruler to deter­mine your seams for the short sides of the rec­tan­gle. This, along with the stan­dard 1/4″ seam, will ensure that the skully will fit around the head with­out gap­ping. Sew up the seams you just drew.

Now your skully should start to take shape.

Step Five: Fold the open­ing up by 1/4″ or what­ever you would like. Press and sew to form the bot­tom hem. Turn right side out. Viola! It’s seri­ously as sim­ple as that.

To make the lit­tle ears, cut some strips from what­ever fab­ric — I like to use strips of the knit T-Shirt because it will stop unrav­el­ing if you stretch it out — and tie them at the cor­ners using a square knot. The size of the ear deter­mines the final shape of the skully, though they all look the same while being worn.

Lit­tle adorn­ments are easy to make if you hap­pen to have some HeatNBond lay­ing around. Basi­cally just cut out your shape from a coör­di­nat­ing fab­ric, iron the HeatNBond to the wrong side, peel the back­ing and iron it onto the Skully in the desired loca­tion. I then go around the edges with a Zigzag stitch just to make sure it stays on and give it a cute lit­tle flair.

You can also use one long rec­tan­gle and fold it in half so there is no seam in the top.

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