Runaway October

I have a really bad habit of doing noth­ing dur­ing the sum­mer. You might have noticed that the heat is a cen­tral part of my last cou­ple posts.

It’s really a cen­tral part of our lives from May­ish to Augustish. Even in the house it’s just too easy to veg out and keep cool.

BUT! I have done some stuff lately. I swear. I have proof!

I made this clock for my brother a while back, for his birthday.

It’s pretty hard to pho­to­graph this, but oh well. I got lucky enough that a local BMX shop gave me the chain­ring, after I offered to buy one. Funny enough they had a sim­i­lar clock dis­played in their front window.

The tuto­r­ial is here. Mine is not nearly as cool, but hey I was work­ing with what I had.

I also made a cover for my sewing machine. I fig­ured that plas­tic one it came with wasn’t good enough for the new craft room. (More on that soon.) Also, the melted hole in it from the iron didn’t help any.

I just used the dimen­sions from the old cover, plus seam allowances, and threw together a rec­tan­gle with ties on it. I backed it with flan­nel, because it seemed like the thing to do. Isn’t that fab­ric gor­geous? I got it on a whim at a local mill end store. Kick­ing myself for not buy­ing more.

Sewing Machine Cover tutorials:

• Sparkle Power! — This is pretty much exactly what I did.
• Sew Inspired
• Chez Lars­son

Last, but not least, a new iron­ing board cover. I love mak­ing these things. It makes me actu­ally want to iron. Yuck.

This is also more fab­ric I picked up on a whim. This time from IKEA. Their uphol­stery fab­ric is the per­fect length from reg­u­lar iron­ing boards.

I always leave the old cov­ers on, for padding. Some­times I’ll throw a layer of fleece in between too if I have big enough scraps.

Here are a cou­ple iron­ing board cover tutorials:

• Stop Star­ing and Start Sewing
• Clear­ly­tan­gled
• Com­muning with Fabric

That’s it for now. I hope to have more soon. I ordered some good­ies.

What are you work­ing on lately, or do you have any inter­est­ing tuto­ri­als to share?

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(As always, click for big­ger pictures.)

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I used a pat­tern from Hip Hand­bags and love the way it turned out. I’ll def­i­nitely be using the pat­tern over again, as both my mom and myself really liked the size and shape.

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Only prob­lem is that it’s more of a medium purse than a mar­ket tote.

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I went ahead and put a reg­u­lar dou­ble welt pocket in it any­way, using match­ing pip­ing from the out­side. The lin­ing is the Sage Kleo from Alexan­der Henry’s Fash­ion­ista line that I am totally in love with.

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I totally love the way it came out, but I real­ized I could really use one of those itty bitty mini irons. I just could not get the wrin­kles out of the bot­tom cor­ners. It got pretty man­gled try­ing to sew the bot­tom on. Appar­ently my machine does not like tight cor­ners when using buck­ram and heavy inter­fac­ing. Who knew?

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I hope you enjoy Eliz­a­beth. I’ll get it in the mail as soon as I have some­one to watch the kids!

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On another note, here’s the iron­ing board cover I did recently. Cute, no?

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I really need to work on tak­ing pic­tures indoors. Sum­mer sun is just too harsh to take stills outside.

“Phew!” with a dra­matic swipe across his forehead.

I’ve actu­ally been pretty busy of late. Remem­ber those 17 loads of laun­dry stuffed on the couch that I men­tioned? ALL folded, hung, sorted, orga­nized and put away!! After 3 weeks it was hard to come up with excuses for why it was still there. But I’ve also com­pleted 2 more aprons — one for Grandma Betty’s birth­day, along with match­ing place­mats and one for Nicky’s birth­day. I finally got a new iron­ing board cover made. It’s super sim­ple but took a day because of the nooblets… I mean the kidlets. (Does any­one remem­ber Sixlets? Those were awe­some!) I started a third apron for Ann today. Next up is my bag for the Mar­ket Tote Swap. I have the idea all worked out in my head, I just hope I can trans­fer it to real­ity easily.

So after all that’s done I’m going to start work­ing on some smock­ing and shirring and post­ing items to my Etsy shop. I promise. No more swaps or birth­days and what­not. I’ve found some gor­geous designer prints mixed in with the cheapy cot­tons at JoAnns and have totally scored bolts of them with 50% off coupons. I’m afraid to cut some of them up.

I’ve also been comtem­plat­ing get­ting a cot­tage license to sell the aprons that I’ve been mak­ing. The thing is it’s $100 for a year but I’m not sure if I could cover the cost with any profit I make, ya know? The license gives me the right to make and sell any­thing by Sew Lib­er­ated, for­mally Montes­sori by Hand, where as now I can only make and give such as all that I’ve made so far. It takes me about a week of fid­dling to make an apron because of… interup­tions. The hard­est part is choos­ing the fab­rics — I always worry that some­one will get their apron and go “WTH was she think­ing? This isn’t me at all!” I’m debat­ing on just going it alone, or using some­one else’s pat­terns. Any thoughts?

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Here’s Grandma’s Apron. The reverse is a very pretty white Poppy print.