spring kcwc, day #1: plain jane sailboat pants

KCWC has begun!

I decided to kick things off with something simple and practical – a pair of spring pants to match everything. This is my third time making the Oliver + S Sailboat pants, and it’s one of my favorite patterns – Lila lived in her Sailboats last spring and summer. And since she actually wore them (it’s getting rare around here nowadays, her wearing something I make), I didn’t deviate much from the pair I made last April, just sized them up.

Last year’s were definitely starting to show their wear. A little snug around the middle, too.

There, that’s better:

This time I hid some spots and butterflies inside and used square buttons, just to spice things up a little bit.

She says she likes them, so I’m calling Day #1 a success!

Pattern: Oliver + S Sailboat pants, size 3T

Fabric: Robert Kaufman Carolina Chambray in Light Indigo Washed (very soft and lightweight – my much overused favorite!) with Lizzy House’s Hello Pilgrim Butterfly facings

Okay, on to the next project!

spring kcwc!

You wouldn’t know it from the weather around here, but it’s spring, and that means the next installment of Elsie Marley‘s Kids Clothes Week Challenge!

The challenge is to make time to sew kids clothes for an hour a day, every day for a whole week. I had lots of fun participating last fall and may even have put in a little overtime. Here’s what I made during fall KCWC:

paper airplanes * lazy days skirt * brooke dress * school days coat * simple skirt

I must admit, the coat is really the only thing that gets any wear. But I did spend the majority of the week on it, so that’s fine by me.

I’m hoping to get some spring basics sewn for Lila this time, since she’s outgrown everything from last spring. I have a small stack of patterns traced and cut out – all Oliver + S so far, and somehow everything is blue (including my pin cushion and scissors, apparently). I don’t want to get too ambitious, but there are a couple other patterns I’d love to squeeze in if I have the time.

Anyway, can’t wait to see what everyone’s sewing next week. Sifting through the Elsie Marley flickr pool is half the fun!

getting crafty

Much like myself, Lila has a special fondness for all things crafty. I have zero confidence that she could pick a tennis ball out of a line up, but she can distinguish between my pinking shears and my scallop shears in seconds flat. In fact, it’s really my craft supplies that she prefers, and she seems to be happiest when she’s making a huge mess. She’s been known (all within the last week) to spill an entire tube a glitter, glue her fingers together on purpose, apply stickers in the most inappropriate of places, take scissors to an entire package of band-aids, and paint herself from finger tips to shoulders (that’s every time the paints come out, actually). Should I be supervising more closely?

Anyway, I think the whole arm-painting thing is why I was drawn to the long-sleeved art smock from Oliver + S Little Things to Sew.

When I bought the book it was the project that appealed to me most, and my friend Trinh made one for Lila last spring. It gets a lot of wear, and does indeed prevent her from painting her arms in their entirety, since she can only access her hands. Foiled!

That’s the one Trinh made for us. It’s in the wash a lot, so I figured I could justify making one myself. I made the medium (size 4-6) so it’s big on her now, but it’ll last a long time.

The main fabric is Raindrops on Posies from Alexander Henry – I bought it to cover the kiddie table for cloud cookie decorating at Lila’s birthday party…

….but then I thought the raindrops looked like colorful drops of paint, and pairing them with these little scissors from Cosmo Cricket seemed like a good art smock combo.

The pattern has some nice details – French seams make it clean and tidy on the inside, and it closes in the back with either Velcro or two snaps (I went with pearl snaps, my favorite).

And while we’re on the subject of craftiness, have you checked out Crafty Chloe?

Our copy was yet another gift from Trinh, and an immediate favorite read. It’s such a cute story, about a girl who also probably can’t identify a tennis ball, but solves all sort of problems with her craft supplies. The illustrations by Heather Ross are delightful.

Highly recommended if you’ve got a crafty kid at home….or you might just enjoy it yourself!

sleepy bunny goody bags

I saw this pin pop up all over the place yesterday, which led me to Mer Mag’s “Easy Bunny Candy Pouch” – and before I knew it I had some felt bunny pouches of my own.

It was exactly the kind of project I was in the mood for – there’s a printable template, I had all the supplies on hand, and each little pouch took about 10 minutes from start to finish. Embroidering the bunny faces was fun, and you can customize them any way you like – I used the sleepy eyes from the template and added a little mouth, then cut some fabric scraps for inside the ears.

These were so simple to make – cut out a back and front, stitch the little face, and sew the two pieces together, leaving a gap between the ears so you can fill it with treats.

Then tie the ears together, and your bunny pouch is complete!

I haven’t shopped for Easter treats yet so I plumped up the pouches with felt balls for the purposes of these photos. I’m hoping to come up with something besides candy to stick inside – Lila has her first dentist appointment tomorrow and I’m a little nervous…she definitely inherited my sweet tooth. But even if it’s not candy, I think it’ll be fun to get these out every year and fill them with some sort of treat.

Here’s another link to the original bunny pouch post, where you can find the template and instructions. They’re so quick – there’s still plenty of time before Easter to make one (or a whole slew of them) if you’re in the mood!

tiny strikes again: the snuggler

This could be my most ridiculous project to date, but from the moment I finished those first Simple Sewing for Baby Snugglers, I knew I had to work out a doll-sized version. In fact, I’ve had trouble thinking about much else. I got it figured out just in time for Lila’s birthday.

Now the easy way to do this would’ve been to print out a scaled-down version of the pattern from Craftzine, but try as I might, I couldn’t get my printer to cooperate. So with Baby Girl and the original pattern pieces as guides, I sketched out a 12-inch doll-sized snuggler pattern.

I sewed up two – one for Baby Girl, and one for Baby Boy.

Don’t they look snug and cozy all swaddled up?

The snugglers are constructed (and function) exactly like the original,

just in miniature.

I’ve been talking about this project for months now and even started it a few times, and last week Lila randomly asked me, “Where’s my baby’s snuggler?” I told her I was working on it, and asked if she thought Baby Girl would still like to have one. To which she replied, “Oh yes, I think she’s really going to like it. I think she’s going to freak out.” I couldn’t ask for a better reaction than that!

If this isn’t the look of a doll freaking out, I don’t know what is…

cloud crayons

Lila is three today!

Yesterday we celebrated with some friends and family. I haven’t sifted through the party photos yet, but last week I made some party favor crayons – they were way easier and more fun than I’d anticipated, so I wanted to spread the word!

From the moment I saw this DIY crayon post on Homemade by Jill, I knew that somewhere down the line I’d be making crayons for one of Lila’s birthday parties. And when I found cloud shaped candy molds, I figured this was the year to try it. It turns out that candy molds come in more shapes than you could ever imagine – there are pages and pages of them to choose from. Endless possibilities.

I didn’t get a lot of great photos of the process, but everything you need to know is in the post I linked to above. Here’s the general idea:

Start by peeling your crayons, breaking them into smaller pieces, and separating them by color.

I enlisted my mom and Lila to help with the peeling – it was the most time consuming part of the process, but we made it our after-breakfast activity for the day. Also, Crayola = good for peeling. Rose Art = pretty much impossible to peel. I used our existing tub of crayons rather than buying a new ones, and we happened to have a set of 120 Crayolas and some random Rose Arts. We gave up on the Rose Arts pretty early on.

Your trash can will look like this:

Next, melt a handful of similarly colored crayons. I melted mine in an aluminum can sitting in a pot (don’t use your nicest pot, it gets a little messy) with a couple of inches of boiling water – double boiler style. You can use the same can throughout the process without washing it in between – just start with your lightest color and move through in rainbow order. That way it won’t matter if a little of the previous color ends up in the next batch.

I used a wooden chopstick to stir, then poured the melted crayons into the molds. When they’ve set they’ll pop right out – placing the mold in the refrigerator speeds up the process, but even sitting out on the counter they didn’t seem to take more than 5 minutes or so to set. By the time my next batch had melted on the stove, the ones in the mold were almost ready to come out. There really wasn’t much waiting around at all.

And before you know it, you’ve got cloud shaped crayons! I’d say we peeled maybe 90-100 crayons, and I got about 45 clouds – so about two crayons per cloud.

I packaged them up into sets of six or so, and made little cloud notebooks (and cloud cookies) to go with them.

Okay, now I can cross homemade crayons off my list and move on to the next thing….

lila’s birthday dress

Oh, this dress.

It’s consumed a lot of energy, mental and otherwise, but I’ll spare you the details. This is the finished product, and I’m sticking to it. It’s not the finished product I’d envisioned, but it’s been a good lesson in being okay with things as they are, and not making myself crazy. Because I think it may have been heading in that direction.

The pattern is the Oliver + S Ice Cream dress, minus the notches, in a 2T. I made the shirt version last spring and have thoroughly enjoyed the pattern both times – it’s so smart and simple, with lots of fun possibilities for variation. This time I used various shot cottons (aqua for the dress, steel for the band) and pieced the pocket yokes (in steel, sprout, mushroom, ice, and raspberry). The shot cotton is soft and light and flowy, which fits with this pattern, I think.

Here it is before the madness began. I had a million different ideas for how to finish this dress, and tried several of them, but nothing really worked.

Then I got tired of thinking about it and added the gray band to the bottom. Lila’s happy that her dress is blue and has treat pockets, and that’s good enough for me!