Category: General Sewing

craftmas, Cross-stitch and Embroidery, General Sewing

On the fourth day of Craftmas…

wittychild

…my true love gave to me: a shirt with a duck who’s daffy!

I am so!  Freaking!  Excited!  about this one.  This was a labour of love which, despite all odds, was finished around 10:00 on December 23…with a day and change left to go.  No early-Christmas-morning stitching for this honey badger!

If you’ve been reading this blog for a while, you’ll know that I have a tendency to stitch up railway logos onto the pockets of shirts for my dad.  (Last year’s offering, for example.)  After scooping up an out-of-print book of Looney Tunes cross-stitch designs online, I thought I’d try something different.

“Daffy Drops the Ball” is done in three pieces, which makes it three times as annoying to stitch all centred-and-straight and whatnot.

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I love the colour of the shirt, and how the black pops on it!  I am less fond of the fact that unlike simply stitching on the pocket (which I take off and then reattach), working on the shirt itself meant I couldn’t access it from the left, which is a real problem for this southpaw.  To stitch Daffy and the bowling ball, I actually worked holding the shirt upside-down, and somehow it’s all reasonably lined up.

Close-up of the design:

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I can’t wait for him to unwrap it!

Merry Christmas, everybody! 😀

craftmas, General Sewing, Other Crafts

On the third day of Craftmas…

wittychild

…my true love gave to me: a hedgehog to hang on the tree!

I’ve probably mentioned on here before that my mother collects all things hedgehog.  As such, I try to accommodate her on special occasions: there have been hedgehog birthday cards, Mother’s Day cards, cakes, t-shirts…

Fast-forward to the Christmas crafting season, when I realized the project I had originally picked out was simply not going to be finished by December 25.  (That’s okay, folks, her birthday is coming up shortly, so I like to think of it as having a head start on that.)  While entering random keywords on Etsy at work one day, I stumbled across trellis & thyme, who, wonder of wonders, boasted a PDF hedgehog ornament pattern in their shop.

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It’s difficult to tell in the photo, but he has little prickles embroidered all around his front side.  The pattern instructions indicated these should be placed randomly, but…I can’t handle random.  So instead, they run in two staggered-but-kinda-concentric circles around his underside.

As always, thanks for looking – and may your holiday crafting be running on-schedule.  🙂

General Sewing, Other Crafts

Tin roof, rusted

wittychild

Back in February, I was sick.  Not seriously, but my cold/flu-like symptoms showed up around Valentine’s Day and eventually caused me to miss five days of work – and that never happens.  I spent a lot of time spaced out on the couch, or heading down for a 12:30 nap (I miss the naps), and I discovered that fuzziness from sleeping poorly, when combined with fuzziness from a cocktail of over-the-counter and prescription medications, makes me prone to buying stuff online with little regard for whether I need it.  I bought this, for example.  And when I got an e-mail from Etsy touting last-minute instant-download Valentine’s gifts, well, that was just asking for trouble.

I bought a Love Elephant.

Whyyyy?  I certainly didn’t need another stuffed animal, or another sewing project.  But hey, there I was, with my freshly printed PDF pattern.  I promptly “filed” it and forgot about it (hooray for NeoCitran!), until my friend was over one evening some time later and saw it.  He had recently been through a bad breakup – that is to say, they’re definitely over, but she keeps popping up like a bad penny – and I thought he could use something to cuddle, so it was off to the fabric store for us to find a suitable colour of fleece.

The end result:

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The recipient has named him “Cupcake”.  But before he went to his new home, he spent some time exploring the jungles of the back yard.

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I’m really quite pleased with the finished product.  I made a few changes: for example, I was too lazy to add the extra centimetre recommended for a seam allowance, so he is oh-so-slightly smaller than he ought to be, but with no adverse effects.  And because I was using a slightly more “masculine” colour and left the hearts off the ears, “Love Elephant” didn’t seem appropriate, so I came to think of him as the “Love Pach” (as in, pachyderm), which might have been a mistake as it led to a B52s earworm like you wouldn’t believe.

Cupcake’s owner thinks he’s the berries, and is fitting in well in his new home by all accounts.

Thanks for looking!

General Sewing, Other Crafts

Cleanliness is next to…patriotism?

wittychild

I’ve always been drawn to those nifty kitchen towels with the crocheted tops that allow one to hang them from a handy hook on a kitchen cabinet or drawer pull – I think it’s because my grandmother used to make them, and we always had one around the house.  The only problem was that up until recently, I didn’t know how to crochet (this has since been remedied); discovering that you can sew a fabric topper pretty much opened up a whole new crafty avenue to me.

I had the perfect fabric in my stash: a cool, sparkly American flag-patterned cotton that’s a bit bold in large doses but adds just the right dose of flair to an otherwise utilitarian object.

Hanging in the backyard:

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I’ve put these for sale in my Etsy shop – I think they’d make a lovely hostess gift with the summer party/barbeque season heating up.

Thanks for looking! 🙂

craftmas, General Sewing, Other Crafts

On the second day of Craftmas…

wittychild

…my true love gave to me a parliament of owls for the tree!

(You just know I’ve been waiting for a chance to use one of those esoteric collective nouns.)

My Rules for Mailing are pretty simple: any items being sent by post should be easily replaced i.e. not one-of-a-kind or otherwise difficult to produce or procure, fairly inexpensive, and as small and light as possible to keep postage costs down.  With these criteria in mind, it was decided that my friend Jeanette would be getting a coordinating set of felt owl ornaments for Christmas.

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I followed the tutorial found here, with a few tweaks: I replaced the button pupils with black fabric paint, and dispensed altogether with the rick-rack tummy feathers.  And although I’m normally loath to use colour palettes that are too trendy and risk dating themselves, I must admit that choosing these four complementary colours of felt made it easy to make a matched set but keep each individual owl just a little bit different.

They took a moment to pause for a picture in the cedar tree in my backyard before settling into a bubble envelope for their cross-border trip. 🙂

craftmas, General Sewing

On the first day of Craftmas…

wittychild

Hard to believe that November is almost over, isn’t it?  I had the brilliant idea that everyone on my Christmas list should get at least something handmade (No, this isn’t stressful in the least!  Yes, that was sarcasm!  – Ed.), and decided to post the results here.

First up, a handmade stocking for my newly single friend to decorate his bachelor pad.  We had been at Fabricland this summer when he saw the reindeer flanellette and decided he liked it, and this seemed like the perfect project for it.

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This is the same pattern I used to make my Star Trek stocking last year – which, I’m pleased to report, the recipient is super-excited about hanging up at his desk again this year.

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I used a sumptuous red satin – formerly a queen-sized sheet – for the lining, and I love the luxurious look and feel it lends to the whole operation.

So, that’s one down….

General Sewing

These pajamas are the cat’s pajamas!

wittychild

Waaayyyy back in March, I finished sewing a pair of emerald-green pajamas for my mom in time for St. Patrick’s Day.  Even further back, in January, I had bought the necessary green cuddle satin along with enough purple to make another pair – and promptly dragged my heels until there were ruts in every room of the house

The pattern I used was McCall’s M4244, as always, and I don’t even want to look at the envelope right now.  I can more or less construct a pair of pajamas from that pattern without the instructions, at this point.

There’s no denying, however, that the purple set is delightfully regal-looking, and make the perfect nightwear as we transition from steamy summer nights into the crisp air of almost-autumn.

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They aren’t nearly as bulky and lumpy as they appear in the photo: when I presented the finished product to her, she couldn’t be bothered with actually getting changed and instead pulled them on over her tank top and cargo shorts.  I choose to interpret that eagerness as a compliment.

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A close-up of the buttons I used, along with a better idea of the fabric’s real colour.

I’d like to think my pajama-sewing days are behind me for a while, but I’d best not speak too soon.  One of my friends saw these and thought a pair of satiny pajama pants “would be all right”.  Maybe for Christmas…

Thanks for looking!

General Sewing

Kiss me; my pajamas are Irish…

wittychild

…and conveniently leprechaun-sized, too!

A few years back, I made the grievous error of (gasp) sewing my mother a pair of pajamas.  Several years before that, she had received as a gift a pair made of this material that was satiny on the outside so as not to cling to the sheets when turning in bed, but cottony-soft on the inside, and she continued to obsess over them long after they had worn beyond use.  Naturally, when I found cuddle satin  – satiny yet snuggly! – at my local Fabricland, I had to replicate them for her.

This was a mistake, as it led to the construction of several more pairs of both the full-length and short-everything variety.  I’m almost surprised I can’t sew McCall’s M4244 from memory.  And so a few months ago, when she started in with, “I could almost use another pair of those satin pajamas…”, I did what I do best, which is to say, I pretended I was immersed in a book and didn’t hear her.  But then Fabricland had a 50% off sale at New Year’s, and my conscience got the better of me, and I took her shopping for fabric.  Six metres for the price of three (in two fabulous colours) was too good a deal to pass up.

But ah, there was a caveat.  She didn’t want a shorts set, but also didn’t want the sleeves, legs, or top to be as long as in the full version.  So, a capri?  “Well, maybe a bit longer than that…”  This was not the kind of thing that the “lengthen or shorten along this line” could handle – I was going to have to eliminate vast-ish swaths of fabric.  Aargh!  After holding the pattern pieces up to her, we more or less agreed on proper lengths for everything.  It was a tight fit on the fabric, too; had they been too short, her only option would have been to shrink.  In the end, though, we seem to have found the perfect balance.

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She won’t be tripping over the hems or setting her sleeves alight if by some odd chance she finds herself cooking over an open flame.  Sounds like an excuse for indoor s’mores to me!

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Aren’t those buttons something else?  I think the opportunity to use green glittery buttons was my primary motivation to make yet another pair of these things.  And this is actually a far more accurate representation of the colour.

There are still three metres of royal purple satin patiently waiting their turn, but that’s a project for another day.

Happy St. Patrick’s Day!

General Sewing

And you thought Rudolph Valentino was the Sheik….

wittychild

Qu’est-ce que c’est bleu-blanc-rouge, et très chaud? – Un foulard Habs super!

Shortly before Christmas, I was browsing Craftster and I saw this cool project.  (If I had a dollar for every time I’ve started a conversation with, “Ohmygosh, someone on Craftster just…”, I could retire.)  These Harry Potter scarves were the perfect, inexpensive, last-minute Christmas gift, and my reaction was both swift and dual: “Those are so great!…But I don’t know any Harry Potter fans.”  I think my cousin had read the books, but I have no idea if she’s still into that stuff, and certainly wouldn’t know what her favourite Quiddich team was.  Is one house inherently better than the others?  (My senior accountant later told me no, that one would simply identify with a house whose values/characteristics/etc. reflected one’s own, but I was done my Christmas shopping by then anyway, so it became a moot point.)

I couldn’t get those scarves out of my head, though.  “I bet you could do that with CFL team colours,” I mused, “or any team, really.”  And so it was decided that my dad, who normally eschews those crazy pieces of winter gear designed to keep one warm, needed a scarf in Montreal Canadiens colours.  (Er, couleurs.)

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It’s long enough to be wrapped around and cover nose/mouth/neck/entire head (probably)….

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….but has groovy fringed ends for a jaunty look.

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(As you can see, he took his modelling job very seriously, with his Béliveau jersey and matching socks.)

A rotary cutter made cutting the oodles and oodles of fleece rectangles a fairly quick job.  Sewing them all together and tying off about a million thread ends (whyyyy does he like a team with more than two colours?) was…not as quick, but the end result is absolutely worth it.  This thing is warm, and darned eye-catching, if I say so myself.

His jersey might have a 4 on it, but when I first set about making this, I had nicknamed it the Subban scarf: the original instructions, before taking seam allowances into account, used 76 inches of fleece.  🙂

craftmas, General Sewing

To go boldly where no man has gone before

wittychild

True Trekkies will take issue with my slight misquote; however, grammarians will rejoice at my perfectly unsplit infinitive (perhaps even to the point that they will ignore “unsplit” not being a real word).

My friend Bill is a fan of Star Trek: TOS, and particularly of William Shatner.  Over the years, I’ve bought him many books penned by Mr. S., as well as bobbleheads, action figures, and other paraphernalia.  Some months ago, whilst rifling through my bookmarks, I found this link.  I had originally saved it a few years ago, and finally decided it was high time I did something about it.

Panic very nearly set in when I clicked on the link to the McCall’s website found within the post, and discovered it no longer existed; luckily, my crafty packrat instincts had kicked in when I first read about the project, and I had downloaded the PDF pattern and instructions.  With some felt, gold fabric paint, and about $2 worth of fleece, Bill would have his very own Star Trek stocking.

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I chose Command Yellow (Gold?), natch – oh, so appropriate, given that his wage-slave hours are spent as a team leader – and found a silhouetted version of the insignia with a quick Google search.  My insignia is made up of three pieces of felt: a black bottom layer; a smaller, yellow layer painted with two coats of gold fabric paint that required 24 hours to dry each time; and a black star on the very top.

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And filled to the gills with all sorts of goodies!

I took a few liberties with the pattern, such as not lining it – though in hindsight this may have been helpful, since the paperback book I thoughtfully stuffed in it caused some rather unsightly bulges.

I made the delivery last week, which seemed a little early, but I wanted him to have the stocking for a Christmas decoration throughout December.  For his part, he asked where I bought it (!), and now has it hanging at his desk, where several coworkers have asked where he got it.  This might be tough to beat next year!