Goodbye Winter

I am always so eager for winter to come, but equally eager for it to leave. I'm happy that spring is here, and spring and summer weather is on it's way. We've had a week of warmer weather, and it has been so nice.

The main project that I've been working on the past few weeks is a car seat cover for my good friend. She was lucky to inherit a lot of baby stuff, but some of it needed updating. We found the perfect fabric for the new cover, Peter Rabbit! Because the fabric was just cotton we decided to iron on some fusible interfacing to give it a little more durability.

Here's a closeup of the fabric (so adorable):

Her store bought pattern did not come with a pattern for the shade cover, so I just cut apart the original one to use as my pattern. Here's what became of that:



My friend did most of the cutting and sewing following the pattern instructions. Like any generic pattern it needed some additional finagling to make it fit snugly in the carrier. I offered to do this part as she was busy and newer to sewing.

To make things easier, I cut off the original cover and used the same batting for the cover, as it already had the perfect shape. After I had the fabric ready to go I matched things up and sewed that to the batting, and then stitched elastic under bias tape around the edges so it would stay put.

Here's pictures of the final product, with the cover:

And without cover:

My advice if you are covering a baby seat, make things a little easier for yourself. If you aren't partial to the original cover I'd cut it off from the batting and use that as a pattern that will fit perfectly on your particular carrier.

On a side note, I finished my unusual bag. I got the idea from this blog post. I didn't follow the pattern very closely at all, but the handle idea is the same. The outside is plain canvas, and the inside fabric is a sea green color that was actually a free pillowcase I got from work.

I didn't think ahead to sew anything cute on the canvas outside before sewing this together, but I did stick a sunny flower pin on it to jazz things up a bit.


I have resurfaced some hideous bright orange knit fabric I bought years ago--seriously I don't know what I was thinking. As I already think it's ugly, I am going to try my hand at making a casual dress (what's there to loose?), and then have fun with bleach and dye to make the color better if the dress turns out.

Project Ketchup

Really I mean project catch-up, I've got some blogging to do.

First, meet my new friend!
I think they are so cute. They are part of the the Gingher limited edition collection, these are the Roberta shears. I hope they don't make anything cuter than these otherwise I'll be tempted to get them the next time my birthday or Christmas rolls around!

It has been a few months since I have made a new purse. I had some green upholstery fabric lying around so I finally decided to do something about it. Here's what I came up with while watching a documentary on the bubble boy (we don't have cable).

Corey and I unintentionally set our wedding for May 5th (Cinco de Mayo) and I have always thought it would be fun to have some festive ornament on our tree to remind us of our wedding day. You wouldn't believe how hard it is to find a reasonable looking taco ornament. Inspired at all the cute craft blogs, I decided to try making a little pinata for our tree. I think I have some work to do on him, but here he is so far. The lighting is a bit off in this picture, but you get the idea.

This last project has been going on for a while now. I believe I bought fabric to start a quilt Thanksgiving weekend of 2005... needless to say it's about time I work on it. Four years later the awesome turquoise fabric I bought is totally out of style, so I had to buy some additional fabric so I'd actually want to use the quilt when I was done.

Here's a sketch of the pattern I'm going to do. So far I've got two fabrics fully cut out, only three more to go. I'll post the progress as I go. I'm hoping to finish this faster than it took me to start it.


Up next on my crafting plans (aside from the quilt, that doesn't count as it's ongoing):

• A casual canvas bag. I'm nearly done, I just made a dumb call on some seams which will cost me some extra time. I saw a tutorial on this idea and modified it. I'll post the full details and the link to the original post when I have finished it.
  

• I'll finally make time to try out one of the retro dress patterns I've been collecting (see below picture). I think I have an unusual fear of dresses and I need to get over it. Skirts I have no issues with, but in the last four years I've worn two dresses: my wedding dress, and this black dress I wear with a cardigan so it doesn't even look like a dress.