I Am My Younger Child's Bespoke Seamstress, and Other Adventures in Parenting College Students

To be fair, serving as my kid's bespoke seamstress is high-key my favorite thing EVER. All I apparently really want with my life is for people to want me to sew things for them.

And the little kid, at least, is happy to oblige!

First, some mending:

I don't know if it's secret sensory issues or just the fact that I raised picky parsnips, but both kids have the absolute worst time trying to find clothes they like. I lecture often on how many pants and shirts, etc., ought to make up a minimum wardrobe, and yet both kids regularly go off to college with half that and then bitch that all their clothes are constantly falling apart.

Like, YEAH, if you're wearing and therefore washing a garment all the time, it's obviously going to wear out more quickly! THIS IS WHY YOUR MOTHER TOLD YOU TO BRING MORE CLOTHES TO SCHOOL!

And don't even get me started about coats. One kid insists that she has not and will not ever find a coat she likes, and pretty much just layers infinite hoodies. In a Philadelphia winter, no less. I've told her that at some point her professors are going to decide that she must be too impoverished to buy herself a coat and take up a collection, and she'll wake up one morning to find that they've put a gift bag with a brand-new coat in it outside her dorm room door. It won't be to her taste, but she'll nevertheless have to wear it until graduation lest she seem ungrateful.

The other kid does have a single coat that she approves of enough to wear--not that it's warm enough for her own Ohio winters, but whatever--but over Winter Break one day I got too close to the kid while she was wearing it, and I was all, "...do you ever wash this thing?"

"Sometimes," she said.

"How?"

"Cold and Delicate, like the label says."

I said, "Yeah... no," and then wrestled it off her. Girl was wearing this thing not only to class every day, but also to the horse barn twice a week and the Humane Society once a week, not to mention on environmental science field trips and throughout all the other horrors of college life. And then she was barely washing it, because the label said she had to treat it fancy!

Like, it's a COAT, Bro. And not even a puffer coat. It can take a little bit of temperature. I soaked it for a day in hot water with a half-cup of Biz stirred in, closed inside my cooler to keep the water hot. I will not describe to you the state of the water when I finally drained it, but it was something. Afterwards, I stuffed it inside a mesh laundry bag and washed it on Warm and Regular with two rinses with my regular laundry detergent, more Biz, a half-cup of ammonia, and a fistful of citric acid in the rinse compartment because I have the hardest water on the planet. 

Let me tell you that this coat was squeaky clean when it got done. Not a whiff of horse or dog or polluted creek to be found! The faux fur was a little stiff after air drying, but after I went over it with a lint rake it was also soft and fluffy again. 

This is your sign to become as obsessed with the r/laundry subreddit as I am.

Along with the mending and the laundry, I actualized the little kid's dream of stitching just the sleeves of a long-sleeved T-shirt inside the sleeves of a short-sleeved T-shirt, so that the kid could get the layered T-shirt look without having to wear layered T-shirts on her body:

*cough, cough* sensory issues *cough*

I thought the stitch lines ended up a little too visible to fool anyone, but the kid said she liked it, so whatever.

My biggest sewing project, though, was for a kid who I don't even know yet!

In the younger kid's first care package of the school year, I sent her and her roommates a set of hoodies that I'd appliqued with their school name in their class colors. I'm VERY chuffed that all the kids seem to love them, and even more chuffed that when I offered to make a similar hoodie for the younger kid's Hell Child (it's a school thing, don't worry about it) in that kid's class colors, the younger kid was super enthusiastic about it.

So I thrifted a hoodie, double-checked the one I'd made for the kid so I could remember how on earth I'd made it--

I've asked the kid several times if the loose threads are an issue, because I'd worried they wouldn't like it, but she says that all the hoodie recipients are super into that look. So yay!

--and then made a red version for the kid's baby red!

I used Heat n' Bond instead of Pellon for this project (I miss you, Joann's!), and although I'm worried it won't wear as well as the Pellon, omg it was SO much easier to apply.

Honestly, I think it turned out even cuter than the blue version, thanks to the matching hoodie color:

And now the kids are back at school for the Spring semester, and I have nobody to sew for but boring old me, sigh. I did impulse buy this giant bow pattern so I can make a giant Valentine's bow that I do not need but will nevertheless decorate my front door with, so that will keep me entertained for a few evenings, I guess.

Spam me with all your ideas for where I can put giant bows!

P.S. Want to follow along with my craft projects, books I'm reading, road trips to weird old cemeteries, looming mid-life crisis, and other various adventures on the daily? Find me on my Craft Knife Facebook page!

Sometimes the Care Packages are Blue

Do not even try to imagine how tickled I was when I figured out I could send each of my kids a corny, pun-themed care package that matched the color of the college merch that I could make for them, because your imagination will not even come close to how tickled I actually was.

The big kid's first care package this year (We al-RED-y miss you!) contained not just Twizzlers and Pringles but a decorative pillow for her apartment couch complete with a handmade appliqued red and white school logo on it. The little kid's care package, however, looked like this:

--and in it she got cookies and cream Pocky, seaweed snacks, blue shark gummies, and the result of a lot of careful fussy cutting with my Cricut, a lot of careful applique--

--and then a lot more of even more careful applique on top of it:

Because I always wanted more daughters and because this kid and her freshman year roommates are still as close as puppies in a pile, I obviously thrifted three hoodies and made three versions of the school applique so that they could each have one.

Two sets of applique are on these sort of off-white hoodies--and honestly, if you're buying hoodies brand-new you're playing a sucker's game, because there are five billion like-new hoodies out there in the thrift stores to be had for just a few bucks each--

The loose threads are a feature, not a bug. I was going for the raw edge look, but I also interfaced the snot out of every piece so nothing is going nowhere, fingers crossed and knock on wood.

--but my own girl is still going hard on the mostly black wardrobe (I suppose that on a granular level it's a very far cry from her preschool years, when she insisted upon wearing only a succession of thrifted party dresses, but since her taste in her wardrobe is still exactly that specific I kind of see it as overall pretty much the same thing), and so whenever I make them their triplet gifts, it's always two creams or pastels and one emo black:

She can just tell her classmates that she's embodying Lantern Night every night!

But an outfit for her first May Day? Now THAT was a pickle to figure out...

P.S. Want to follow along with my craft projects, books I'm reading, road trips to weird old cemeteries, looming mid-life crisis, and other various adventures on the daily? Find me on my Craft Knife Facebook page!

March 2025 Pumpkin+Bear Updates: Now You, Too, Can Have a Quilted Flyers Logo Hoodie!

I really like making things in multiples--it's a great way to perfect techniques, and I enjoy the process of working out a best practice as I go.

The problem is that often, I'm the only one in the family who wants the thing I've just made, ahem. Why everybody else does not want their very own eclipse bunting or witch hat or quilted Flyers logo hoodie, I do not know, but it definitely hinders my preferred process.

Thank goodness, then, for my Pumpkin+Bear etsy shop!

I burned with desire to make a second quilted Flyers logo hoodie (as I was making mine, I had an idea for a better way to do the interfacing that I OBVIOUSLY needed to test out), so I bought a second thrift store hoodie, quilted a new Flyers logo to it--my newly improved process worked perfectly!--and you can now find it listed in my shop:

I used the exact same quilting cottons for this one as I did for my own quilted logo hoodie, but you can see that with this one, I got much less fraying on the edges, thanks to my improved interfacing technique: I interfaced the fabric BEFORE I put it through the Cricut, which had no problem cutting through the extra layer:

I really lucked out with this hoodie, too. I'm hoping that hoodies will be easier to find off-season in the thrift shops, but this was a winter find, and it's a terrific score! It's a thrifted, like-new GapFit XL with no visible wear or damage. It feels like a thick cotton sweatshirt fabric, but I'd be happily shocked if it was actually 100% cotton. The hoodie's measurements are as follows:

*Chest Circumference: 49"
*Circumference at Hem: 49"
*Top of the Shoulder to the Hem: 28"
*Armpit to the Hem: 18.5"
*Armpit to the Cuff: 20.5"


I washed the hoodie before I sewed onto it, but I didn't wash it afterwards, so the quilted Flyers logo is still super crisp and not yet fluffy and crinkly. I'm second-guessing myself a little about not washing it before I listed it, since the soft quilting-ness won't be visible until it's washed and so maybe that will surprise the buyer, but I DID mention it in the listing, and we all know how good buyers are about thoroughly reading the listings, right?

Ahem.

I really like the size of the logo compared to the size of the hoodie, but next I sort of want to experiment with making a different-sized quilted hoodie, so I need to come to some sort of percentage calculation of logo size compared to hoodie front:

That can be for another time, though, because during the kids' Spring Break shopping I thrifted another hoodie just for me, so now I can figure out how to make a quilted Blue Jackets logo!

P.S. Want to follow along with my craft projects, books I'm reading, road trips to weird old cemeteries, looming mid-life crisis, and other various adventures on the daily? Find me on my Craft Knife Facebook page!

Pavophobia and Trampoline Punk: A Senior Year Trashion/Refashion Show

Once upon a time, there was a four-year-old who was super into drawing pictures of pretty outfits she'd thought up. She also like to take her mom's fabric scraps and cut and tape them into fancy clothes for her Barbies. 

One day her mom, who still got the local newspaper because it hadn't yet been sold to a conglomerate whose sole goal was to bleed its assets, saw a call for entries for the town's second annual Trashion/Refashion Show. It invited people to design their own outfits from trash and repurposed materials, and if they were accepted they'd get to model them in a runway show benefiting the local sustainable living center. It seemed like a good project for a homeschooling preschooler and her crafty mom, so the mom asked her kid if she wanted to design an outfit and help sew it and be in a real fashion show.

The kid did.

This was her design:

This is what her mom sewed:

And this is the kid getting her photo taken right before she walked the runway:

That was fourteen years ago, y'all. I don't even know how this didn't go the way of gymnastics and aerial silks and Animal Jam and horseback riding and My Little Pony and Girl Scout summer camp. But every year, leaving the theatre at the end of the Trashion/Refashion Show, the kid would be talking about what she wanted to design the next year, and then every next year when the call for entries came out, there she'd be drawing her design for me, and after the age of nine helping me sew it, and after the age of eleven sewing the whole thing, and after the age of thirteen taking over writing out and submitting her entry, too.

So somehow the years have passed until now, along with her Spring ballet recital and our Girl Scout troop's Bridging/Graduation party, this show has become another last thing for her Senior year of high school.

It's a weird feeling to be a secondary character in someone else's good old days. 

As the kids are getting properly grown up now, I've realized that these kid years are my good old days, too. So because this is also MY last Trashion/Refashion Show, or at least the last one that I'll experience this way, I asked the kid if I could go back to our roots and design and sew an outfit for her to model. She said yes, and I immediately set about discovering for myself how inadvisable it is to sew a garment for a human to wear out of a broken trampoline. 

Like, that webbing is SHARP!

This is what it looks like when the kid and I are both working on our entries on the same weekend, because we both procrastinated until the very last minute.

I ended up cutting it with the kitchen shears because I was too afraid to let any of my proper scissors near it, and tbh now I probably need a new pair of kitchen shears. The plastic threads in the cut ends of the webbing cut ME the entire time I was working with it, and they poked through all the seams and cut the kid until I covered every single inside seam with duct tape.

And there was only a certain amount of sewing I could possibly do by machine--

--before I had to just get out the hand-sewing needle and embroidery floss and resign myself to hand-stitching all the fussy parts while cutting myself up even more thoroughly.

The dog looks perturbed in the below photo, but even with all that I was happy as a clam, making a big mess in the family room in parallel with the kid making her own big mess. These ARE the good old days!

Remember that skull quilt block from November? I didn't know at the time what I was going to do with it, but I did happen to sew it from a thrifted blouse and my old wedding dress--

--which made it a refashioned item, which means that I could applique it onto the back of the trampoline webbing dress jacket. And then I cut the bodice off the wedding dress, turned it backwards so the cool fake buttons went down the front, added some spaghetti straps, and that became the dress shirt for the garment:

The trampoline webbing pants were a nightmare to sew (and a nightmare to wear, ahem, if you happen to enjoy being able to bend at the hips and knees) and I kept them super simple, but I did cut the triangle rings out of the webbing and hook them together to make a chain to add a little detail to the otherwise plain black:

And here's my Trampoline Punk!

Trampoline Punk image via Bloomington Trashion

Here's the kid's own design, Pavophobia:

Pavophobia image via Bloomington Trashion

Pavophobia image via Bloomington Trashion

And then one last walk down the runway together for old times' sake:

Model/Designer Walk image via Bloomington Trashion

Some of the kid's friends always come to watch her show, and afterwards I always take them all out for ice cream. Because this was also the Eclipse Weekend, though, every place was paaaaacked even at 9:30 pm on a Sunday. It was bananas! But finally we found a spot where the line at least wasn't out the door, and although they were out of waffle cones they still had one last waffle bowl left, and then a giant group left and we were all able to wedge ourselves around a little table in the back corner behind a bunch of local college students whose friends had all come to town for the eclipse:

The kids mostly talked amongst themselves but because they're nice kids and they've all known me since they were seven, they kindly included me in their conversation, as well. A year from now I'm definitely going to have to find my own friends to eat rainbow sherbet with on a certain Sunday night in mid-April, but this one last year I just enjoyed the heck out of it, like you're supposed to do in the good old days.

P.S. Want to follow along with my craft projects, books I'm reading, road trips to weird old cemeteries, looming mid-life crisis, and other various adventures on the daily? Find me on my Craft Knife Facebook page!

Trashion/Refashion Show 2023: Quick Change

 

It was about 4:00 pm on the Sunday of this year's Trashion/Refashion Show. The teenager and I were happily ensconced in our spot on the landing of the upper lobby's balcony, the one that replaced our previous traditional spot in the back of the audience in the balcony and our previous previous traditional spot on the floor in front of the accessible seats halfway back on stage right. We were eating our traditional snacks of fruit gummies and sparkling water in cans, and had bonus snacks of full-sized Lara Bars(!!!) from the complimentary snack table backstage. We were sitting in companionable silence, each on our phones (I have found a blog that does a snarky episode-by-episode recap of Gilmore Girls and I will do nothing else productive in my life until I have read the entire run of recaps, including those for A Year in the Life!), listening to a couple arguing in the lobby below. Whenever one of them said something especially shocking, we'd make expressive eyes at each other. We were anticipating the 5:00 backstage pizza delivery, the 6:30 opening of the house, and, of course, the 7:00 top of the show.

A thought suddenly occurred to me, so I looked up from my phone and told the teenager, "You know, I think this is one of my favorite days of the year to spend with you."

She said, "Right? We should do this more often."

Alas that our town's Trashion/Refashion Show happens only once a year! I eagerly anticipate it every spring, and it IS one of my favorite days, and favorite nights, of the year. 

As much as I love watching this kid grow up, watching her grow away from needing her mom's help is a little bit of lonesome--once upon a time, I sewed the kid's entire garment based on a single markered drawing, helped her with her hair and makeup, taught her a runway walk, helped her practice it, chaperoned her every second backstage, and escorted her through the final Model/Designer walk. The first year she sewed her own garment all by herself, I essentially reattached the entire thing together using safety pins and duct tape between the dress rehearsal and showtime. Even last year, I spent the whole week leading up to the show figuring out how on earth to create those dream moth wings of hers, finally finishing them so the teenager could paint them the day before. 

This year... well, let's see. I held her several extra emotional support hair ties for her, and her ipod. I figured out how to keep the tops of her sleeves secure around her upper arms after they kept slipping down. And I took the photos and videos that she requested. 

My help was so unnecessary to my own designer/model that I volunteered to do emergency mending for anyone in the show who needed it--and THEN I had plenty to do!

As always, this kid's concept and execution amaze me. Her idea for this year was a garment consisting of skirt, bodice, sleeves, veil, and flowy overskirt, all separate pieces:

The flowy, modest overskirt is easy to detach--

--resulting in a look appropriate for a night out dancing:

It turned out beautifully, and she wore it just as beautifully on the runway!

Afterwards, the teenager was thrilled that some of her friends had come to see her--

--and I managed to sneak in a little love, too!

And just in case you'd deluded yourself into thinking that you'd be able to see her face if only she would ditch that veil...

Always and forever our favorite mask! I need to pick up pack of 100 before we leave for England.

Next year will be the last year that this kid designs and models as a grade school kid. If she's accepted next year, it will be her fourteenth time accepted into the show and her thirteenth walk down the runway (fucking Covid). I don't know if it will be her last time participating, but it WILL be her last time as the child phenom who's been designing and modeling her own original garments since the age of four--there are a LOT of college students in the show every year!

Contemplating all that, I had another thought, so this morning I asked the teenager, "Hey, can I design you a garment next year?"

TEENAGER: "Hmm, I've never modeled two garments in one show before."

ME: "Right? Could be fun!"

TEENAGER: "Sure, why not?"

Even though the teenager will also do her own entry, I kind of love the idea, for me, of finishing out the Trashion/Refashion Show where I started it--designing and sewing a garment, with lots of love, a little bit of skill, and maybe a couple of secret staples, for this awesome kid.

Bleach-Painted T-shirts: A Tutorial

 

Twice in the past few months, I've wanted to make some kind of custom fan apparel, but I didn't want to devote a ton of time, energy, or money to it. The first was for a Mother Mother concert, and the second was a present for all of the children dancing the (kind of shitty, because you have to wear a fat suit and giant mascot head that's apparently hot, smelly, and hard to see out of) role of Mouse in our local university's production of The Nutcracker. 

You can do this project a lot more nicely than I did it, with super clean lines and really even tones, but here's how you can ALSO do it quick and dirty-like, whether it's for a concert tomorrow or you've got to make six in a row and you're already bored.

To bleach paint T-shirts, you will need:

• black 100% cotton T-shirt. The best shirt is obviously a thrifted shirt, and for my Mother Mother shirt I did find the perfect black T-shirt at Goodwill. Speaking of... y'all have the Goodwill prices gotten absolutely RIDICULOUS in your area, or is my town the only one in which the local Goodwills have decided that not only do they no longer need to offer any sales or discounts on the crap they're literally given for free, but they've also just absolutely jacked up their prices to Jesus? I'd long more-or-less abandoned the little indie thrift shops around me for more than just the occasional browse-through, because their selection is the pits compared to Goodwill, but 2023 is the year that I rededicate myself to their cause. Anyway, I picked up the six Medium Team Mouse shirts that I needed via a Black Friday Doorbuster from one of the big-box craft stores. I feel like those shirts have a reputation for being cheap in quality as well as price, but 100% cotton shirts are nothing to sneeze about these days, when pretty much every shirt and its dog is infused with polyester!
• backing material. This will need to be thick enough to keep the bleach from bleeding through to the back of the T-shirt. I used a brown paper grocery bag.
• bleach. Get the cheapest, and don't get it on you.
• cotton swabs.
• glass dish.
• paper stencil.
• glue stick (optional). 

Step 1: Prepare the stencil.

Both of the stencils I wanted to make were word art, so I just did them in Google Docs. Because I am basic.

But at least I printed them as outlines to save ink!

Cut out the stencils and save the widows, since you'll need to place them back on the shirt before you paint.

My Team Mouse stencil took up two pages, so I taped them together with the spacing that I wanted.

Step 2: Paint!

Place your backing material inside the shirt, making absolutely sure it will cover where you'll be bleach painting. 

You can either just set your stencil on the shirt, if it's fairly short and simple--

--or you can tape it down with more masking tape.

I even took the glue stick to the back of those fiddly M and U sticky-outy bits to make sure they stayed put, and I also glued down the widows. I was able to reuse this same stencil for all six Team Mouse shirts, gluing the bits and the widows each time and pulling them up afterwards.

Then, put on a podcast and start painting within the lines!

I found it easiest to first draw the outline of each letter, then color in the center. It made them look wonky as I went, since the bleach activates right away--

--but I think it evens out pretty well by the end:

I'm disappointed in how much the edges bled, but none of the recipients of these shirts seemed to notice, and you also can't really tell when you're standing a normal distance from the human wearing it.

Below is the first shirt I did, though, and for that one I just painted away and it also looks fine:

Step 3: Rinse and Wash.

After I finished painting, I gave the bleach a few more minutes to even out the last couple of letters, then I rinsed each shirt very, very well under cool water and then tossed it into the wash. I washed each individually so nothing else would accidentally get bleach stained, but fortunately my washing machine has an eco-friendly quick wash, so I'm not the cause of the nation's water shortage.

I haven't tried it, but this TikTok recommends a hydrogen peroxide rinse to deactivate the bleach:

Might be worth a try!

Step 4: Show off your beautiful work.

Here's what happens when you ask your husband to photograph you in your beautiful shirt in front of the theater where Mother Mother is about to play:

Seriously, it's a cell phone camera. You have to really try if you want to get your thumb in the way of a cell phone camera.

And here's one particular member of Team Mouse, coincidentally the one who walked by as I was finishing up and asked if she could use the rest of the dish of bleach to customize her own shirt. Since "her own" shirt is inevitably the shirt that I messed up on (can't give a flawed shirt to someone else's child, gasp!), I happily let her also make her shirt the most elaborately cutest:

It's very likely that I'll do this project a few more times this year, because it's SUCH a quick, easy, and cheap way to customize a T-shirt. I would like to get smoother edges, though, so next time I'm going to play around with thickening the bleach first so it can't run away from me.