Busts, Bitching, and Subversive Seamsters: My Birthday Favorites

Bust Magazine is my favorite!

Since I'm supposed to be using this precious naptime to frantically clean the house so that our dear friends attending Syd's birthday dinner tonight don't realize how filthy we are, I am obviously blogging instead. The very first book I picked up to put away is overdue at the library, but it's an awesome how-to book and I wanted to scan some projects from it and blog about it, and if I'm doing that I might as well blog about the other reference materials I've found recently, and, well, here we are...

I'm a big fan of the Stitch 'n Bitch franchise: I'm not a scarf-and-sweater gal, but I'd actually make a ton of these projects if I could do more than knit back-and-forth in a straight line until someone casts off for me, and the editor, Debbie Stoller, also does Bust magazine,which I adore. Son of Stitch 'n Bitch: 45 Projects to Knit and Crochet for Menis the best of the bunch, in my opinion, because I prefer wearing masc clothing, and this book is all about projects to knit and crochet for men-like people. My favorites are the beer gloves, which are the type of fingerless gloves I rocked in junior high, and the Cobra and Pub Crawler sweaters, which are very understated and comfy-looking. I'd totally make someone knit my kids the Ernie sweater, though, which is, yes, the one of Bert-and- fame.

The Vogue Knitting The Ultimate Sock Book: History*Technique*Design (Vogue Knitting) is also appealing, even though most of the patterns aren't to my taste, because of its lengthy, cogent, and illustrated instructions for sock knitting, which I reaaaaallly, reeeeaaaaallly want to learn. I keep building up the supplies during sales at the crafts store--I bought circular needles when they were 50%-off, only to have my friend Molly the Knitter tell me that it's double-pointed needles you use, and so then I bought a pair of double-pointeds at a different sale only to see in this book that you need more like two or even three pairs...Sigh.

Matt is getting frustrated with sneaking back into work at night to print me some business cards on the fussy and easily-broken color printer there, so I'm thinking about investing in these 2.75"x1" Moo cards--you can upload a beautiful photo, and put your business info on the back, and get 100 for about 20 bucks. That would be nice, because using an actual product photo or a photo of the kids would be much more relevant and evocative of my work.

I'm thinking about applying to sell at Yarncon in Chicago. Even though I don't knit, I'm really getting into the possibilities of creating with felted wool yarn, and my friend Molly the Knitter knits, so... I did apply to the Shadow Art Fair in Ypsilanti. Even though it's quite a drive, it fits my criteria because Matt's granny lives just around there, near Ann Arbor where my favorite store ever is.

The book I just can't stand to return to the library is Subversive Seamster. I had the library buy it, which means I get first dibs, but then someone else went and requested it before I could renew it! The best thing about this book is that one of the creators is an ample woman like I am, so I'm confident that most, if not all, of the designs are ample-woman friendly. This contrasts with some other remaking clothing books like T-Shirt Makeovers: 20 Transformations for Fabulous Fashions, in which I've tried to make a project or two, but I just don't think they work with my body. My favorite projects in Subversive Seamster are the duct tape dress form, which I totally have the duct tape to do, the turtleneck bolero jacket, the Hawaiian shirt pillowcase, the poncho skirt (I'd wear it over jeans), the men's dress pants shorts, the Catholic schoolgirl plaid skirt tank top, the bridesmaid's dress tie, the muumuu peasant top, the sports jersey toiletries bag--yeah, I really like this book.

Finally, Clean Lockers

At last, self-awareness--I've figured out why it takes me so, so long to clean up around here. So you can figure it out, too, I'll illustrate the process of my locker-cleaning this weekend:

1. Willow was miserable with a high fever on Saturday, so instead of doing little girl stuff all day, she spent the entire day lounging in our bed watching movie after movie after movie--screen time is severely limited in our house, so this works as a stay-in-bed tactic. I decide that since my little girl helpers are halved, this would be a great time to tackle cleaning out those lockers. The first thing I pull out is a stack of thrifted and dumpster-dived T-shirts, some of which are tie-dyed. I've been working on a tie-dye T-shirt quilt for myself for a while and I also want to make another one to sell, so I separate out the tie-dyed T-shirts and spend a couple of hours cutting out quilt panels. I happily discover that all the T-shirts are large enough to also cut out the material for a baby bib and a set of coasters from each shirt. Sweet.
2. I organize and restack the rest of the T-shirts and return them to the lockers. As I'm replacing the stack of baby clothes I'm using for a future quilt for the girls, I notice that one of Sydney's old shirts, size 18 months, has some mildew stains along the shoulder that disqualify it from quilt making. The sweet embroidery along the front is unaffected, however, so I cut that out, get on the computer and pull up all the photos I took of Sydney when she was 18 months old, crop and tweak the exposure, etc., print them out, and make this awesome scrapbook page, my best yet, I think:
3. The Monsters, Inc. (Two-Disc Collector's Edition) DVD skips because it's been watched about 5 billion times, and so Willow comes in to see what I'm doing. To entertain her, I make her some ribbon headbands for her new short hair. They're very simple:

• Measure the circumference of the kid's head where you want the headband to be. Willow is 19 inches.
• Cut the majority of this length as ribbon. For each headband, I cut about 12-13 inches of ribbon.
• Cut the rest from elastic. I used elastic the same width as the ribbon, and about 5-6 inches in length.
• Sew the elastic to the ribbon at both ends with a very strong stitch, and trim the raw ends close to the stitching. I didn't include a hem allowance here because you want it to fit a little snug, so the finished circumference of the headband should be about an inch smaller than the kid's head--that's where the elastic comes in. Make them a little roomier for growing, if you'd like.

Here's Willow rocking one of her new headbands:
4. Something like 12 hours have passed, now. I re-organize the sewing stuff and put it back into one crate in the locker. I wonder where to put my knitting stuff. I still haven't completed any knitting projects--I want to make something useful and necessary (no scarves!), but easy enough to let me practice my skills and get them into muscle memory. Hmm, I think...washcloths! They're small and square, I can practice a variety of stitches, and we have practically no useful washcloths because I keep using them for cleaning and getting them stained and gross. I cast on for a six-inch square washcloth, using my Stitch 'n Bitch Nation as a reference, and happily knit away in a simple knit stitch for the rest of the evening.
5. It's the next morning, and since I was up with Willow pretty much all night, Matt let me sleep in until 10:00 am, and then took the girls out for breakfast burritos and to try to score a Sunday paper from outside some business closed on Sunday. I knit some more, hiding in the bathroom for most of one row when Matt returns home, since I don't know how to stop in the middle of a row and I'd told Matt I'd be cleaning while he was gone.
6. I do clean for a while, finding a box for knitting stuff and organizing and replacing my scrapbook stuff, and then I pull a Scrabble board out. I used these for bulletin boards and book covers last summer, but my latest issue of had a short tutorial about how to make a box out of a gameboard. I should probably see if it works before I decide what to do with the rest of the gameboards I have lying around. I make some modifications to the tutorial, covering the inside with flannel, reinforcing the edges with pretty duct tape, and altering the overall dimensions somewhat, and it ends up taking so long--at least a couple of hours--that I doubt I'll make any of these to sell, but I might make more to store stuff in the house. It looks pretty awesome, though:
7. Matt is starting to give me dirty looks every time he passes the doorway to the study, now, so I buckle down for 30 or so minutes and finish up:And yeah, that's why nothing is ever clean around here.