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...

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In Which I Violate the IP of My Kid's College To Make Her Custom Merch

So yes, I DID violate the IP of the kid's college by recreating their school logo in fabric and appliqueing it to a decorative pillowcase, buuuuuut I also own several pieces of properly licensed merchandise purchased from the school bookstore, AND by the time she graduates I'll have paid the school far more than my own personal net worth in tuition.

So let's just call it fair, yes?

I cut and assembled the patchwork applique D during my mending group's monthly volunteer day at our local public library, in between mending holes in several pairs of leggings, teaching a child a couple of different hand-sewing stitches, and patching holes and rips in what I believe to be every pair of ripped jeans in the county:

I finished satin stitching the pieces of the D later that night at home, forgetting that I still had a heavy-duty jeans needle installed in my sewing machine until I was halfway done so that now I'm rightfully paranoid that the pillowcase is going to rip at the edges of the satin stitching, sigh:

The stitching looks so tidy and the colors are well-matched, though! And if the fabric does split where the heavy-duty needle was punching through it, well... the kid knows when and where our local public library's Mending Day happens!

I also made the envelope-back pillowcase from scratch:

I perhaps shouldn't have trusted the label on the pillow form that indicated that it was a perfect square, 16"x16". I crafted my pillowcase to match, and the vertical measurement of the finished product seems to agree with the label, but the horizontal measurement clearly does not. Look how snug it is at the sides, dang it!

Whatever. Maybe it just needs to be punched some more to redistribute the stuffing... as long as that doesn't cause the fabric to rip at the satin stitching.

Gentle punching, then.

On the long drive to drop the younger kid off at school this August, I amused everyone in the car by reading them posts from the various college parent Facebook groups that I lurk in. There are a LOT of moms crashing out on public Facebook groups about their crippling grief and loneliness, y'all. And there are a LOT of college freshmen, apparently, calling their parents crying and asking to come home before their parents can even finish driving back after dropping them off. One mom reported that her daughter called an Uber and came knocking on their hotel room door in the middle of the night and telling them she didn't want to stay. Like, Baby, they JUST dropped you off! Unless your roommates are actively worshipping Satan, and by that I mean not just putting on the robes and painting the pentagrams and lighting the black candles but, like, actually calling up a physical incarnation of the Prince of Darkness himself and offering you to him as his bride, you really need to sit with your discomfort for at least a semester. And if you can hold out for one semester, see if you can try for two. 

Honestly, even if the kid's entire college looked exactly like that abbey from The Nun, I'd still be all, "Honey, you can stick out a demon nun for four years. She's the leading researcher in her field! See if you can TA for her and get her to write you a recommendation letter for your grad school application."

Anyway, all that to say that I am now following a Facebook group devoted to sending themed care packages with punny slogans to one's college kid:

And along with the Twizzlers, spiced apple foaming hand soap, snack-sized Pringles, and Stranger Things-themed Chips Ahoy cookies, a decorative pillow with a half-red school logo fit in just perfectly!

Now to figure out what pun I want to use for this month's Halloween-themed care package...

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If You Stand Still Long Enough, I Will Sew You (and Your Roommates) Easter Baskets

One of my kids doesn't like chocolate, so I've gotten into the habit of doing my Easter prep super early, before the stores get picked over, always in search of that singular non-chocolate (and also non-white chocolate, because in the kid's mind, the only acceptable cocoa is hot cocoa, and even then only sometimes) Easter bunny. 

This year, the sole non-chocolate alternative within driving distance was a blue raspberry gummy astronaut, of all things, from Wal-mart, which I'm officially avoiding during Trump's presidency, but it's better than Amazon and I gave up Target for Lent, so whatever, Wal-mart. Take my four dollars, I guess. 

The past couple of years I've happily tossed the older kid's Easter treats willy-nilly into a box to mail to her, but that was when I still had a daughter at home to do the whole Easter basket ceremony with. This year it'll be just me and my partner eating bunny ear cinnamon rolls and drinking mimosas, sob, so I don't know, I guess I felt like making a fuss. 

I also felt like making a fuss over the younger kid's dorm roommates, whom I have been steadily wooing into bonus daughter-hood all year. I've made so much progress that one or the other tends to pop into our weekly family Zoom calls, so obviously they need Easter baskets, too!

And all the more excuse to set the Cricut up at the kitchen table for the day!

The younger kid and her roommates are probably tired of getting all things baby blue, but that's their class color and I think it's adorable. They also might be tired of getting everything matching and monogrammed with their initials, but how else would I get to live out my dream of having triplets?

Behold the Easter triplets!

The roommates' baskets have bubbles, chalk, glow sticks, and candy. My own kid's baskets are overstuffed, as usual. Candy Easter is our third favorite holiday!

I used the pattern from the We All Sew Easter basket tutorial, but I went my own way with the construction. I also used the Pellon 809 interfacing that I have on hand, not the Pellon Shape-Flex that the tutorial calls for, so you can see that my baskets have less structure that the ones in that tutorial. They stand up well, though, and they weren't a bitch to sew like they would have been with a stiffer interfacing, so I'm pleased with how they turned out.

My older kid doesn't have to abide by baby blue, and she's in a single so she doesn't have to have her name on everything, either:

Now that the kids' Easter stuff is all prepped and ready to mail, I should probably decorate for Easter this week. A big part of me doesn't really feel like putting forth the effort when the kids aren't here to celebrate with, but I'm at the point where I really need to cut the constant moping shit out and, like, find myself again or something. I really like Easter eggs and candy and festive holiday coasters, so maybe I'll just lock in on that.

Oh, I also like buntings! I bet I could do one with appliqued bunny Peeps and it would be really cute.

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The Bookshelf Quilt is Finished

The glorious day has finally come that the bookshelf quilt is finished!

Its finished size is approximately 65"x95", so more or less within the standard sizing for a twin-sized quilt. I'd made the older kid's dorm room quilt more of a full size, thinking it would serve her better over the years, but with the bed lofted that extra quilt width is really in the way, so it turns out that a twin-sized quilt really IS the best size for a twin-sized bed, ahem.

The grey background fabric is a really nice piece of cotton yardage that I found at Goodwill--our local Goodwills have raised the prices on most items to a shocking degree, but you can still find great deals on fabric cuts.. probably because the staff don't know what they even are.

Most of the books are stash/scrap fabric from my own collection, but about halfway through piecing the blocks I realized that picking through my fabric to dig out the right scraps, then painstakingly cutting around all the other random cut-out bits and old seams and crap to make them the right sizes was taking WAY longer than it did to just sew my jellyroll pieces into books... so I hopped over to Joann's and had the kid pick out a couple more jellyroll sets. I do really like the scraps that I used, though, especially the red/green batik canvas that used to be bedroom curtains in the house before this one, and the Pegasus prints that I sewed a ton of stuff for my horse-loving older kid with, and all the various other bits and pieces of kid clothes and home projects and pretty things long past:

Here's my view from the ladder I'm perched on. My partner is rightfully refusing to help me because I rightfully got mad at him after I'd asked him to help me and then caught him PUTTING DUCT TAPE ON MY QUILT. He thought it would look better if it was photographed hanging, and apparently duct tape is the best way to hang a handmade, heirloom quilt that his wife is barely 12 hours from having completed:

Kind of reminds me of the time that our newborn first-born daughter would not stop screaming so he jokingly screamed back at her, and I flatly informed him that if he EVER screamed at my child again I would divorce him.

And he never screamed at the kids again! Ahem.

I'm the proudest of those blocks with the leaning books. I got the idea from this tutorial, but I think I ended up doing mine a little differently:

The couple of empty blocks were my partner's idea, and it was BRILLIANT. I felt like I could only get away with putting a couple in there, but OMG what a time-saver, and obviously a bookshelf has to have some room for more books!

I still don't love the look of the stacked book blocks, but I do like how they break up the space. They've grown on the kid, too, mostly because she likes to do the same thing on her own bookshelves:

I'm so happy to have this quilt finished, and I'm so pleased that my kid is pleased with it--

--but dang does it make her imminent departure real. I spent most of the summer feeling a lot of anticipatory grief about both kids going away--and pretty far away, too!--but now that we're just about in the moment I'm sort of... I don't know. Kind of in a state of just pushing through and getting stuff done and being sad about it later? I am firmly reminding myself not to get all wrapped up in my own feelings so I can keep the focus on the kids and their experience, but I did also mention to my kid that although I was super happy and excited for her I would probably cry, and when I cried it didn't mean I wasn't happy and excited for her. She was all, "Yeah, I HAVE met you before. Remember that time that you randomly burst into tears, oh, let's see... THREE HOURS AGO?" And my other kid accused me of not letting her out of my sight, which is completely untrue, but yes, I likely have been staring creepily at her because I want to memorize her face before she sails literally halfway across the world.

So, I dunno, you guys. I am freaking out but also feeling like I'm too busy to freak out and if I just hold off on freaking out now I'll have plenty of time to freak out later. But my kids are going to very exciting places to do very exciting things, and they both have handmade quilts to accompany them.

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Piecing the Bookshelf Quilt

Back in May, the summer seemed so long, so how is it actually so short?

When the summer seemed long, the time that I would need to drop my baby off at college and help her make her dorm room bed, complete with a homemade quilt on top, seemed so far away. Too far away to worry about now. Time enough to start sewing later. June, maybe. July, at the latest.

And then somehow it turned out that it was actually August. Cue quite a shocking number of sewing fugue states!

Probably for the best that I didn't realize how long this quilt would take, ahem. The big kid's quilt is the same size but didn't take nearly as long, probably because the pieces were mostly zigzag appliqued and there was a lot of negative space. The pieces for this kid's quilt, though, were endless and looked like this:

I did them in batches, cutting a ton of strips to different widths, cutting and piecing them to different lengths, and then every now and then getting down on the floor and laying out a few blocks:

Fortunately, I always had my gentleman helper at hand:

So helpful!

Is he not exquisitely handsome in this light, though?

Even when he's sitting directly atop the block that I'm trying to lay out...

Each block took between 6 and 11 strips to create, depending on the widths that I tried to vary:

I also did some blocks that are stacks of books:

The kid and I didn't end up loving the way these stacked book blocks look, but that's just tough because by the time we decided that I'd already cut out a ton of strips for them. Oh, well... not every block in your quilt needs to be the cutest block you've ever seen!

After a while I got a little punchy and just started throwing pieces into quilt blocks. That rainbow book is a mini quilt block that I made during my mini quilt block obsession at the beginning of summer but never got around to incorporating into anything. So I sliced it up and put it here!

My partner took me on a weekend trip to Nashville for my birthday earlier this month, and I found an arts and crafts reuse store to visit. They had even more fabric scraps and unfinished quilt blocks, most already the perfect size to be books. Those mountains in the image below started off as somebody else's project who knows when!

I kind of lost my mind when I got down to the wire, and I kept losing count of how many quilt blocks I'd made and having to count them all over again every time I finished a new one. Eventually, my big kid took pity on me, counted them once and for all, and set me up with an easy way to keep track:

Two episodes of Chicago Med later, and I could lay out 48 10.5" x 10.5" bookshelf blocks on my favorite sunny spot on the floor:

Still to come:

• a proper arrangement of the blocks to look just the way the kid prefers
• piecing the blocks into bookshelf rows
• selecting, purchasing, washing, then cutting and sewing sashing fabric for the shelves and the perimeter
• sewing the entire quilt top together
• selecting, purchasing, washing, and laying out the backing fabric and batting
• quilting
• folding and sewing the back-to-front binding
• cutting off all the little threads
• washing and drying to make it clean and fluffy

See, I'm almost done!

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I Made Quilted Stationery Sets for the Class of 2024 Because It Would Kill Me To Simply Give Them Gift Cards

Did I tell you that we have construction people in the house AGAIN?!?

We're rounding in on the one-year anniversary of that time that a tree fell on our house, but considering that the roof people didn't even finish that job until well into winter, and that thanks to that nightmare we have not had a single year without a construction project since 2020, I feel like I should probably replace the disused menu board in my kitchen with a sign that reads, "It's been [#] Days Since We've Last Had Construction People in the House."

This current construction project actually stems from the 2022 project of replacing the hideous floors in the kids' bedrooms. When the workers ripped out the floor in the older kid's room, they saw a ton of water damage on one exterior wall and they theorized that the old concrete porch out there might be funneling water towards the house. Sometimes this company will add on another project to the one we already hired them to do--that's how we got the kids' bathroom floor retiled!--but we had to get back in line for this one. It was a LONG line, I guess, since our turn has just come up again, but it's for the best, probably, since, you know, it took us half of 2023 to get a roof back on our house!

I was sort of afraid this porch project would result in them having to rip out and remake all the exterior walls facing the porch, since that's generally how our luck has run, but this time we were lucky! None of the water damage needed anything that extensive, none of the termite damage(!!!) turned out to be current, and the porch didn't even need to be repoured. Instead, we've got some brand-new watertight sealing on the exterior walls around the porch, and all-new termite- and water-free wood inside. And the guy putting on the siding only got stung by wasps twice.

And because you never want to let these guys leave when you've got them here (remember that long line!), my partner got them to agree to fix a shockingly janky wall in the older kid's bedroom, so to circle back around to my first sentence, THAT'S why we've got workers in the house right now. 

And the whole point of that story is that I'm too bashful to sew in the room that the wall guy has to pass through 40,000 times per day, so instead of doing this project leisurely over the course of a week, as I'd envisioned, I instead panic-sewed most of it during the day he got called to a different site, thoroughly warping my personality by listening to my fairy smut on headphones the entire time. 

My idea was that I would quilt each graduate a set of postcards and stamp them, but 1) the price of postcard stamps is now so high that you might as well just buy regular Forever stamps, and 2) my partner and older kid both thought that my quilted postcards, while they really are a thing that can be mailed, were so nice that the recipients would fret at tossing them willy-nilly in the mail as-is. So although I kept the postcard format, my older kid helped me make envelopes for them out of our stash scrapbook paper ("Are we EVER going to use up all this paper?!?" she groused, but to be fair, this single pad of 12"x12" paper *has* seemed to pop up in every paper project we've done since about 2010 or so!), and I pre-stamped them for college student mailing convenience. 

My favorite thing about these postcards is how they serve as a sort of sampler for all the patchwork techniques I currently know. Here are some triangle hexies:

That batik canvas is from the first curtains I ever sewed!

Here are a variety of log cabins:

These are actually all postage square quilt blocks I made over a decade ago... before I learned how to sew a straight seam and properly square things, ahem:

And these are new postage stamp quilt blocks made from stash, because I'm still in the habit of cutting and saving 1.5" pieces from my last bits of scraps whenever I sew:

Inside this quilt block is the very last square inch of the purple striped fabric that used to be the ring sling that was my very first sewing project ever. I wore both my babies in it!

And here's my newest-to-me technique, the quilt-as-you-go method!

And because my NEWEST newest-to-me technique isn't quilting but gif-making, here's a gif of all my quilted postcards--I've learned how to slow down the frame rate, so it's not quite as obnoxious as my quilted coasters gif:

And here's all the envelopes ready to be stuffed!

I sewed zippered pouches to hold the stationery sets, a nice pen, and a glue stick since my homemade envelopes aren't self-sealing, ahem. 

Most of these stationery sets are now with their recipients, ready to have records of college adventures written on them and sent off to loved ones. I kind of want to see what it would look like to put a quilted patchwork front onto a single-fold greeting card, though, and I also want to make a few more of these postcards for myself, because in my experience, college students like to receive mail even more than they like to send it!

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