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!

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

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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A Dragon Quilt for a Dorm Room Bed

I almost had this quilt project well-organized.

I mean, I started it in July, with the intent to give it as a Christmas gift!

And then I finished about 90% of it, still in July! I did all the taxing piecing, and basted the batting and backing fabric to the quilt top. All I had left to do by the end of the month was applique/quilt the dragon to the quilt, then stitch the back-to-front binding.

So obviously that's what I was doing in a panic on December 24th...

Why, yes, completing a project in the same month that I begin it IS one of my 2023 New Year's Resolutions! I'll keep you in the loop about how it goes!

I got so much done in July because I was able to take advantage of my partner and one teenager swanning off to Peru for two weeks and the other teenager having, you know, an active social life and a part-time job, etc., leaving me, with no social life and no part-time job and no vacation out of the country, home alone in silence. 

Mental note that when my second kid leaves for college, as well, I should probably try to make some friends.

It was good, though, that I had so many uninterrupted hours to work, because some of these techniques were new to me. Here's the link for my dragon quilt inspiration. This was my first time using fusible interfacing as a template--

--which involves cutting pieces from my fabric stash--

--then ironing them to the interfacing--

--then zigzagging them in place--

--and then cutting and ironing some more!

Spots was, as usual, of great help:

She's pissed off because it's a drive-in night so she wasn't allowed outside. That's where the mean cars live!

My photo editing software automatically organizes my photos in chronological order, and it must have access to the timestamps for each photo, as well, because a funny thing happened with my catalog of these photos. I lent my partner my nice camera for their trip, so when he got back all those photos just fed into my program along with all the shitty cellphone pics I'd been taking, to such an extent that when we were clearly taking photos simultaneously, our photos interlaced in the catalog!

So while I was finishing up piecing the dragon's body onto my template--

--my teenager was sitting on a curb somewhere in Peru and eating an ice cream cone:

By the time I got that wing finished, several hours later--

--she was standing on the shore of Lake Titicaca!

And late that evening, when I'd finally gotten all of those interfaced scraps pieced together and had only the dinosaur's spikes left to cut out--

--she was enjoying a delicious dinner:

Here is exactly where I was in the process on the day they came home from Peru:

And there the project remained until December 24th. In other news, WHY does my sewing machine always do some random funky wonky thing every single time I'm panic sewing on a deadline? Do not look at the stitching that I used to quilt this dragon, because from the backside it looks like shit. I kept adjusting the freaking tension, I rethreaded the needle forty times, I changed the needle, I did everything but pray to the goddamned sewing machine, and I still have no idea why it wouldn't give me nice stitching on the back.

Whatever. It's far from perfect, but it IS finished!

The younger kid thinks it's cheezy that I chose a piece whose print looked like the dragon's eye, but I love it!

...and that's all the photos you get of just the quilt without the dog walking all over it.

She is very helpful, yes?

Fortunately, she only walked all over it in snowy paws, not muddy paws, so all I had to do was toss it in the dryer when I was done.

And that's the last big project until I drive my kid to Ohio, unless I get around to sewing her the matching laptop and ipad and phone cases that I bought the zippers for back in October... which I'm NOT going to get around to doing, ahem.

After all, I'll need something to fill my lonely hours while she's gone!

P.S. Want to follow along with my craft projects, books I'm reading, dog-walking mishaps, confrontations with gross men, and other various adventures on the daily? Find me on my Craft Knife Facebook page!