I Made a Little Quilt That Is a Ghost for The Little Ghost Who Was a Quilt

The best thing, for me, about having a small niece, is that I can still make all the cute children's things that I want to make, because I still have someone to give them to!

Honestly, I might actually make more things for my niece than I did for my own kids, if you don't count things like clothes or homeschool materials or collaborative crafts, because when my own kids were this little kid's age, I was too busy parenting little kids to get enough crafty time to actually make them cute things! My younger kid was four years old by the time I made her first quilt, oops!

So when I saw The Little Ghost Who Was a Quilt in a local bookstore a few weeks ago, and I was immediately charmed by it, and then immediately after that I wanted to make a little ghost quilt--I did!

Happily, the book's endpapers feature the quilt design of the titular little ghost, making it super easy to see what similar fabrics would look like. And even more happily, I did not have to buy a single thing to make this quilt! To be fair, a couple of the fabrics that I used are remnants that I'd previously bought with no purpose in mind, but everything else was honest-to-goodness scraps and stash, from the fabric for the top to the cotton batting to the cotton sheet I used as the backing.

All of the pieces are 5" squares. I wanted my quilt to be 10 blocks by 12 blocks, so I needed 120 blocks total. I sort of tried to keep the colors even between purple, aqua, and white, but it's a little blue-heavy. There are just a few grey blocks scattered in, because it turns out that I don't actually own very much grey fabric. The little ghost quilt in the book also has tan blocks, but for some reason I don't have ANY tan fabric, and anyway, I wasn't really feeling the tan colorway... which is perhaps one reason for why I don't own any tan fabric, lol!

To make the quilt, you lay out your pieces and rearrange them until you like the way they look as a whole, then stack them by rows, piece each row, then piece the rows themselves together, being quite fussy about lining up the corners:

Then you take up your entire family room floor making your quilt sandwich!

This is why I can never say that my creations come from a pet-free home, ahem. I would NEVER want my creations to come from a pet-free home!

I pinned my quilt quite well to the batting/backing, trimmed it out roughly, then quilted it via stitch in the ditch, earning myself yet another day of having a wonky back in the process. Why must quilting be so ergonomically incorrect?!?

Here's how it looks all nicely quilted and ready to be properly trimmed:

I got through trimming the batting before my supervisor came to check up on me:

I trimmed the backing to 1" wider than the quilt on all sides, then folded it in half twice, clipped it in place using every plastic sewing clip I own, and stitched it down:

Proper quilters use a blind stitch or another invisible stitch, but I'm happy with a plain old zig-zag.

And there's my little ghost quilt!

The lighting was soooo perfect right when I finished, but in the hour it took me to run out and do early voting, it got completely overcast. But I had to take my photos anyway, because Halloween presents are more fun if you can get them in the mail in time for the recipient to receive them before, you know, Halloween!

...and that's a bunch of cat hairs there on the purple block, sigh. I did wash it and dry it, and then go over it with the lint roller, before I put it in the mail.

Because you don't have to follow a pattern, just make sure that the pieces look cute together as a whole, this is actually one of the quickest quilts I've ever sewn:

I'm always especially pleased when I can work any of my favorite meaningful fabrics into a piece. Below, the smocked blue fabric used to be part of the only skirt that my older kid ever willingly wore. The silky white fabric to its right is actually from my wedding dress!

My favorite part, though, is that I used variegated thread to quilt it, and it looks so nice from the back!

Isn't it crazy that you can make something so substantial, and so pretty and perfect, entirely from materials you already have on hand? Historically, that's exactly what quilting should be, including reusing those bits of old clothes, and I LOVE that there's a children's book that encourages children to notice and care for the simple, unassuming gift of a patchwork quilt:

I didn't have any ghosts on hand to put into it, though, so that part's going to have to figure itself out later. 

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!

How to Dye Pasta to Make Sensory Materials

Pretty much the last family activity that we did before taking the kids to college was an evening of making sensory materials together.

You know, as you do!

I'd had the idea that my preschool niece might like some of the same homemade sensory materials that my own kids had enjoyed at her age. We made her slime (although my kids actually played with oobleck, not slime, throughout their preschool years, you might remember that my younger kid went through a BIG slime phase as a tween and still has the recipe memorized), play dough, sand dough, cloud dough, dyed Epsom salts, and a couple of colors of this dyed pasta.

Out of all of those options, the pasta is the easiest! It takes just a few minutes of hands-on time, spread out over the course of a full day. Here's how to make it:

Materials

To make this sensory material, you will need:

• dry pasta. The pasta that you use is limited only by your imagination, your budget, and the size of the jar you plan to use. Rotini and elbow macaroni were perennial favorites with my kids, but bowties and shells also turn out exceptionally cute. Star pasta is a splurge but would be adorable, and spaghetti would be cool-looking but unwieldy to dye and delicate when finished.
• liquid food coloring or liquid watercolors. I use the snot out of our liquid watercolors, and used them for this particular project, but before I knew such a thing existed I made many fine and colorful batches of dyed pasta with cheap liquid food coloring. 
• old jars. I've always used glass jars, as in old spaghetti sauce or salsa jars, and never plastic, but I don't see why plastic wouldn't work.
• rubbing alcohol. You need this because it's a non-water-based solvent that can distribute the dye without dissolving the pasta. Some of my hippier friends buy super-high-proof organic vodka to make their own disinfectants, though, so if you like, I bet you can use that!
• newspaper, brown paper bags, cardboard, etc. You want something to spread the pasta out on to dry, ideally something you can toss in the recycling bin when you're done.

How to Dye the Dried Pasta

Pour dried pasta into a jar, filling it no more than halfway. Check out this old photo I found of my adorable older darling completing this step. She looks like she might be five?

Five was a really great age for that kid. Actually, though, twenty is turning out to also be a great year for her!

Add enough rubbing alcohol to just cover the bottom of the jar, then add the dye. Put the lid on and shake it around until the dye is evenly distributed, then add more dye as desired until the pasta looks about as saturated as you want it to be.

Here's the part you have to remember: put the jars on a table or counter you frequently walk by, and then for the rest of the day, every time you pass the jars, agitate them and shake them around for a few seconds to further distribute the dye and unstick any pasta bits.

After a few hours of that, dump out the jas and spread the pasta out in an even layer on your blotting paper:

Leave the pasta to finish drying out at least overnight, or even as long as a full day:

Your blotting paper gets pretty messy, so that's why you want something you can toss!

When the pasta has finished drying, kids can play with it right away, or you can store it in deli containers at room temperature. Look how cute it looks combined with all the other sensory materials in my niece's present stash!

Kids can simply play with this pasta, of course, but it also makes a great addition to a play kitchen or mud kitchen, or to a pretend construction site. Dump trucks love to drive around pink elbow pasta! 

And, of course, you can do art with it, especially making mosaics with different types and colors of pastas. You know you want your own pasta mosaic masterpiece hung on your wall!

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!

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!

DIY Sewn Finger Labyrinth

 

I originally published this tutorial on Crafting a Green World.

This finger labyrinth is a satisfying (and SILENT!) fidget toy.

And you can sew it completely from stash!

If you or someone you love also loves fidget toys, then you are going to be thrilled with this finger labyrinth! It’s a totally silent fidget, hallelujah, that’s also super portable and delightfully fidgety. And depending on whether or not you’ve got a spare marble lying around, you can sew this finger maze entirely from stash.

Here’s what you need:

• 1″ graph paper or ruler/stencil. I thrifted a ream of this ages ago and its been endlessly useful, but you can also simply print a 1″ graph paper pdf. To transfer the maze pattern to your fabric, a clear gridded quilting ruler will come in VERY handy, but you can also do the work with a regular ruler and an eye for accuracy.
• fabric, 2″ larger than your planned maze by length and width. If you’ve got sensory particulars, pay attention to your fabric choice here. I, for instance, ONLY like this finger maze in flannel, but one of my teenagers refers to flannel as, and I quote, “a sensory nightmare.” Ahem. Whatever fabric you choose, a novelty print is a fun choice.
• matching/contrasting thread. I like to sew the maze lines in contrasting thread to add interest to the toy, but you do you.
• fabric markers. I am obsessed with Pilot Frixion pens for marking on fabric. The ink irons away, which makes it, for me, even more convenient than wash-away ink. You DO have to be careful using it on darker fabrics, however, as sometimes after you iron there will be a light mark in its place. When in doubt, do a test first!
• marble. I’m steadily stealing the marbles from my kids’ old marble mazes. Hungry Hungry Hippos is also a good place to find marbles, or swing through your local thrift store.

And here’s how to sew your maze!

Step 1: Pre-test your marble vs. stitched channel setup.

Before you dive into maze-making, double-check that your marble will fit through the maze you’re planning. To do this, sew a few short stitched channels, perhaps in .75″, 1″, 1.25″, and 1.5″ widths, then pass your marble through each to see which feels the best. I’ve found that I vastly prefer a 1″ channel for all the standard marble sizes, which vary by only a millimeter or two, but you should make your maze the way that YOU want!

If you do decide to change the width of your maze paths, change all the other measurements, too, to match. You can even customize your graph paper grid size to make drawing the maze pattern easier!

Step 2: Draw your maze pattern.

Technically, these are labyrinths, since there’s only one path from beginning to end and the task is just to get the marble along the path. But if you want to make it a maze with dead ends, go for it!

Have fun drawing your maze just the way you want it, making sure that you use up all your maze space and that you’ve left openings equal to the width of the maze path whenever you turn a corner. That’s where working with graph paper really helps!

Step 2: Cut and sew the maze base.

Cut two pieces of fabric that are 2″ longer by both length and width than your maze pattern. In the image above, you can see that I cut my graph paper, which is in 1″ grids, to the overall fabric size so I can use it as a template. Or I could have just cut my fabric to be 8″x10″ to accommodate my 6″x8″ maze.

If you’re using novelty fabric, it’s fun to fussy cut it to make sure that any especially cute elements will be prominent.

Put your two fabric pieces right sides together, then sew a .25″ seam around the perimeter, leaving a hole in one side for turning.

Turn the fabric right sides out, use a blunt pencil or similar tool to push out the corners, and iron flat. Fold in the raw edges at the opening to match the rest of the seam, and iron to crease. You’ll close that hole later.

Step 3: Draw and stitch the maze.

Center the maze pattern on one side of the fabric–here is where your quilting ruler will come in QUITE handy!

I find it easiest to draw the perimeter of the maze first directly onto the fabric with my heat-erasable pen, then use the quilting ruler to draw in the lines that make up the maze path. Measure and draw the lines as accurately as you’re able to, because it would suck if you mis-measured and ended up with a path too narrow for your marble.

Speaking of that marble–pop it inside the maze through the opening as soon as you’ve finished drawing out your pattern! Technically you can leave it until just before you stitch the opening shut, but I just know that if I do that, then I’ll forget it entirely. I’d rather sew around the marble a bit while also reassuring myself that it’s there!

Step 4: Edge stitch to close the opening and add a second barrier.

Edge stitching around the perimeter of the fabric is enough to close the opening, but I’m paranoid about kids and marbles, and I also like this step because it adds one more stitched barrier to keep that marble from escaping.

If you really want to go ham on making that barrier, you can even do a zigzag or other decorative stitch there. I did this on the finger mazes that I’m giving to my four-year-old niece, but I did plain edge stitching, in a thread color to match the maze path, on the ones for my teenagers. The straight line in the maze path color looks a lot nicer, too.

These sewn fidgets turn out quite well for something so simple! I like the 6″x8″ maze to give you something to really fiddle with, but I also make these as small as 4″x4″ and they’re still satisfying to play with.

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!

I Finished the Wool Felt Moveable Alphabet (and the Dolch Sight Word Cards!)

 

Once upon a time, waaaay back in January 2023, Past Julie thought, "Ooh, I have the perfect idea for a cute Christmas gift for my niece! I'll hand-sew her a moveable alphabet out of the rest of my stash of wool felt. I'll just sew, like, one letter a week and she'll have SO many letters by Christmas!"

June 2023 rolled around, and Past Julie thought, "Hmm, no big deal. I'll just start stitching a couple of letters a week."

During the October meeting of my mending group, I happily cut out letters and burbled to my fellow menders that "I just need to sew one a day and they'll be done in plenty of time before Christmas!"

During the November meeting, I said, a little more grimly, "Just two a day and I can squeak them into the mail just in time for Christmas."

Those last couple of days in December, it was more like six a day while binge-watching Chicago Med DVDs, but look at the glorious result!

I am SO pleased with them! 

Here's a rooster for size comparison, because the entire flock could not get it out of their heads that these colorful nuggets were perhaps made of delicious chicken food:

My favorite part of this project is that even though yes, it took a lot of me-hours to accomplish, the materials are ENTIRELY stash!

The felt is a really nice merino wool felt that I bought long ago for projects with my own kids (it's this exact set, but I bought 8"x10" cuts instead of the 4"x6" cuts shown here). I blanket stitched the letters with basic-grade Amazon embroidery floss and I stuffed each letter with snips of that same felt, and won my own personal game of wool felt chicken because after the very last letter was stuffed, I had less than a handful of little wool felt snippies left. 

I even had all the colors left! I managed a complete rainbow to start the set--

--and also had enough grey, brown, black, and white to make a nice variety and multiples of every letter (except for X and Q, ahem):

My partner handled creating all the Dolch sight words in the same font and size, and I backed each one in pretty paper and laminated it so my niece can use them as templates to make words with the wool felt letters:

Wool felt has such a lovely feel, though, and the colors are so pretty, that I'm hoping that the letters alone are a fun sensory experience. Sensory experiences build intrinsic knowledge and increase one's love for a topic.

It's clear that the chickens, at least, appreciate the sensory appeal!

Even though this project took a loooong time, it was not hard at all, and I actually would recommend it as a beginner-level hand-sewing project for absolutely anyone. Over Thanksgiving break my college kid sewed a perfectly acceptable "I" after about five seconds of instruction, and it's now mixed in there somewhere with the rest of the letters, completely indistinguishable from the lot (well, *I* can distinguish it, but definitely nobody else could)...

Best. Christmas. Yet. Now, to figure out something even more unwieldy to make for next year!

P.S. Want to follow along with my unfinished craft projects, books I'm reading, cute photos of the cats, high school chemistry labs, and other various adventures on the daily? Find me on my Craft Knife Facebook page!