My Latest over at Crafting a Green World: Refashion

the kid's T-shirt refashion

and a bunch, bunch, bunch more clothing refashion projects

I would dearly like for Syd and I to finish the pants for her Trashion/Refashion Show outfit this week, so that next week I can watch out for a nice day to do her photo shoot. I think I've decided to sacrifice my frumpy old thrifted green coat, the one that I haven't worn since Christmas 2012 (when Matt bought me an awesome biker coat, complete with elbow and back pads to keep me safe when I fall off my Harley or get shot at), to the pants cause, hopefully re-using the coat's hardware for the pants fastenings, and then *maybe* using a couple of old green T-shirts for the bell bottoms that Syd dearly desires. Syd also dearly desires green sequins, but I just do not think that we're going to be able to score anything with green sequins to upcycle into the garment.

Seriously, there has been nothing with green sequins in any of the thrift stores for WEEKS. Are people with green sequined clothing finding them so justifiably hideous that they're choosing to burn them instead of donate them?

Yeah, I probably would.

My Latest over at Crafting a Green World: How to Patch Your Pants

a tutorial for sewing on a basic patch

and a round-up of all the best ways to sew a patch

It's absolutely the time of year when we, at least, are spending more time thinking about mending and patches and lengthening, etc. Eventually, spring will come--I'm not buying those kids new warm pants! In addition, many of the kids' activities involve an absolute hell of keeping the proper clothes clean and organized. Aerial silks requires a leotard, leggings, and a cotton shirt on top. Horseback riding requires fingerless gloves, jeans, and heeled boots. Ice skating requires a sweater, a hat, and warm gloves (NOT the fingerless ones). Nature class requires, depending on the weather, fleece pants, a long-sleeved shirt, a coat, snow pants, wool socks, snow boots, gloves, and a warm hat, not to mention a backpack, notebook, pencil, water bottle, and packed lunch (including a warm soup or drink in a thermos).

Many of those activities also require thermal underwear:

These at least, are a source of endless hilarity, since we like to tell Syd that she's a ninja when she wears them, and we like to pretend that we can't even see Will.

Right now, as I write and as Syd works on her spelling and Will works on her math (kicking up a fuss because she's being asked to learn order of operations), I am already feeling fretful about the required clothing for today. Where, for instance, will we find those fingerless gloves, since we haven't been to horseback riding in a month? I'm sure that searching for them will be agony. And I know for a fact that the thermal underwear needs to be washed this morning, since the girls came home from nature class on Saturday muddy and filthy and wet to the skin, and yes I washed their snow pants and coats immediately after, but not the clothes underneath. And the aerial silks outfit... am I remembering Will spilling something on that after class last week, so that her shirt and leggings need to be washed, too?

I guess today turns out to be Laundry Day!

My Latest over at Crafting a Green World: Christmas Prep

a tutorial for kid-friendly filled ornaments

and a tutorial for a kid-painted Christmas tree shirt

We've been having a great school week so far, filled with Christmas crafts, math, spelling, and science. I tried to upload our work plans today, but the host that I use is giving me issues, so since I can't turn it off and then back on (A buddy of mine at college had a job supervising the photocopying and microfilm stations at our university library. Whenever people would come to him fussing about how the photocopiers or microfilm readers weren't working, he'd sigh, stand up, walk over to the machine, turn it off, count to ten, turn it back on, huff "There!" at them, walk back to his chair, and sit down), I'm just going to leave it alone for a day and try again tomorrow.

So my thoughts on the chemistry of acids and bases are just going to have to wait, I guess...

My Latest over at Crafting a Green World: T-shirts!

a tutorial for altering a T-shirt to make it smaller

and a tutorial for altering the neckline of a T-shirt

After a long winter in which I felt particularly unwell much of the time, I started, this spring, to work towards getting healthier. Most of my efforts have involve getting more exercise and losing weight; I'm not particularly vain, nor am I size-conscious, but I just wasn't feeling good, and it's not rocket surgery to blame the 50 pounds that I've gained since my first pregnancy.

I've been tracking my food using MyFitnessPal and my exercise using BodyMedia, because I don't do well with guesswork, and I've been able to lose 23 pounds so far without actually that much stress or fuss; I wonder if I would have started getting healthier sooner if I'd known how different the options are from that first crash diet that I was put on back in the sixth grade. That first experience is the one that makes me feel kind of panicky and upset still if I get too hungry 25 years later, so there's absolutely none of that nonsense now. No tiny little kitchen scale, no tuna, no English muffins--Weight Watchers in the 1980s was a piece of work, I'll tell you that.

My major focus, though, is the amount of healthy exercise that I'm trying to get each day. I wear a BodyMedia armband that tracks it, which is often the main thing that gets me back on the treadmill for another fifteen minutes after dinner, because I want to meet my activity goals, or gets me to that Wednesday morning cardio class, because my armband reads it as "vigorous" activity. I'm teaching myself to run, even though I don't love it and I am definitely the slowest runner on the planet, and I've finally gotten the girls used to the idea that every trip to the park must also include the .8-mile trek AROUND the park, as well.

And so now I have a bunch of clothes that don't fit! I actually am not in love with that fact, because I don't like to shop, and when I do shop, I like to shop second-hand. And second-hand is NOT the way to go when you need a new wardrobe of pants right this minute. I actually had to go to Target last weekend to buy a pair of pants. I am looking forward to altering, modding, and reworking all my T-shirts, though.

But the big question... Yes, I feel SO much better today than I did six months ago. Just in general, I feel so much better! How great is that?

My Latest over at Crafting a Green World: A DIY Balance Bike, and a Vintage Embroidered Pillowcase Refashion

a tutorial for converting a pedal bike into a balance bike

and a tutorial for converting a pillowcase into a summer top

with much bonus chick footage, apparently

 

In other news, the fabulous food pantry where we volunteer has big, wonderful changes afoot: it's moving to another, much larger space! With that space, it will be able to be open more hours, so patrons will no longer have to stand in line outside waiting to shop; it will be able to stock more food of a wider variety, giving patrons more options and power to make their own food choices; it will be right on a bus line, making it less stressful for many patrons to get there; it will have a bigger parking lot, so patrons in vehicles won't have to waste gas circling the block or risk getting a ticket; and it will just be BETTER, with a teaching kitchen on-site, loading docks, a pallet jack (my back says hallelujah to that!), walk-in storage coolers and freezers, and a small demonstration garden.

The pantry isn't *quite* as close to us anymore, but it's still not that bad at just about a mile. I'm fixing to go make the girls sandwiches for lunch, and then we're going to head down the road that mile to an orientation in the new space.

And, and, AND...

We're all going to ride our bikes!

My Latest over at Crafting a Green World: Handmade Looms and a Rock Star Dress (and Four New Babies, Too)

a round-up of handmade looms crafted from upcycled materials

and a review of the Cool Water dress from Sew Pretty: T-Shirt Dresses

I messed up the distance between the upper black and white ruffle and the pink skulls ruffle--I'm not going to  try to fix it, but it did cause me to see that the dress with only two ruffles would be a pretty cool top. Mod to come:

In other news, I took a deep breath, gathered some supplies, put Matt to work with a box knife and plenty of duct tape, and accepted the generosity of a good friend in her gift of four of her recently-hatched chicks:

We can keep up to five hens in our yard, but really I only want two or three, so hopefully one or two, but not all four, of these babies will be boys, because I don't know how we'll stand to choose which ones to give back to my friend, otherwise.

Because we LOVE these chicks. LOVE. THEM. Especially Fluffball:

Fluffball is some kind of chicken genius, I swear. Willow is all the time catching potato bugs (I pay her a penny for each bug she picks out of my garden, payable upon the dollar) and dropping them into the chicks' brooder, and so far only Fluffball has figured out the utter awesomeness of these bugs. She'll run up right away and start grabbing them up, and then the other chicks will get excited because she's excited, so they'll chase her around with a bug in her mouth and try to get it from her, but in the rare instances that they actually do, they just stare at the bug and they're all, "What's the hell is THIS thing?!?", but in that time Fluffball has managed to grab another bug, which gets the chicks all excited because she's excited, so they'll chase her around with a bug in her mouth.

Fluffball can also roost on the rock that we've got in there for some chick enrichment, and she can jump off of your hand if you put it super low to the ground, and once Sydney had her outside of her brooder on the floor with her, and she saw an ant crawling by, and she ate it!

Of course, we love Arrow, Crow, and Cluck, too. But it's nice to know that they've got a chicken genius like Fluffball to show them what's what.

My Latest over at Crafting a Green World: Tank Tops and Markers

a tutorial for art supply swatch cards 

and a tutorial for replacing tank top straps

I think I'm going to try to not buy the girls any clothes this summer. They're still so easy to sew for, in these ages before darts and careful fitting come into play, and they're thankfully still of ages in which they're thrilled with whatever I sew for them (I understand that this may NOT be the case in a few more years, but hopefully by then they'll be sewing some things for themselves!).

This decision will mostly affect Willow--Sydney has a HUGE selection of hand-me-downs from her sister, an older cousin, and a generous acquaintance of mine, but Will's main source of hand-me-downs, bless her heart, is a playmate who is several sizes bigger than her; when Will's a tween, she'll be all set with summer clothes, but this summer, for her, may well be the summer of cropped pants and homemade shorts. 

Barbie Fashion Show

We are deep into fashion show season here! Syd is practicing her runway walk daily, and spending much of the rest of her days thinking, dreaming about, talking about, and playing fashion show.

On our free day from school last week, I was spending the afternoon completing some orders from my pumpkin+bear etsy shop, and trying really hard to ignore all screams, thumps, and crashes from the other room, but I could not ignore my kiddo when she came in to theatrically announce that it was time for the Barbie fashion show in the next room.

A Barbie fashion show?!? Count me IN!

So I turned off the heat gun, laid a cloth over the beeswax (I've learned through experience that a cat will lie on top of rolled beeswax, and that rolled beeswax that a cat has lain on top of will never again be suitable for sale), and followed Syd out to the living room, where my clever girl had spent HER afternoon creating garments for each of her hand-me-down Barbies, and using our colored masking tape to tape a fashion show runway onto the floor.

Syd asked me to find "thumpy music" for the show, so I turned on the Club/House radio station on Spotify, and off we went!


Before I go on, I just have to ask you: you're not sitting there snarking on my house, are you? It's fine if you are, because I am not the person who stages my shots, or even runs around cleaning like crazy when someone's about to come over. Okay, I WILL clean the bathroom sink and put out a fresh hand towel, but I probably won't vacuum or clear off the table. So yes, the room that you can see through the doorway is messy, and the games don't fit on those built-in shelves, and the hallway has a kid-painted rainbow right in the middle of it, and I didn't vacuum the carpet, and I never learned that trick of how to hide a cord so that it doesn't hang in the middle of everything, and man, do our hardwood floors look run-down!

Anyway, back to the story: I love Sydney's Barbie fashion show, because you can really see how much of the process she's learned from her years of experience as a Trashion/Refashion Show designer/model. She taped her models' marks, and she walks them and poses them and walks them again, and they take care to show the entire outfit to both sides of the audience, and they certainly look like they're having fun, don't they?

But of course, the most important aspect of the model's performance is the garment, and I really, REALLY love how Sydney created each model's outfit, some from our stash of vintage Barbie clothes, but most assembled from my scrap fabric bin:

And speaking of Ken, Sydney has a further video starring him. She produced, directed, and served as costume designer. I filmed exactly as she dictated:


Hopefully we won't have anything like THAT at the fashion show!

Charlie Brown Circle Skirt

When I'm out thrifting, I collect kids' bedding in novelty patterns. They're actually not terribly common, especially the vintage patterns that I like (can't you just envision all the yuck that can happen to a kid's bed sheet?), but in the time that I've been sewing, some great sheets have come and gone through my sewing stash--Incredible Hulk, Powerpuff Girls, dinosaurs of all sorts, Batman and Robin, Spider-man, Scooby Doo, and who knows what else that I'm not remembering?

I've had a great Peanuts flat sheet in my stash for years, loving it but not sure what to do with it. Eventually my girls, however, who have by this point read every comic strip the library has for Foxtrot, Calvin and Hobbes, and Garfield, discovered (with a little sneaky Momma influence) Peanuts. They LOVE Charlie Brown and Snoopy, and Lucy and Peppermint Patty and Linus! So the day after I completely finished up Rose Dress, I cut out and started sewing the girls matching circle skirts from this Peanuts sheet. You'd think that I'd want a break from sewing after all that fuss, but I've already got another sewing project lined up immediately after this one, as well, so I suppose not.

Sydney's skirt still needs the elastic added to the waist, but Will's was finished up in time to write a circle skirt tutorial for Crafting a Green World, so instead of waiting for a mitchy-matchy photo shoot, I went ahead and just photographed her:

In trying to get the most use out of the sheet, I'm afraid that I made Willow's skirt a size too large. I'm embarrassed to tell you that I meant for this skirt to be knee-length!

It's not knee-length, and the elastic waist is a little roomy, as well:

I really, really like this sheet, though, and I actually really like the size of this skirt because it shows off all the little scenes on the sheet so well:

Willow likes the skirt, too, but after a muddy afternoon at the park she did tell me that the skirt "didn't feel like play clothes."

Ah, well. I'll put it back in her wardrobe one more time, but if it still feels a little awkward to her, then I guess that's why I keep a Next Size Up bin!

Rose Dress: Our 2013 Trashion/Refashion Show Entry

I took the bones of Sydney's design, made lots of false starts and took lots of wrong paths, then finally just sat down with an old red silk sheet (complete with Sharpie stains) and spent two solid days at the sewing machine creating Rose Dress:

I've already written about the construction of the dress, so now I just get to show it off, from top--

to bottom:

front--

back--

--and sides:

Thank goodness I had just enough fabric left for those bloomers!

Unlike last year's garment, which wasn't exactly play clothes, I wanted this dress to be something that Sydney could wear whether or not we're accepted into the fashion show, and all spring and summer after the fashion show is over. To that end, I tried to make the dress comfy and soft, light and sturdy, with as few seams and fussy bits as possible:

I'll just put snaps on these shoulder straps when the "fashion" work is over, and the dress will be ready for play!

Fortunately, we already discovered that the dress plays pretty well just as it is: