I Sewed a Christmas Tree Skirt, as Requested

How did we ever get by without a Christmas tree skirt?!?

It looks so pretty, and now I think the tree would look naked without it, but until my older kid suggested one last year, it had never occurred to me.

Although my kid has a sort of contentious relationship with her memory, so by "suggested," what I actually mean is that when we were decorating the tree, she dug through a couple of bins and then said, "Where's the tree skirt?"

I said, "We don't have a tree skirt."

She said, "What about the tree skirt we used last year?"

I said, "We didn't have a tree skirt last year."

She said, "Yes, we did."

I said, "No, we didn't."

She said, "Yes, we did."

No, we didn't:

Merry Christmas 2023 from Spots and Jones!

Nor did we in 2022:

How about way back in 2016, maybe?

Merry Christmas 2016 from Gracie, the best of cats

Nope! Although that was the year that I ran Pappa's train around the tree and it was ADORABLE.

Just between us, I think she's misremembering the red and white quilt I have on my bed, since I generally just pull it out as an extra warm layer in the winter. 

Anyway, to mollify her I told her that a tree skirt was a wonderful idea, even though I secretly didn't think so, and that I'd definitely make one for the tree this year, even though I secretly didn't want to.

My kids are right and I am wrong so often that it's kind of starting to get on my nerves...

I did dutifully spend most of the year low-key checking out tree skirt ideas. This one from Gathered is really pretty--

Christmas tree skirt image via Gathered

So is this one from Sewing with Scraps:

Starburst tree skirt image via Sewing with Scraps

I also really like this Dresden skirt pattern from Carrieactually on etsy:

Dresden tree skirt image via Carrieactually

At the very last minute, I happened upon this Nutcracker tree skirt pattern from The Weekend Quilter--

Nutcracker tree skirt image via The Weekend Quilter

--and I almost went for that one because you KNOW how we feel about The Nutcracker over here, but I still haven't taught myself FPP, shame on me. I've looked at a lot of YouTube tutorials, but honestly I think I may need to just get a book on how to do it.

But then in one of my quilting Facebook groups, a group member posted a photo of the tree skirt that she'd made by altering the Chroma Quilt pattern from Taralee Quiltery, and I was sold.

To alter the pattern from a traditional quilt to a tree skirt, you pretty much just have to omit the center octagon from the pattern and then cut through one side of the finished quilt. Sewing the first set of triangles is a little fiddly without that octagon to anchor them--

--but after that you can continue the piecing exactly as the pattern indicates:

I did not do my neatest job on the piecing--tbh, I was basically just throwing this quilt together since I'd promised I'd make it AND I had to get it finished before I could start putting presents under the tree--and to me, the misaligned points and general messiness are very evident, ahem. But everyone else swears that they cannot see a thing wrong, even when I make them look at the very worst bits, so although I may not have perfect quilting as my legacy, I do have a perfect family.

The quilt is entirely sewn from stash, although that's a bit of a cheat because I generally always buy 100% cotton solids and abstract prints when I see them in the remnant bins at Joann, so a lot of the fabric comes from that--I dithered about buying those three different shades of green when I found them in the same remnants bin, but I don't regret it now!

The holly fabric is a true scrap, though, as I have NO idea where it came from, and the quilt back is a white sheet that somebody gave me at some point and has been just kicking around my fabric bin for years:

Pause for a festive shot of the Christmas tree in the background!

That giant back deck grill eyesore was my Christmas present to Matt in... 2020, maybe? So it's thematically relevant!

I pieced together a couple of cuts of batting to get the correct dimensions. The next time I make a quilt, I'm going to have to splurge on new batting, grr!

So festive! Especially because in this shot you can barely see the giant back deck barbecue grill! My favorite part of our Christmas tree is that a good 98% of the ornaments are handmade, and another 1.5% are vintage ornaments from childhood family trees:

After that, all I had to do was bravely cut straight through the quilt I had just painstakingly pieced and sewn and backed and quilted--

--and then bind it with some stash binding, sandwiching three sets of ties in between the binding and the quilt:

And here's this year's Christmas tree, exactly the way that my older kid dreamed it should be:

It's kind of a nightmare with the robot vacuum, but it looks so pretty with the presents.

Now I want to make a proper Chroma quilt, lining up all my points and everything!

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

I Made Some Oven Mitts, and I'll Probably Make Some More

 

It was my birthday last week, and the kids and I had made all kinds of plans. The teenager tipped me off on signing up for birthday freebies, so we had some of those to pick up, and we also thought it might be fun to buy iced coffees and hang out for a while at our favorite indie bookstore. For dinner, a local pizza place gives you your age as a discount on your bill on your birthday, and at 47, I feel like I am finally old enough to really work that discount! Afterwards, Matt said he would set up the projector in the family room so we could all eat cheesecake and watch my favorite movie on a super-sized screen.

But first, the kids had to cool their heels for a couple of hours, because I told them that what I REALLY wanted to do the most on my birthday was sew some new oven mitts!

Our current oven mitts were all old and raggedy, which doesn't actually bother me, but Matt kept somehow grabbing pans with the raggediest part of any given oven mitt and burning himself, which is obviously not an oven mitt success story.

So I found this oven mitt pattern from Suzy Quilts, printed it out, and spent part of my birthday happily sewing away!

The exterior pieces are canvas--a couple of years ago, I got into buying canvas remnants whenever I stopped by Joann's, and for a while I was sewing all kinds of stuff with it, but now it's just sitting in my stash and I'm stoked to have a good use for it!--and cotton batting. I bought a TON of cotton batting yardage online during the Covid lockdowns (just between us, I mathed incorrectly and waaaaay overordered, ahem), and after being used on tons and tons of quilts over the past three years it's finally down to a scrappily remnant amount, as well.

The interior pieces are all quilting cotton of unknown provenance and in patterns that I LOATHE, but I keep it around anyway because quilting cotton! So useful! So a couple of these oven mitts have American flag insides, and a couple have pitchfork and straw hat insides, shudder. Don't look inside my oven mitts!

Here's a little of the quilting on the exterior pieces:

These oven mitts sew up SO quickly! I put a few shortcuts into the Suzy Quilts tutorial to make it even quicker, so if you, too, want the absolute quickest way to a new oven mitt, do this:

1. Follow all the regular steps to cut out the pieces, baste the lining to the fabric, quilt the exterior pieces, sew the two interior pieces together and the two exterior pieces together, and turn the exterior side of the mitt right side out.
2. Insert the interior side of the mitt (which should still be inside out) into the exterior mitt. The two parts of the mitt should be wrong sides together.
3. Turn the raw edges of both parts to the inside, clip it well with those super handy plastic clips you finally bought yourself after seeing them on Tiktok and wanting them for years--

--and sew around the edge to finish!

Here's a photo of Luna helping me photograph my brand-new oven mitts on the back deck, right before the kids and I headed off for iced coffee, my free Crumbl cookie, and a couple of hours of book browsing:

These oven mitts have been in use for a week now, and we love them! The two layers of canvas, two layers of quilting cotton, and four layers of cotton batting feel like plenty of insulation, and the size works for every hand from the teenager's to Matt's. Even though I don't think we need more than four oven mitts in our rotation, I'm very tempted to make more while I have the canvas and the cotton batting and a pattern I love at my fingertips. I could save a couple each for these kids' future first apartments, and I could put a few in my handmade presents stash, or just set them aside to replace these when they get worn.

Actually, though, our current hot pads are just as old and raggedy, so maybe I should make some new ones to match my new oven mitts!

Three New Ballet Skirts, or, It's So Fun To Sew with Slippery Fabrics /s

 

The world of children's ballet is a Whole Thing, y'all. And I'm not even talking about the body politics or the stresses of casting or the superb posture training. My teenager has danced in the same pre-college ballet program since the age of approximately four, and so you'd think the uniform would be pretty standard. Leotard, tights, and shoes, and you can even skip the tights if you're dancing Russian-style.

But no. Every year, and sometimes every semester, is just a new, annoying way to spend my money because these people cannot seem to make up their minds about how they'd like the children to dress! At one point in time, several ages wore the same leotard color, so that switching to a new leo color was a momentous achievement. Then they decided that every level should have its own color. Annoying to buy all new leotards each year, but at least there was something of a resale market. Then they decided that kids could only wear camisole-style leotards, so we all had to go buy new ones. Then they kept everything the same for a year, which was cool, but in the last month of classes decided that the kids should wear a completely different color of leotard and ballet skirt just for the recital--here, by the way, is that white leotard and skirt that my kid wore exactly once. Then they decided that you could wear any style of leotard you wanted as long it was the right color, but they had two different levels wearing two different colors of green, and do you know how hard it is to tell online if a leotard is more mint green or forest green (this one is neither mint NOR forest, it was determined)? And don't even get me started about the level that had to wear "grey"--Friends, there are a lot of greys in the world! Then there was a year in which they did uniform by ages but grouped several ages into a single class, and that's how we discovered that my teenager is the only teenager exactly her age in the program, because she got to be the only black leotard in a sea of burgundy, and guess how much she did not love that.

Over the years we've gone from kids can wear ballet skirts to every class (everyone bought SO MANY skirts) to kids can never wear them ever (after, of course, everyone had bought and owned and loved 4-6 different skirts) to now kids can wear them on Saturdays. I think. For now.

My teenager is, as you might imagine if you've ever known somebody who submitted daily to a strict dress code, thrilled by the upcoming Ballet Skirt Saturdays. Because I can never just buy something and be done with it, I found this pattern for an asymmetrical SAB-style ballet skirt from DsSewingPatterns on etsy, ran it by the teenager, she approved, and then I bought it and we went fabric shopping.

Because fabric shopping is the funnest part!

Four-way stretch isn't really my jam, nor is sewing thin, slippery mesh and tulle, but the teenager had a fabulous time picking out a few fabrics to try, and she was so excited to have me sew them up for her that she literally stood next to the table as I worked, just, like, watching me stitch while listening to my Dolls of Our Lives podcast. I felt very attended to! 

Luna helped, too:

Fortunately, this is one of the best, easiest, and most straightforward patterns I've ever used. The magic is in the cut, which, as you can see if you look closely at the template below, IS asymmetrical!

This means that you can wear it truly asymmetrical, with one side longer, or the way my teenager likes it, with the longer part at the booty for a little more coverage.

The photo below is technically my muslin, although I have a Depression-era fear and loathing (thanks, Mamma and Pappa!) of wasting fabric, so I got the teenager to choose something on clearance that she would still reluctantly wear. She's got those October Saturdays pinned down now!

I did alter the pattern quite a bit in length after sewing this muslin, which is why you should always sew a muslin. Fortunately, the saving grace of this thin, slippery, asshole fabric is that at least it doesn't ravel, so I could just trim the bottom to my preferred length and didn't even have to hem it, hallelujah.

That spiderweb fabric also worked out perfectly when turned inside-out to make the black waistband on this, the most glorious of all ballet skirts:

My teenager and I are absolutely enamored with this skirt. To be honest, she's probably not gonna wear any of the others as long as this one is around. It's a sheer black mesh with these flowers and sequins appliqued on it, and it. Is. Stunning. Now imagine it in motion!

I'm just going to show you a few more close-up photos of it, I'm so proud of it:

Y'all aren't going to believe this, but over winter break the pre-college ballet department reorganized the levels AGAIN, so after having all the kids in my kid's class wearing black leotards all semester, even the ones who were technically supposed to wear burgundy, and me thinking that my kid was going to be wearing black leotards six days a week for the next two years and therefore buying her even more black leotards for Christmas, now they've decided that everyone should go back to... BURGUNDY. You know, the color that LITERALLY NOBODY WORE LAST SEMESTER. BECAUSE THEY WERE ALL WEARING BLACK. A CLASS FULL OF KIDS WHO NOW OWN SEVERAL BLACK LEOTARDS THAT FIT, AND THEY WANT THEM TO BUY SIX DAYS' WORTH OF BURGUNDY LEOTARDS INSTEAD. JUST FOR THE SECOND SEMESTER OF THE EXACT SAME CLASS FULL OF THE EXACT SAME CHILDREN.

I participated in the Great Burgundy Leotard Scramble of 2019, and I am not going back to that nightmare scenario of battling every other parent in the class for the, like, five burgundy leotards, total, that exist in the world--burgundy is not a popular leotard color for the ballet world at large!!! They can put whatever they want on their dress code, but they have pushed me, personally, too far. I bought my teenager a shit ton of black leotards back in August, and a shit ton more black leotards over Christmas, and two shit tons of black leotards is what she will be wearing to class next semester whether they like it or not. 

Sigh. Do you want to make bets on how many classes until I cave?

Team Mouse on the Christmas Tree

 

The Nutcracker battle is fought not just on the stage, but also on the Christmas tree this year!

And Team Mouse is finally winning!

I bought these super cute felt Mouse and felt Officer patterns thinking that they'd make adorable gifts for the other Mice and Officers in my teenager's Nutcracker casts. I only thought that because I sew by hand so rarely that I had completely forgotten how time consuming it is, oops!

First, you cut out all the tiny pattern pieces:

Then you figure out what color you want everything to be. I still have plenty of felt wool scrippy scraps (I just checked my gmail, and I originally bought this felt way back in 2017--definitely time to finish using it up!), and this kind of small felt figure is the exact perfect use for them. Wool felt is much more beautiful than acrylic felt, and has such a nicer texture, that it's worth it to use it in a project where both of those features are really highlighted.

Cutting out all the little felt pieces wasn't super fun because I was too cheap to go out and buy a proper pair of tiny scissors, but I did get to use my favorite heat-erasable Frixion pens to trace most of the patterns, and that's never not thrilling:

Finally, just spend a million hours hand-stitching the cutest little Mouse Soldier in the world!

Um, I did NOT end up making felt Mice and Officers for every kid in my kid's casts. I did make a different present for just the Team Mouse kids, but it was a lot quicker and easier than hand-sewn felt ornaments!

I do think this sewing would go a lot more quickly the second time, now that I know what I'm doing, and I DO have another Mouse and an Officer already cut out and ready to go. Frankly, though, I think I need to have an appointment with my optometrist first, because I'm not sure I've got the eyes for hand-sewing anymore...

The Harper Tunic, a Second Try--And This Time It Fits!

 

The bad news first: fewer kittens fit in your pockets when your Harper Tunic actually fits!

Although to be fair, the kittens, themselves, are bigger now, too. Look at these nearly seven-week-old chonkers!

The lightest of them (our picky Pickle!), is about one pound, 10 ounces currently, so we'll probably have these foster babies for another couple of weeks. 

With my first try at the Harper Tunic, I took the advice that if I was between sizes, I should size up, but the finished tunic was just too roomy.

This time, I cut the pattern down to an OSP, and I love it!

I also love sewing this tunic. It's got some nice details, but is overall quite quick and easy to sew. My fabric of choice was a $5 thrifted sheet, the perfect price so that if, as with my first tunic, I didn't love it, I hadn't thrown too much money at it. I've got enough leftover from the sheet to sew some other projects, although not enough for another garment.

Don't you love a nice spiral of tidy double-fold bias tape?

Also as with my first tunic, I sewed a second pocket onto the front. When I tried the first tunic on, I just wasn't feeling the asymmetry, so I added the second pocket to this tunic as a matter of course:

Good thing, because the pockets are my absolute favorite part of this garment! I can hold so many kittens, sure, but also gardening shears, oregano sprigs, and sunflower cuttings:

It's also VERY comfy, but alas, it's still not anymore flattering than it was with my first try. I, personally, don't care, but as we were getting ready to go out the other day, both Matt and Will each asked me separately if this was what I was planning to wear:

It most certainly was! Here I am in a McDonald's parking lot, waiting for my French fries and Diet Coke:

After that, I wore my new tunic to the Museum of Miniature Houses (yay for Smithsonian's Museum Day!), then to IKEA for dorm stuff for Will, then to Trader Joe's for almost every single seasonal autumn product they had in stock, and then back home to lie around drinking pumpkin cider and eating Halloween Joe Joe's while my brand-new vanilla pumpkin candle burned and kittens used my body as a battleground:

That's probably all the Harper Tunics that I need for myself, although I do have the short-sleeved version printed out, and I could see myself sewing it up next summer when it's hot but I miss my giant pockets. Will's also somewhere in the middle of piecing together a Harper Tunic pattern of her own (oh, the hell of all those 8.5"x11" pieces of paper that must be trimmed, lined up, and taped together!!!), so that will be a fun beginner sewing project for me to help her with.

And then we can go out and about with our matching unflattering but comfy tunics!!!