In other news, I'm teaching a cloth diapering workshop at Barefoot Herbs + Barefoot Kids this Saturday, April 26, from 4:00-6:30. Cloth diapers are better for baby and better for the environment for a myriad of reasons, and overall they're also cheaper than an entire baby's worth of disposables, but they can have a large up-front cost. Fortunately, the actual diaper material that goes into the cute little moisture-proof cover is something that it's possible to make yourself with a bare minimum of sewing skills and using recycled/repurposed materials. This takes a LOT of the cost out of cloth diapers, and it's all terrific in that since a diaper's insides are purely functional, not necessarily attractive at all (though they can be!), you can use fabric so unsightly that there is hardly any other way to usefully repurpose them. To wit:
- Go through your linen closet and pull out all your old, nasty, beaten-down bath towels. You know you have them, and you know you need to get rid of them before company comes over. The one below is the one I'm going to be cutting up today. Notice the old fingerpaint stains in the middle, and the big tear there where the sun is shining in through the window. This was in my linen closet, y'all!
2. Find a nice, big rectangle or square to use as a template. Below I'm using my 12"x18" cutting mat, which is a really nice size, but lots of sizes would work--pizza boxes make good templates, or large picture books.
3. Cut up the towel using the template--with my template, I got five big rectangles. It's fine to include the stains, because this diaper is going to be purely functional here, but do not include worn parts of the towel--they won't last. Notice that you're going to have to vacuum later, because little bits of terry will get everywhere.
4. Using the towel as a template, now, cut a piece of 100% cotton fabric for the facing. I used some flannel leftover from the ring sling I made when the big kid was the baby, but stained cotton T-shirts are also really terrific--I often like to use fabric for these that is so ugly, stained or just stupid, that I'd never repurpose it in anything else. You can either cut out one piece of cotton fabric for each piece of terry, ending up with a diaper that is terry on one side and cotton on the other, or cut out two pieces and make a cotton-terrycloth-cotton sandwich out of it. I'm making an open-faced cotton-terry sandwich here.
5. Pin it or don't pin it, but put a sharp, strong needle in your sewing machine, and begin to stitch your two pieces of fabric together. 
You will be interrupted at this point by a diaper-wearing child who is tired of independent play, and you'll likely nurse, read books, make a cheese quesadilla that no child eats, switch over the laundry, go to a children's dance class, etc., before you can get back to sewing. Frankly, I don't mean to be pessimistic here, but you may never get back to sewing.
6. However, if one child is at preschool and the other is napping for the moment, awesome, and don't forget to leave a space open so we can turn this puppy right side out when we're done. 
7. Clip the corners so they'll turn right side out neatly...
...and turn that baby right side out. You can iron it flat, now, or just smooth it out some, but get back to the sewing machine and sew that opening closed. Sometimes I like to topstitch around all the edges to disguise the spot where I sewed the opening closed, but really, that's just fanciness, and regardless, your diaper will now look like this:
To see how it looks nice and folded inside a Bummis cover, check out the photo at the top of this post!
You can also stuff these inside a pocket diaper such as Fuzzi Bunz, and you can stitch on or just lay on top a nice rectangle of fleece if you want, which will wick moisture away from baby's butt and keep them feeling dry.
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!
collection. It is so weird), then creeeep out, holding my breath, and actually have time to finish tweaking and printing the dino photos I'm going to put in the kids' downstairs bathroom. This is Sue, from the Chicago Field Museum:
(gift alert: the kids totally need all these Smithsonian Handbooks) and she actually found the right picture for each of these dinosaurs and spelled their names for me so I could label their bellies with a Sharpie. This here is a velociraptor up front, and possibly a pachycephalosaurus behind it:
DVD skips because it's been watched about 5 billion times, and so Willow comes in to see what I'm doing. To entertain her, I make her some ribbon headbands for her new short hair. They're very simple:
as a reference, and happily knit away in a simple knit stitch for the rest of the evening. 
And yeah, that's why nothing is ever clean around here.
I found some overdue library books, one of the girls' 
DVDs, a couple of tax forms, the clear packing tape we'd been looking for, a student's homework paper (oops!)--it was quite the treasure trove. I was even inspired, after looking at this very photo of the unattractive wall with the electrical cords hanging down and the one sad little postcard from our vacation to France when Willow, who is almost four, was 8 months old, to whip out my brand new duct tape in pretty colors and organize all the very, very many cords at my desk: 
It still looks a little wild, but they're not tangled, they're off the ground, I can see what goes with what, and they're relatively inaccessible to the babies. Up on top of the desk, now, I have a second power strip, and I've plugged all the power vampires--scanner, printer, back-up drive, laptop--into that power strip, even if I've taped their cords to the wall down below. I can easily reach the power strip on the desk top to turn it and the vampires off, and below the desk I've plugged in the stuff that isn't vampiric--desk lamp, pencil sharpener, sewing machine--and the wi-fi thingy, which needs to stay on regardless.
--but otherwise this plan is a bust. All my previous projects--study floor, livingroom table, etc.--are as filthy again as they were before, and the rest of the house is even filthier because instead of lowering the overall filth factor of the house by a little bit every day, I've been spending most of my very short cleaning time just trying to lower the filth factor of my few project spots a lot. Sigh. So until a new plan emerges, we'll keep to our previous workable strategies of kicking stuff over to the walls when we need floor space and enforcing the rule that when you trip over something, you have to pick it up and put it away (Willow tries to get around this rule by, while getting back up after falling on her face, tears in her eyes and readying the screams, insisting, "I didn't trip over anything!").
and, awesomely, this:
This latter I'm going to back and bind and hang as a tapestry in the basement bathroom off of the playroom, which the girls and I are currently painting a combination of aqua green and Incredible Hulk green. The other fabrics will be ample, I think, for the full-sized quilt I'm planning, plus some pillowcases and perhaps extra for dino quilts to sell. 
She did the back middle (unsupervised, with "Momma scissors") and I evened out the sides. It's adorable, of course, and though there were dire consequences for using Momma scissors without permission, there were no consequences for the hair cutting--it's her hair, right? I firmly support her right to have control over her own body, within the limits of safety and public codes of conduct, but I do still get to cry quietly in the bathroom with the door closed. Adieu, sweet little baby curls. Adieu.
, by Amy Karol, is such a useful resource for a self-taught sewist because it offers some pretty intricate projects that I can totally get into, but without using the technical language I never learned. I just realized, while flipping through it for an example, that there is something in here I am absolutely going to modify for my swap!--lips are zipped.
, by Wenlan Chia, makes good perusing. Also peruse the 
The simplest stuff to make, of course, is in the "flat" category. Bread is just a brown bread shape with a white smaller bread shape stitched on--if you're into a pleasing shape, by the way, or you're just not a skilled hand-drawer as I am not, it's simple to find a template for most of this stuff by doing a Google Image search for, say, bread slice, printing out a picture that has a shape you like, and cutting it out. And once you have bread, all the other sandwich fixins are easy--cheese slices (don't forget a holey Swiss or my own personal favorite--American!), lunchmeat, the peanut butter and jelly I made above, etc., don't even require sewing, and items like lettuce leaves or tomato slices just need some embroidery for definition. 
frosted cookie and slice of pizza! Even though we never have either sausage or pepperoni on our pizzas (we always, always order half sundried tomatoes or broccoli for me and half pineapple for Matt), Willow requested the above "saussaroni" on her pizza. 
I'm the one who likes sushi, and these are really easy: roll up long rectangles, hand-stitch the felt nori closed, and take a few stitches back and forth across the whole piece to keep it all together.
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Notice that some fabrics do better with hemming, and with some, you don't have to bother: kids are the only group who can still pull off the frayed look.