Dresses!

Why not? My pics for Oscars 2013.

Favorite overall: Halle Berry
Favorite color: Sally Field
Favorite black: Samantha Barks
Favorite sillouette: Salma Hayek


Honorable mentions: Sandra Bullock
 Stacey Keibler
 Kristin Chenoweth

Seriously Halle. Just stop.

Triangles are the devil.

Ok. Since we moved and I have a toddler and I really, really like to sleep I have not crafted much in the last several months. But I have crafted this:

I'm only showing the full view of this baby quilt because the pattern is really cute, but for the love of God please don't look too closely.

This looks super easy, I thought. It's just sewing straight lines, I thought. I've never done triangles or binding but I can totally do this in a week, I thought. Well you know what's great about babies? They smell good and don't care about precision sewing. Here are the cute fabrics, all flannel:

Find the original pattern here!

Paper flower mosaic.

Huzzah! I finished something recently!* Thank you to Crystal Seibert of It's Doable for the idea, which of course I found on Pinterest.

This is an AWESOME way to burn through paper scraps, and I'll be sharing more paper mosaic projects later. Unfortunately, while I love the way this turned out ... I don't like it over the mantel, which is where I was planning on putting it. I have no idea what to do with this now. I think the problem is that my house is full of muted colors and the red is just way too vibrant without anything to balance it. So do I make another one with different colors?

Something has got to replace our mantel "art;" a marker sketch I did of the view from our back steps looking out onto the light rail and mills. It is geographically inaccurate. And very, very plain. Perhaps the red was a bit of an over-compensation.


UPDATE (1/3/13):
We've moved! Now we don't have a space over the fireplace for artwork as it's a really, really, really old-style mantel with a mirror - which works great for quaint xmas decor.

So the flower mosaic ended up in my new closet-sized craft room. I hung it with an empty gold frame I had lying around and I dare say I like it. Brightens up what it otherwise a pretty crowded space.

 

Also, I can now sew while being watched over by a *totally authentically signed* photo of Barbara Walters.

Very inspiring.

*True, but this isn't it. Wrote this months ago. Soon we shall see the real project-of-late.

This scarf hanger is wicked awesome.

I think I'm going to corrupt the New England-accented "wicked awesome" with a Minnesotan accent.

So many Pinterest projects, so little time. Thank you to Be Different, Act Normal for this idea:

Hanger + shower curtain rings = no more balled up scarves. I found that the weight of the scarves made all the rings slide to one end of the hanger, but that was easily solved by grabbing a spool of cheap ribbon from my stash and wrapping the rings into place.

DIY sleep sack in half a day.

August is on the verge of crawling, so I can no longer let him play on the floor of the craft room as I work on stuff that leaves the room a veritable minefield of baby danger. Boo. Well, it was nice while it lasted.

This sleep sack was made for a friend who's due in a few weeks with her first. It is, as usual, not the most *technically* accurate product if one were to look very closely, but one doesn't need to do that.

I followed the instructions on Jan Andrea's At Home on the Web (she apparently got it from Annabear Babyware, but I can't find the original page). Fantastic project that's quick even for beginning sewers who don't like to strictly follow a pattern. Plus these are truly useful items from a retail category that is bogged down by a lot of unnecessary do-dads.

This is why we save every button that ever came off anything.

Plus, since I save lengths of ribbon and scraps of fabric I can probably make like five more of these before I run out of buttons.

For the baby's room, which did not need another piece of decor (shrug), I stretched scrap of grey herringbone over some foamcore and added black ribbon before gluing on the buttons.

It will sit on the highest shelf of his bookcase until the day I disassemble it because it is without a doubt the most dangerous thing in the room - what with the chewable foam, sharp pins, toxic glue, and throat-sized buttons.

For when you lose one mitten.

Aaaand when you don't care what your baby's mittens look like ...

Cut the sleeves off an old baby outfit that has cuffs and sew the top shut. Add a little fleece liner if you want to be fancy about it.

Cat-dog gets a new bed.

So about 15 years ago, my mom had this grand scheme to teach me how to sew by helping me make a tshirt quilt. We got a large piece of fleece for the backing and cut out rectangles from all the tshirts I had acquired in junior and senior high school (summer camps, school spirit events, badminton team - that kind of thing). Then we threw all these pieces into plastic bags to save for when we'd have more time to work on the project.

I *may* still have the tshirt scraps in the bag stashed under the basement stairs. Stupid depression-era rationale all running in the family and ruining any chance any of us has at ever being tidy, normal people. 

But wait! I knew I saved that stuff for a reason (other than my mom never letting me forget it if I had done something drastic and recycled it all).

 I took a cheapo pillow and used some of the fleece to make Penny a bed for the living room. My hope was that she'd take the reasonable opportunities to get in my lap (i.e. when it's empty) and STOP trying to take non-opportunities (i.e. when I'm on the laptop while feeding the baby). I mean, a nice cozy pillow bed is way better than someone constantly shoving you aside so your ears, eyes, and fur don't get scratched, gouged, or yanked.

What will I do with the rest of the fleece? I'll recycle it. There was a problem with that whole "measure twice, cut once" thing.

Drawings 48 and 49.

Trouble is, the sun was an afterthought and I put it in the wrong place according to the shadows I had already drawn.

Nobody looks good in a crystal ball.

Drawings 46 and 47.

Who puts hammers in a bag?

Almost no one. That's why there are like three Google images. Although this is apparently the title of a movie that came out last year.

Aaaand, here's something delicious:

My beans would be of the lemon-lime variety, obviously.