Fishies!

Well, I should be packing and getting ready for our beach vacation tomorrow, so what did I do this evening? Make some car toys, of course! ;) I'd been thinking about making little round animals for a while, but I hadn't gotten around to it. So tonight I put together these fish:

They're kind of hard to see in this picture, but I made cloth balls and then added fish parts. I'll post better pictures sometime later - I can't seem to get good ones right now. They turned out awfully cute, though!

And as cheesy a bad pun it is, I'm very amused by my cat-fish. Hee-hee....

Success!

It's done!!



Well, for all my complaining in the previous post, my carrier really didn't take all that long to make. A couple of hours for cutting, and a day for actually putting it together. The padding of the straps was a huge pain in the neck, and I spent quite a long time trying to figure out how to attach the waistband to the body of the carrier. (I'm apparently a visual learner for sewing. Written instructions puzzle me.) And I should've ordered my webbing and buckles, since the stuff from REI isn't really quite right (heavy duty enough, but not right). Oh, and I broke one needle, but that's actually pretty good considering the number of layers I was sewing through. My machine actually did a lot better than I expected.

I haven't really had a chance to test it too much, but I can put M up in it, and it's like a real carrier. And it's pretty. :) I might even make another one, with some changes to make it more comfy. I'll have to try the new one out a bit more to figure out what exactly I'll need, but all in all I'm pleased. And as you can see, so is M.

Baby carriers

When M was a baby/young toddler, I was really into babywearing and baby carriers. Bought a lot, sold a lot, owned a lot. ;) Our babywearing isn't as frequent anymore, but she does still ride on my back sometimes. ("I want to go in a carrier." A two year old saying carrier is *so cute*!) Anyway, in all that time of intense baby carrier addiction, I never really got into making the carriers myself. I made a pathetically bad mei tai (way too floppy, because at the time I had no idea what I was doing), and a tremendously uncomfortable pouch (still don't quite know what happened there). Lately, though, I've been admiring all the pretty DIY carriers on thebabywearer.com, and then I saw a free SSC (soft structured carrier) pattern on there. (Here's a link: http://www.lulu.com/content/2302753 .) So I decided to take the plunge.

And wow, I think the carrier makers deserve every penny that they charge! What a pain!

I think it's going to be a pretty carrier, assuming it's actually successful, but it certainly is a lot of work. I was just padding the straps (which are curved), and getting the fleece to lie flat is SO irritating! It'd be easier if I'd gone for straight straps, but I think the curved ones might help with my main problem with our current carrier. I guess I'll see how it goes, though. I hope it turns out okay, but at the moment I'm not entirely sure it will! Perhaps pictures will come sometime... :)

Rainbows, part 2

I'm all about the part twos lately, huh? :)

After much, much procrastinating, I finally finished M's patchwork rainbow kitty dress. Here's a picture:
Instead of a button type bodice, I did a more empire style bodice on M's dress, and I think it looks better that way. It's also super poofy because the first tier was so wide (and they just went out from there). I had 6 rainbow fabrics, so each tier is a multiple of 6, starting with 12 squares on the first layer. Each layer after that was whichever multiple of 6 was closest to 1.5 times the previous layer. Anyway, I'm pleased. As usual, I kind of prefer my second attempt at a dress, although in this case it's mostly because I like the kitties better than the butterflies on the bodice of A's dress.

The girls wore their dresses to a birthday party yesterday, and a woman there (I didn't know her previously) kept going on and on about how I should make them for sale in a boutique. It's always a nice ego boost, although frankly, these were a massive pain to make, so even if that was a direction I was going, I don't think I'd make these for sale! Although the patchworking part was fun - it's just the circle skirt part that's a pain. All that gathering!

And, just because this picture amused me, here they are in their matching dresses, riding on the cart at Home Depot.

We're making great progress on the bathroom renovations. Actually, it's not too far off being done. The shower is usable, yay! That was just done, so I haven't had a chance to try it out yet, but I'm very excited!

470 inches (or 39.16 feet)

That's how long the tiers of this patchwork circle skirted dress would be, if you stretched them all out next to one another. Almost 40 feet! The ruffle alone was 131/2 feet.

I'm all into patchwork skirts at the moment. I had made a patchwork circle skirt for her a while back. (Seen below in it's full circle-ness...)

She loves it, and I started playing around with the idea of a rainbow one for M. Which, of course, meant that I had to make one for A as well, and somehow hers got done first. I'm not sure how that happened.

Anyway, I quite like the effect of the patchwork, and who doesn't like a nice twirly skirt, but wow, it was a pain at the end. Gathering the 13ish feet of ruffle took some doing. (Although elastic tape is the greatest invention ever for gathering. It doesn't look quite as good as properly gathering the fabric, in my opinion, but it's SO much easier.) And of course, I had to go buy extra fabric for the patchwork, since I really only had enough for M's dress in the first place, and A is so tall that it had to be longer than I was expecting.

The thing that took the most time was the bodice, since I radically changed a bodice pattern that I had, and it didn't go quite as smoothly as I would have liked. It ended up working out fine - it's cute, and pretty much what I was aiming for - but there was quite a bit of seam ripping and re-sewing involved.

But hey, she's happy, and she looks pretty darn cute in it, so it all worked out. Now I have to get up the energy to do M's!!