Flower Box Baby Quilt

I started this quilt about 6 years ago as a gift for a friend who was having a baby. The quilt is simple enough and you may wonder why it took so long to finish, but I couldn't figure out how I wanted to quilt the border and other projects & life worked their way to the front burner. I finally decided to just carry the quilting design to the edge and completed this UFO last night.

Excuse the wrinkled appearance. It doesn't seem so wrinkled when I look at it-- perhaps I didn't spread it out well enough when I took the picture?

This makes 2 down and 8 to go for my goal to finish 10 UFO's/WIP's in one month.

Pardon Our Dust

I am trying to update this blog and find that my left column is lost and my right column has found its way to the bottom of the blog. Hopefully I can get it figured out soon, without Rich looking into the code for me. For now, I need to go play with a 4-year old.

Road to Go

We're heading off for a long drive tomorrow (3 hours). Since Rich won't be accompanying us, I thought Zack might need something to help keep him occupied in the car. We do have a portable DVD player, but Zack has been known to get car sick and has never made this particular trip without getting sick. Needless to say, I want something that will clean up fairly easy and will not be ruined should he get sick.

Somehow I had a stroke of genuis. Since I'm not spending any money on crafts this month, I found an old cookie sheet that never gets used because it's rusty. You can pick up a new cookie sheet for as little as $4 at Walmart if you don't have one lying around.

Spray paint your cookie sheet. I chose to use black. If your cookie sheet is rusty like mine, you may want to sand off the worst of the rust to eliminate the blotches you can see in the photos. I didn't really care about it, since I knew that I would be covering them.

I used my Silhouette to cut out the stop signs and the race track, then I used Mod Podge to adhere them to the cookie sheet. I'm a bit of a Mod Podge novice and didn't get all of the bubbles out, but I'm sure Zack won't mind having some bumps in his road. One down fall of my cookie sheet: because it was small, I was limited as to the road I could use and the signs didn't really fit on the road like I had envisioned. I had a plan of a more realistic traveling road/city, which I could have fit on a larger cookie sheet had I bought a sheet instead of using what was on hand. Oh, well. He'll never know the difference, right?

After using the item, I actually found that this was the perfect size. The cookie sheet fit perfectly on his lap and was just large enough to rest on the arm rests of his booster chair.

These Hotwheels are fairly new on the market-- they are magnetic! Zack loves that they will climb up doors. I will love that they will stick to the cookie sheet and not fall off as he's playing or when he puts it away, causing problems while we're trying to drive.

Seriously, they don't fall off! They do drive down the sheet with good ol' gravity working on them, but they don't fall when they're vertical.

I have plans for the back of the cookie sheet as well. I thought about checkers, tic-tac-toe, etc. but those games all require a second player. I came up with something that I think Zack will have a lot of fun with, but I haven't had time to create it, yet. I'm excited to surprise Zack with his new game tomorrow and will try to have the rest of it done for another surprise before our next long drive.

Linking up:

Fifth Time's the Charm

I needed a bag to hold everything we needed to go play at the water park a week or so ago. I was unable to find anything that met my needs, so I thought I would make a bag. I knew I could make something simple that would be large enough to hold the items, but then I found a pattern that fit what I needed AND had a zipper AND had a lot of pockets. Zippers are always a plus. I picked up all of the materials, went home and spent the night working on the bag so that it would be ready to go the next day. *Note to self: just because you are awake and can't sleep does NOT mean that you can function well enough to try a new type of pattern. Also, don't try to complete an entire bag the night before you want to use it.

The first time through I somehow managed to sew the zipper inside the bag. I mean completely inside the bag-- in between the lining and the outside fabric. I unpicked, sewed the bag together again, only to find that I had the zipper piece sewn in upside down. I grabbed my trusty seam ripper again, then set to work sewing the bag for a third time. I didn't understand the instructions of the pattern because it was not working out properly and I couldn't figure out what to do with the ends of the zipper piece. I tried sewing them in, but that was obviously not the answer. Frustrated, I gave up at this point. The next morning, I ran to Target as fast as I could before we left for the water slides and found this bag:

I wish I could say that I saved a ton of money on the bag that I made, but the materials were the same price as this bag that I purchased at Target. It doesn't have nearly as many pockets as the pattern bag, though. With a finished model, my bag pattern now made sense. I knew what to do with the zipper piece. So, now that my bag pattern made sense, I started unpicking again last night. I sewed the bag together again. It was one of those perfect times when the stars are aligned and you run out of bobbin thread right as you finish your last seam. I was so pleased. Then I looked at the bag. I lined up seams of the lining and seams of the bag, but the lining seams were its center and the bag seams were its corners. The handles and the bag were skiwampus. I unpicked, yet again, and on the 5th time I finally managed to get the bag right.

The correct way to handle the zipper piece:

Beautiful pockets on the sides, ready to hold water bottles:

Two pockets on the front of the bag. They're pretty big, so I'm not sure yet what will go in them.

I didn't take any pictures of the inside pockets. I did a bit of adapting to meet my needs here. I ALWAYS need to have pens in my bags, so I made some narrow pockets that will house pens and/or pencils. The lining also features some larger pockets, so that it has a total of 8 pockets.

Here is the final bag:

May it see years of service and may I come to love it after all of the seam-ripping pain it caused me.

This makes 1 WIP finished for my month of no spending on crafting supplies. I also used some leftover fabric to make some bean bags. I have plans for those for another time.

Twist Collective

One of my favorite blogs to read is a knitting blog, Alaskan Purl. I love Allison Haas' writing style and her designs. One of her designs is featured in the Fall 2011 Twist Collective. So, I thought I would swing over and check out the patterns. I have this problem with knitting patterns-- the problem being that I fall in love with them and I have to have the pattern. My knitting skills are usually not up to snuff to actually make the product (though I hope to remedy that in the near future), so the patterns sit and collect and my pile grows ever larger. I am in love with so many patterns from Twist Collective! Here are just a few of my favorites.

If only they weren't sold separately for $6 or $7 per pattern. I would be more than happy to pay a book price to have a collection of the patterns, but how do I choose to buy them separately? How do I afford to buy them all separately? With the promise of fall and winter on the way, I am itching to get some needles out and attempt to finish some sort of cold weather project. This in no way helps my problem and these beautiful patterns are taunting me.