Family slippers

Here they are.

Pleasing pile of alpaca

Half of them at least.

Imagine this picture with 7 pairs. *sigh

And you have to trust me that the other half were delivered because I handed them over, and then remembered to photograph them.

In a bad case of Absolutely not Learning My Lesson About Furry Yarn, I tried to make myself a pair in this.

Moda Vera Flurry. Feels nice around my toes, nasty on the hook.

 Once again, couldn't read the stitches and failed to count them accurately so I have no hope in hades of  replicating the one sad little slipperish shaped object that is slumped in a heap at the bottom of my crochet bag.

Sulky flurry rodent.

You know those slippers...

Well, there is progress being made, but these, these, have taken up more time that all of them put together.

Little doll slippers. Made of scraps of merino. And yes, that is knitters elastic you see worked into the top stitches... 

... and treble crochet detail in thee instep. don't tell the cousins...

He looked cold, ok? With his little bare plastic feet and shortie onesie...

So yes. there was a cardie too.

Note co-ordinating edging and toddler-easy popper fastening.

There now, doesn't that look nice?

 And honestly, Andy does sort of stick his arms out - his pose above has almost nothing to do with the construction of the garment. Almost. Nothing.

Oh, and worth noting that Andy came with socks and shoes, but they were lost within days. This had nothing to do with the construction of the socks, and everything to do with the apparently funnel-shaped feet on our favourite doll. Did i learn from this? Why no, I didn't even notice it. so, all round a good investment of time... (as in, its only a matter of...)

Happy belated birthday

BoyGoblin turned two not long after The Big Move, and so it was time for another birthday badge. You can see last year's here (and there's a pdf tutorial too).

This year it was all about steam trains.

This works the same as the last one, with a magnet sewn into the frontspiece, and into a large plain felt circle worn inside the clothing. 

A big hard-to-swallow felt circle for the back, with the magnet double-sewn in.

You can see that I had to use oblong magnets this year - round ones work better.

The ribbon really lifts it

The ribbon was a real find - from a bargain store, of all places!

Pun-tastic!

Making time

My Boygoblin is obsessed with clocks at the moment, and I fear that  the decorative clocks in his room that seemed such a cute idea at the time is simply confusing him.

How do I know this? Because he comes out with breathless statements like "The big hand is on the castle and its half past the dragon and now its time to play trains!"

So we raided the craft box and made our own. 

Move over, PlaySchool

I did all the sharp stuff, but he coloured the clock face, threaded the hands onto the pipe cleaner and through the plate, and stuck most of the numbers on.

I cut and coloured the hands. BoyGoblin did the rest.

I'm considering upping the stakes and getting a clock motor for it for his playroom. Only considering mind.

No motor, just a matchstick (safer than a split pin).

WIP or UFO

This is a project that is inhabiting that limbo land between WIP and UFO. Which is it?

This is when I started having doubts. 

Even Dearwife is finding it hard to stop laughing be encouraging, and she is usually extremely supportive of even my most misguided creative endeavours.

Its the beginnings of an elephant, and it was to be my first softie.

It looks less like a poo now i've attached the ears.

But, you know, I'm not sure about the pattern. Im still reserving judgement, because its hard to tell until its finished, but I'm not chuffed that the animal will be top heavy. Rather than weight it with beans, which means it cant be washed, I foolishly stuffed it with toy pellets, which are now working their way out between the loops and shedding all over the floor. Poor thing looks like it has some awful disease.

My softie's shedding choke hazards. I see here he is mysteriously covered in cat fur, so someone in the house must love him.

The yarn is just awful to work with - its flocked, so it gives a lovely soft fabric, but the stitches are impossible to see, which makes the work impossible to read. That means there was a lot of rework going on, and I found it nigh-on impossible to reuse the yarn that had been frogged.

So, I  ran out of the yarn which I bought in the UK, and is not available here, so he's going to have to have pale purple legs. And possibly eyelids. (and oh jeez, don't even talk to me about safety eyes. Safe for whom, exactly?)

Disaster all round, but I'm not quite ready to give up on him.

I am going to have to do something about his pellet problem, though, and I fear it might be terminal.

Patient feet

Cosy alpaca toes for the littlest, who also astonished me with his forebearance, allowing mummy to slip his feet in and out of partly completed slippers throughout the hot afternoon. (I think he was actually more tolerant than his mumma.)

Not sure how long these will stay white when goblintoes inhabit them...

 I bought a pattern for the applique alphabet, forgetting that as I'm left-handed, I've had to reverse them all - either working backwards up the pattern, or reverse engineering each letter. 

f is for faff

I've already given up, and all the cousins will be getting stars appliqued on their toes. 

Eggspert floristry

I seem to be spending a lot of time covered in poster paints these days as boygoblin likes to make things and at just 2 years old, is not yet to be trusted with needles and hooks. (He does like his threading beads though, so there is hope for the wee thing yet.)


Pretty flowers

This week's project was a bunch of flowers for Dearwife -  he misses her when she's as work.
We had lots of fun mixing colours and splashing about with the paint on the egg cartons.



colourific!



Then, during naptime (thank goodness for naptime) I cut up the egg tray and prepierced the bowls, ready for the pipe cleaners.



Ready for wake-up time



Pretty!


The vase is the box from mini cupcake papers, and Boygoblin picked the mama and baby stickers to decorate it.



any excuse for stickers

Boys don't wash

Not much time for sewing around here at the moment, not least because we’ve been away on holiday.

And every time we go, I’m astonished at how vast our family toiletry / first aid bag is. There are only three of us, one is less than three foot tall, and neither of his mamas are lotions and potions sorts of gals. But we routinely fill a large nappy bag with soap, shampoos, moisturisers, plasters, panadol, thermometers…. You name it! And even that’s with all of us smelling of baby bath all week.

Not only is the resulting saddlebag bulky and heavy, but it makes it very difficult to find anything, like a medicine syringe at 1am.

To divide it up a little more, the BoyGoblin needs his own wetbag. After a couple of days of sketching, reality bit – no time to make one, especially as the skills gap was less a fissure and more a chasm (oilcloth? Zip? Eek!).

A couple of hours online  revealed that buying one was going to be tricky too, as apparently, boy children don’t wash.

So I did a quick and dirty. A £2 toiletry bag from Tiger, and 10 minutes to iron on a set of transfers I picked up in Berlin last year.

Just a sample of the stuff that will ge stuffed in here...

The photos aren’t hugely charismatic, and neither is the bag to be honest, but it does the trick, and as far as boygoblin is concerned its perfect! Not only has it got diggers on it, but you can put things in and take things out. Did I mention the diggers?



Flocked forklift. Flocking awesome!







The end of the rainbow...

I finally finished it. Goodness me.



Juicy colours, made with love, sweat and tears.

I can’t tell you how painful the freemotion quilting was. I’m clearly not a natural (hence the deliberately off-centre swirls) and I had all sorts of issues with my tension (both the thread, and my shoulders.)

Charming wobbly spirals - the much contested limit of my freemotion prowess.

There are four big pockets in the back,  that will loosely hold cars, crayons, whatever.

These are the pockets...



... and these would be the Whatevers. DearWife was not impressed.

It all rolls up neatly.


Oh, and I appliqued some shapes on the back too. Templates via Word, sanity via Bondaweb.



I wonder how long it will take me to sew on a strap?

Like a yummy car-filled sushi roll

 I think the Cath Kidston ribbon I got for my birthday makes perfect binding. Lucky I procrastinated over finishing then, eh?

By far the biggest challenge was met by DearWife, who completed her mission to find a car to match each panel. Pink was a particular challenge.

I can hear the engines revving, can't you?

  This one's going on the plane with us. 

I'm not a papercrafter but...

…I am a thrifty stitcher, which is where the inspiration for this came from.



Sturdy baby bath box about to be repurposed



This was a box of baby samples. It was a free offer, and comes with an inner tray that makes it perfect as a sewing box.

Now, not being a papercrafter (did I mention that) I used some fairly basic materials to  spruce it up a bit



The paper was scrap from a craft magazine, and the rest of the materials are pretty basic



I was rather pleased with this ingenious use of fridge magnets and binding clips (actually hairclips):

 

I'm sure papercrafters have a slicker way...



 I traced the shape of the label i wanted to cover onto baking paper, and then used magnets and hairclips to "pin" the template to the patterned paper.

Et voila!



The teal tray comes out too



And not content to stop there...

This box cost £8

DearWife was not oncvinced when I brought this home...

And with the addition of wrapping paper and felt letters makes a jolly, practical  storage box for boygoblin’s rapidly expanding stash of art and craft supplies.

(like mother, like son…)





Chasing rainbows

For the past four weeks my sewing studio has been out of bounds – first filled with houseguests, and then packed up for the painters, (neither DearWife nor me being the sort of domestic goddesses who relish redecorating, our response to chipped walls being “get the little men in!”)  and finally carefully dressed and posed for sales viewings.

Well, the men have been and gone, as have the estate agents. I spent most of last night reassembling the space the way I really like it, and rather a lot of time simply fondling my stash, if you know what I mean.



Lovely rainbows



And all this led to me starting a bit of an impulsive project – a colour-sorting table mat for the BoyGoblin that I’ve had in mind for a while. Using spare charm squares from the Eye-spy quilt, and scrap batting too.



Coloured cars waiting for their parking spaces



I’m using it to practice quilting freemotion quilting, and I am truly rubbish at it. I’ve stitched and unpicked so many times that the cotton is starting to look like tulle, and I have a pile of threads the size of a pelican’s nest on the sewing table. Arrgh! and those threads are getting everywhere! I noticed one caught in my stockings yesterday at work. Whoops!

Something from the archives

This must be one of the first thing I ever stitched, so it must be about 25 years old.

Well worn

I think this is supposed to be flower, possibly as tulip? Snowdrop? I’m not sure whether I got the pattern wrong, or used weird colours (possibly both) but I don’t remember a time when I thought it looked pretty.

Not convinced about the red trim either.

Delighfully wonky red stitching

I assume I was working with what was available – offcuts and scraps from my mums sewing room, and I do know cross-stitch patterns were nowhere near as available then as they are.

Some of these needles have been in here for years.



It's been in heavy use ever since, and had travelled halfway across the world, so I can’t hate it. 

Fraying

Although I do think its time for a new one…