Too cute to survive

Because really, who can resist a teeny tiny pincushion that has a tendency to roll away, and is extremely attractive to toddlers?

Boygoblin called this "Mummy's yellow car".
Deeply unfair, because it is eerily similar to "'Goblin's yellow car."

Thats a strip of printed jersey rolled, handsewn and popped in the tray.

Babycrack. Right. there.

Too cute to live, and Boygoblin has car back now.

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).

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!







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…)





Side tracked

The Boygoblin has started to pretend. Which is lovely, especially when I find him firmly smooshing his stuffed rabbit face-first into the catfood bowl.

Or when he dissolves in heartbreak because he can’t get Andy, his boy doll, into its fiddly little doll-sized sleepsack.

The catfood I’ve just had to get a bit zen about, but the sleepsack? That I can solve.

So last week I pulled some yarn scraps (Cath Kidston Book of Crochet since you ask) and made a good old old-fashioned granny blanket.

Old style granny blanket

Apart from being doll-sized, its just like the real thing – its as ugly as you’d expect, and catches on little doll toes. DearWife loves it, and says its just like the ones she grew up with.  I won’t be making another one, for pretty much exactly the same reason.

Doll sized

And boygoblin? Fewer tears, because he can easily put Andy to bed.  

Andy's all snuggled in

And then zoom  him around the house.

Check out those drivers...

Did I mention Andy sleeps in the lorry walker?

All snuggled up on the flat"bed"

Fancy a quick nap?

Scrap attack!

Remember this?

hundreds and hundreds of hexes

I’ve turned them into this:

Memory quilt top

For a while now I’ve felt a growing need to try english paper piecing. This is the type of patchwork my mum did, and she recently sent me the cot quilt she made for me, which we use on one of BoyGoblin’s change tables. Last year I went to the v&a quilting exhibition   – this was the impetus really for me to start patchwork, and it was the paper pieced quilts, with scraps of love letters and household receipts sewn in, that really captured my attention.

So, in the cross-generational spirit, I kept aside all of the goblin’s sleepsuits and onesies from his first 6 months. I feel slightly guilty, because some of these could be passed on, but most have had pretty heavy use and lots of washing – after all, the only things a newborn does really are sleep and make mess. (older children of course stop sleeping, and come up with new and e exciting ways of making mess…)

Because they were all stretch jersey, there was some front-end faffage involved in stabilising the scraps with iron-on interfacing before I could cut out my hexes.

So, here are the hexes, all ready to be pieced.

I did most of the sewing on my commute. Assembling  the daisy chains was just about doable in transit, but putting them together was definitely a late-night-telly job.

Now I need to sort out backing and binding. I’m reluctant to buy new fabric but don’t really have big enough scraps for the backing…

Back view, where all the process (and layout notes) is visible

A Hex on all your houses!

This would be a very clever title for this post, except that a good portion of my hexes are actually pentagons, and “a polygon on all your houses” is less catchy, somehow.

Hexes and Pents

Four corners just aren’t enough for me at the moment. Three very different projects have conspired to make piles of polygons in our house. More later.

recycle-bin refugees

These little guys are at the heart of one of the patterns I'm picking away at at the moment. 

Two bottle caps with a shirt button ready to go inside.

The blue cap is from a 50cl buxton bottle, and the green is a 1.5L highland spring cap. The fact that with a bit of gentle coaxing they fit so neatly together is possibly the most pleasing thing I’ve done all year.

Claws for thought

Lawrence is a lefty lobster

Here he is!

He came from this book.  It wasn’t a super easy pattern to follow, hence the lopsided claws. As it turns out, Lawrence is left handed, but not strongly left-handed yet, so he must still be fairly young. I’m no lobster expert,  but just for clarity, I think he might be a reef lobster , rather than the larger American lobster. Neither is he. What do you think? I do know he looked disturingly like something unmentionable before I sewed his claws and legs on. I was disinclined to give it claws at all...

I crocheted him from plarn made of supermarket bags (the best instructions for making plarn that I’ve found are here).

I think Lawrence represents my single brief foray into the ecowonderful world of plarn. Its rough to work with, and the results are usually ugly and overearnest. Please disabuse me of this notion if you’ve made something elegant with plarn. I’m not holding my breath.

He is stuffed with deflated packing airbags from the Christmas parcels and his eyes are scraps of rubbish sack.

I could claim that this is a comment on ocean pollution – and rather a good one if I may say so.

But, actually, I liked the idea that this project was completely free! Which is just as well, because as this plarn was made from biodegradable plastic bags, I fear Lawrence won’t be with us for long…

Long evenings

Daylight savings is rubbish when I'm still at my desk at work at nightfall, but pretty darn cosy when I'm at home snuggled up in my pyjamas... or with my pyjamas.

I've dug out a cushion cover I made last summer from our old flannel pyjamas. Its super-snuggly, and has a handy pocket for love notes, the tv remote, or, in my case, thread trimmings to keep safe and out of the mouths of babes.

It was a really good beginning project. I learned machine basics – how to wind bobbins, thread up, change feet and needles (oh, and not to sew over pins) and i also designed it myself.

And then had to trim the pieced squares because i got the maths wrong. (I mean, really! How difficult can squares be?) And restitch  the piecing so i could ease it in properly to make the corners (nearly) match up.  I hadn’t accounted for the fact that the fabrics are all different, and have worn differently. I had blithely and naively assumed that if I line up the edges, my magic new machine would sort out the middle bits, Actually, it needed some input from me. Who’d a thunk it?

Anyway, here’s the method, complete with seam allowances, and some piecing diagrams that would have saved me having to puzzle it all out on the bed and disturb the cat.

Tutorial here: Upcycled snuggle cushion