Category: Sewing

Things You Need:

1 vinyl tablecloth 60″ x 60″

1 piece of fabric 60″ x 60″

1 1/2 yards of coordinating fabric

Coordinating scrap fabric (to make checkers board)

34″ sew on Velcro cut into 4 equal lengths of 8.5 inches

34″ ric-rac cut into 4 strips 8.5 inches long

7 yards double fold bias tape

Heat’n Bond Lite

Fabric marker

game pieces: 24 pieces of wood 1.5″ diameter and 75 small pieces for Bingo calling numbers (I used small wooden hearts)

Let’s get started making the blanket.

I found a 60×120 tablecloth and cut it in half for this project. Now I can make a second blanket one day. I used a bottom weight khaki fabric for the top side of the blanket, also cut 60×60. So that’s where I started.

Next, cut the pieces of fabric you need to begin making the pockets and borders.

Cut 4 strips of fabric (out of your coordinating fabric) that measure 37 x 6.5 inches.

Cut the corner pieces that will form the pockets. Follow the measurements on the diagram below and cut 4 pieces total.

Stitch each strip of ric-rac to the top piece of your Velcro. Be sure to stitch it to the backside of the strip so it’s not between the layers of Velcro later.

On the side of the corner piece that measures 8.5 inches, turn under 1/2 inch and iron. Stitch the top piece of Velcro (with the added ric-rac) to the folded edge of the corner piece. Allow the edge of the ric-rac to extend beyond the edge of the corner. Fold back and sew the Velcro to the remaining corner pieces.

Place each corner piece onto the top portion of your blanket with the corners aligned. Mark the position for the bottom Velcro piece. I use a disappearing ink pen, but you can pin it to secure it. Doesn’t matter how you mark it, just be sure you have it aligned properly. Stitch lower Velcro onto the 60×60 inch piece of fabric for each corner.

Moving on to your 37 inch strips now. Fold one long edge of your strips under 1/2 inch and iron flat. Place the strips between the corner pieces with the folded side towards the middle of the blanket and align the outside edges of all the pieces. Using a 1/2 inch seam allowance, stitch the pieces together as shown below.

Place the border/corner pieces on the blanket top and stitch. I stitched each side of the seam between the border strips and the corner pocket pieces.

Part 2 of the tutorial will show you how to add the games to the top of the blanket!

Click here to head over to the second part.

I’m still working on getting a tutorial for my cloche hat. It’s coming soon, I promise! In the meantime, I thought I would share how I made the fabric flower for the hat.

I made a smaller size to use as a hair accessory for the girls. This flower and quick and easy. After making the flower, you can sew it to something (like a hat!), attach a broach pin or glue to an alligator clip.

Begin with the fabric you want to use. For the hat, I used one type of fabric, but for the flower hair clip, I decided to use two different ones so it would be easy to see what is what in this tutorial.

I cut up an outfit I made for Katelyn when she was younger. Gotta recycle when I can.

Decide how big you want your flower and find a circular object to trace. I used a measuring cup this morning and for the life of me, I can’t remember what I used for the hat flower.

Cut out your circles. I used 10 circles for this flower and 9 for the hat flower.

Fold each circle in half and iron flat.

Thread a needle and knot the end so you have a double strand of thread. Run a stitch through the straight portion of the half circle.

Slide the fabric all the way to the end by the knot and gather it on the thread.

Repeat the process with the remaining pieces of fabric.

Allow the half circles to curl into a circular shape and begin to layer the fabric as you go.

Once you get to the end of the fabric pieces, tighten the flower by pulling the thread. Make a knot to secure the flower.

Sew a button to the middle of the flower and you’re done!

The first week of So You Think You’re Crafty is over and I made it through to the next round! I was thrilled with the amount of votes I got for my hat. I was quite tickled with how it turned out and I’ll have a tutorial available soon for anyone else wanting to make one.

Any interest in a tutorial on how to make the flower too? Just let me know and I’ll get that one done as well.

Shopping at a thrift store can be hit or miss for sure. As I wandered through several stores, I came up with nothing. I put on my thinking cap and came up this idea to make a hat. I headed back to the store with this project in mind. I found the perfect blazer for a cloche hat. I’ve always thought a cloche hat was cute and this one speaks to my inner flapper.

After felting the coat, I stitched the hat using my own sewing pattern. It still needed something though. I decided to add the ribbon and made a fabric flower.

I think this hat is the bee’s knees. Now I’m all ready to put on my hat-ski, go grab a bell bottom and head down to the local speakeasy for some giggle water.

I can’t believe that our little girl is already 6 years old. We celebrated her birthday and she had a blast. I made her a new dress to wear to school. She loved it, and I was tickled about how it turned out. I used my trusty Oliver + S Jump Rope pattern to make this corduroy dress. It is the first time I made it with long sleeves and this time I used a bit of a gingham trim under the collar, on the pockets and the placket.

I took these pictures really quick while everyone else was getting into the car to head to school, so they aren’t the best, but you get the idea.

She wanted a Cinderella theme to her party, so I made her a cake with Cinderella, but I couldn’t find anything with Cinderella on it for the cupcakes I made for her class. So I came up with my own solution. I made cupcake toppers out of a pack of Cinderella stickers. I put them on a foam sheet and then cut around them. Then I taped a toothpick on the back and we had Cinderella cupcakes.

Happy Birthday, Emily. We love you, sweet girl, and we are so proud of you!

I found this pattern at a local thrift store. I snatched it up for $0.50. I always dig through the bin of old patterns. Sometimes you can come up with some cute stuff. I think the wrap around apron is cute and I can’t decide if I want to make it to wear as a sundress for next summer or as an apron to wear in the kitchen.

I think I’m leaning towards kitchen apron.

I made it onto the next season of So You Think You’re Crafty! Thank you all for voting, even if it wasn’t for me. I hope you will continue to head over there weekly once the contest starts at the beginning of next year. It should be a fun ride and I’m so excited to be able to share this experience with my sis. I’m already hard at work on the first project for the contest and I can’t wait to see how it turns out.

This was my audition piece. My sister ended up stomping everyone with her cute bowling set, so she set the bar pretty high for the rest of us!

Having a Christmas party and want a cute way to display wine charms? Place them on a small Christmas tree and let them double as table decoration. Then guests can easily see and choose what charm they want on their glass.

I made some custom charms and placed them on earring hoops (I couldn’t find regular wine charm holders) and they worked great!

By making them myself out of some small pieces of craft felt and some DMC floss, I was able to make the charms the colors and style I wanted. I made some holiday themed and I stitched some with initials on them for my party goers. These make a cute housewarming or hostess gift too.

For another theme, I took small glass ornaments and wrote on them with a metallic Sharpie marker. I wrote names, drew holiday pictures and wrote holiday words, like Peace and Joy.

Just in case you aren’t feeling too crafty, using store bought wine charms on the tree is quick, cute and easy. You can’t get much better than that combination.

These days headbands are all the rage for our girls. That’s about all they want to wear in their hair. It’s funny to me since I don’t ever remember wearing headbands when I was young. I wanted a way to create headbands that are cute and not crazy priced. I set out to make some myself using store bought basic headbands.

Things You Need:
Headband

Fabric scraps

Ribbon

Double stick tape

How to cover the headband:

1. Cut a piece of scrap fabric twice the width of the headband and just a bit longer.

2. Lay a strip of double stick tape along the top side of the headband and lay the fabric on top of the headband. Make sure it’s centered so the sides wrap around to the back.

3. Place a piece of double stick tape on the underside portion of the headband. Wrap the fabric under the headband and press into place on the tape.

4. Cut a piece of grosgrain ribbon the same length as the headband. Seal the ends. I prefer to use a flame to melt them just a bit.

5. Place a strip of double stick tape along the underside of the headband and place the ribbon over the tape.

6. Add a fabric flower or other decorations, if you want.

I’m sure using a fabric glue will also work for this project, but I found the double stick tape quick and mess free.

These are fun to make for different holidays too. I went ahead and made one for Halloween. Madison claimed it when she came home from school.

This is also a great way to buy cheap, ugly headbands and cover them or recycle some you already own.

I’m linking to some of these fun parties.

One night while I was up late, I found a blog that talked about making a weighted blanket. I’d never heard of such, but later when I mentioned it to my mom and sister, they knew exactly what I was talking about, so maybe I’m a bit late to the game and everyone else knows about these. A weighted blanket helps calm and soothe people with sensory issues.

It’s basically a heavy blanket. You sew squares and place a filler in the sections to add weight to the blanket.

They are great for kids with autism and for people with restless leg syndrome. I thought Katelyn may like one of these blankets since  she is forever trying to get dressed in snuggly clothes and under blankets. She is a cuddlebug for sure. It also may help kids who are hyperactive and have difficulty concentrating. So I thought that would be a bonus for Katelyn too. We can use all the help we can get in that department.
So the next morning, I talked to Katelyn about these blankets and she was all over the idea. We ran over to let her pick out some fabric and she chose the ladybugs and the soft minky for her blanket. The fabric store didn’t have the poly beads I needed to fill the pockets, so we headed off to the craft store to get them. I got the filler poly pellets that you use to fill stuffed animals and dolls and used my shipping scale to weigh the pellets so I could add the same amount into each square. It took me hours and hours to carefully sew and fill each square with the pellets, but she went to bed that night with her new blanket. That minky is some tricky stuff to sew too!

One tip I have is to sew carefully. I broke 2 needles making this blanket. The pellets hop around from the vibrations of sewing and scatter easily. If you hit one of those bad boys with your needle, you will be digging it out and putting on a new one.

For more information and some great tutorials on how to make a weighted blanket, here are some sites I found helpful.

Calming the Senses with a Craft Blanket by Craft Nectar

Weighted Blanket Tutorial by Crap I’ve Made

Tutorial: Weighted Blanket by Dandelion Mama

If you have any questions about how I made the blanket, let me know!

I saw this post titled Things We’ve Learned Sewing at 2:00 am and I could identify with much of the list. Then I realized there are other things I’ve learned while sewing at 2 am that are not on there so I’m adding my own.

My Tips for Sewing in the Middle of the Night

1. Laying the fabric on top of a sleeping child does not give you a good sense of how the finished product is going to fit no matter how much you think it will. That dress you think goes to their knees…yeah, not so much.
2. When ripping out the same seam for the third time, it goes much smoother if you are sitting on the sofa, watching a rerun of The Nanny or Golden Girls.
3. Always sew with at least 4 pairs of scissors and 3 seam rippers. They seem to want to wander off into the night and I can never find them where I swear I left them.
4. Put some pillows in your bed like you see kids doing on tv when they want to sneak out of the house. Maybe it will fool your husband into thinking you are in the bed when he wakes up at 3am to use the bathroom. Hopefully, this will avoid the stumbling you hear coming down the hall and the sleepy mumbled questions like, “Do you have any idea what time it is?” Sure I know what time it is…Blanche is getting ready for her 10^th date of the evening and I’m almost done with this project…I’ll be in bed a minute. I only have a few more things to do, like the buttons and buttonholes, hemming, putting the pockets on and make a hair accessory. I’ve never really tried the pillows in the bed, but I’m thinking about it!
5. This is not the time to worry that there are no shoes in the house that match the outfit currently being constructed and worn the next day at 7 am. That’s a problem for 6 am. Keep sewing.
6. Take a minute to actually read the instructions. Sewing it the first time the way you think it should be done, ripping it out when it didn’t work, reading the directions and sewing it again actually takes more time than reading the first time.
7. Plan for some unscheduled breaks, like when the cat wants to go out five minutes after you let him in or you hear the dreaded thump of a child falling out of bed. Why do kids feel the need to sleep on the edge of the bed and sit their glasses on the edge of the table?
8. Drinking coffee doesn’t help you sew better.
9. Eating nacho cheese Doritos may sound like a great late night snack, but they are noisy and leave your fingers orange. Even after washing your hands, you fear transferring the funk to the fabric. You will probably wake your husband with Dorito breath as you toss the extra pillows to the floor and finally crawl into bed. Waking him up then negates the whole reason for the pillows to start with. Skip the chips and go for the ice cream.
10. Hammering on snaps is not a good idea in the middle of the night.

This morning, Madison headed back for her first day of preschool. She was excited about going. I made her a new dress for the big day and I was so tickled that it was finished on Saturday instead of me staying up the night before school started. I used some vintage looking dog fabric for her since she loves every dog she sees. I needed to have her take her backpack off and turn her so she wasn’t squinting in the sun. I took the pictures with my phone since I didn’t realize my camera battery was completely dead.

She decided to accessorize her new dress with a great big red flower in her hair and a red and white beaded bracelet. She put it on in the car. Apparently, Katelyn left it behind so Madison decided that meant that Katelyn wanted Madison to wear it to school.

The big flower helps disguise the haircut she gave herself last week. She has a half a set of short bangs on the right side of her head.

Good thing Madison was more prepared about going back to school than me. She is excited about her new teacher and loved the first day. She colored, played on the playground, sang songs and had lunch. Sounds like a perfect day at preschool.

I will charge my battery and get some better pictures of the dress.

I’m so happy that Madison is looking forward to going back to school tomorrow.