wall organizer

I am slowly but surely getting our family room into shape. Very slowly. Like one baby step every couple of months. One serious pain point is my sewing area. I finally whipped up one of these wall organizers from Lotta Jansdotter's Simple Sewing. The area is still not actually organized though, so I'm not posting a pic yet. Soon!

Hattonettes

I made some dresses this week for the wee Hattonettes. I used the Flower Girl Dress from Weekend Sewing. Oh, such a great book. I can't wait to make some more garments from this book. Very inspiring.

This pattern seemed to run small... The size 3 bodice that I made for Delly ended up fitting Mimi, who wears 12-mo clothes. I made the size 4 for Delly, who normally wears size 2 or 3.



Instead of sewing the straps, I attached them just to the back and put snaps in the front, so I can extend the life of the dresses by making the straps longer as these rapidly growing get taller.



These dresses are for my great pally Moira's wedding tomorrow. I'm looking forward to the photographer getting some nice shots of them.



And here's some photographic evidence that Beany does in fact occasionally crack a smile.

cuff

Here's a little snizzy that I made a few weeks ago. I used my new handy-dandy Snapsetter, which totally rocks. I'm a little snap-happy. I might just not ever learn to make buttonholes now.

crafty club

I get so jealous when I read in blogs about people having little craft clubs where they make lovely things for each other, swap crafty goodies, get together to do projects, etc... So I decided to reach out to some of my crafty lady friends to start our own club. Round I included 4 of us, the others came to my house a few weeks ago and we made our exchanges and drank champagne/blueberry/pomegranate cocktails and chitty-chatted for hours. It was lovely.

Josefa made us each these beautiful bags with Japanese fabrics outside and silk inside, perfect for packing jewelry in when traveling. Check out the cool button detail!



Moira made us each cool pouches. She learned to sew zippers for this project, good girl! Each zipper also got a sweet little felt heart fob. And she somehow didn't think this was "enough" (as if!) so she also gave us each cute bracelets. Delma fell in love with my yellow bracelet and it was days before I could go anywhere near it.



Sarah made us all bags using hex hinges, which are so totally rad. For mine she used vintage fabric.


I made little fabric baskets for everyone using this pattern, and different fabrics for everyone. Of course I took NO pictures. Duh. Maybe one of my girls will snap a pic and send it to me??

music and crafts

If you haven't heard Mika yet, go to Amazon or iTunes and listen to the samples STAT, especially for Love Today. He performed on SO You Think You Can Dance (OMG, LOVE THAT SHOW!), and when I was fast-forwarding over it like I always do for the filler stuff on that show, the banter, the music, etc, I saw him jumping around the stage, all 9 feet and 23 pounds of him, so I stopped to watch it and got so so excited. Super-fun music.

I haven't been doing as much sewing as I'd like, but I have gotten a few thinks done, including this embelished tee and reversable pinafore for my girlfriend's daughter. I made a tee like this for Delma, and my friend loved it so I made her one. The pinafore is a repro of one I bought on Etsy. I fell in love with it, and realized it was the simplest design so I made a pattern from it and started making my own. I have lots of fabrics waiting to be made into pinnies!

The appliqués are made from these instructions at jcaroline creative. I didn't use a pattern, just cut some circles out from fabric, so I skipped steps 1 and 3. So simple. And I (very sloppily) sewed ric rac on for the stems. Such a home-job, but it still looks pretty cute.




Front, back and reverse views of the pinafore:




And hopefully soon I'll get around the shipping them off to the wee recipient!