glittergoods

June, zoom

The last half of June:

We made a little art for Father's Day.  Tiny canvases, tissue paper, cardstock, mod podge, sharpies.  I put a little glitter on mine, later.

I baked five dozen cupcakes for a first grade graduation party. 

I pieced, marked, & basted a new quilt top.  Still working on the quilting.

He's been spending a lot of time doing this.  We love the new skate park.  Our neighbors probably love that he has somewhere else to go besides the sidewalk out front.

Meanwhile, she is an official preschool graduate.  In a Liberty print/Ottobre pattern dress, which will get its own post, but for our purposes here I would just like to note that at the graduation picnic she managed to avoid frosting, berry, & grass stains -- while still having fun -- but got marker on it within 5 minutes of arriving home post-party.  (I got it out.)

Today I tended to my sick girl, pacified my stir-crazy boy, made popsicles, ate a lot of watermelon, started planning the Great Jedi Robe Summer Project.  Bring it on, July.

Basics for Girls (except mine, who needs something a little fancier)

As I mentioned a couple of posts ago, my latest Japanese book purchase inspired me to actually make something (instead of just sitting around thinking about what I COULD make), except from a book that I picked up almost a year ago, Basics for Girls (I haven't made anything from that fabric in the picture yet, but have often thought about it, see how that works?).  I feel essentially the same way about it as I did in my original post, which is to say that the patterns are, yes, basic, but compelling, also "basic" isn't a terrible quality when you are trying to make something according to instructions that you cannot actually read.

I love, love this dress. I love how smocky it is, I think the proportions are great, it's adorable over jeans & a long-sleeve tee, I love the raspberry striped seersucker I used to make it.  I love the fit of the yoke & the binding around the neck & arms.  I love the design of the pockets, though they're too small to be that useful & I was clumsy with them.  Big armholes definitely make it an overdress, but since we are, I learned today, having colder weather than SIBERIA here in Seattle, I'm not too worried about her suddenly being unable to wear an undershirt without melting.  (Last week I was in the fabric store picking up some this & that for summer clothes, the cutter made the usual small-talk comment about "boy, you'll be busy" & I said something equally small-talky about having to get the sundresses made before it gets hot, & she stopped, looked at me, & said "It's JUNE and you're wearing a DOWN JACKET.  I don't think you have to rush.")

 
My girl thinks this dress is pretty cute, though initially refused to wear it pre-embellishment, "please can you put something on it, you know, like when you do drawing with thread?"  Then she sent it back again to have the heart filled in, FINE, & in the interim I made the huge mistake of making the same dress out of a floral fabric, & so her initial refusal has been followed by a grudging acknowledgement that yes, the heart is awesome & maybe she'll wear it sometimes, but it just isn't as cute as the flower one because it doesn't have as much stuff on it.  Stripes, it turns out, do not count as stuff.  (Too basic, right?)

Here we have the right amount of stuff.  This one, she wanted to wear two days in a row, the other one she can barely stand to try on for two seconds. "Just try it on!  Let's see how it fits!" I say, cheerfully, hoping that she'll get distracted by something sparkly before she remembers to rip those boring, boring stripes off of her body. 

No luck so far.

weekend (plus 3 months) quilt

Those of you who check out my Flickr stream may have noticed this quilt top I posted back in the beginning of March:

Just a quick little lap quilt, inspired by me having very much other work to do +  some genuine curiosity about whether I could put together a quilt in a weekend.  That was day one.

This was day two, after which the entire "weekend" conceit promptly fell apart because not only do I hand-bind my quilts, on any given quilt there is a 50% chance that when I trim the binding to sew it together I will cut the angle the wrong way, so to be safe you have to add swearing, unpicking, & patching time in to the handsewing time.

Besides, I didn't really have time to be finishing another quilt in March, & then I didn't really feel much like finishing a quilt in April, & when I picked it back up in May I started carting it around as my during-ballet, waiting-for-kids project, & the going, it was slow.

Which is all to say, I don't think I got an accurate answer to my question of timing, but I finally finished it & I sure do like it.

As may be obvious, I basically floated three pillow tops on a field of my favorite cotton/linen blend.

It's backed with a red & white teeny dot, bound with solid red cotton, quilted in freehand loops with red cotton thread.

The amazing squashy texture post-wash still slays me.

And I think the folding up of the freshly-finished quilt at the end might just be the most satisfying part.

we call it "relaxing," not "boring"

Oh, I had a whole long post detailing our weekend in San Francisco, which was not actually very detailed because mostly all we did was eat good food & take long walks in the wrong direction (thanks, Google Maps, I owe you one), & thus we completely failed to hit any of the crafty hotspots except Britex.  And Kinokuniya, but that was by accident (see:  long walk, wrong direction). 

But then New Typepad ate it, & I'm not sure that we are not all better off for it being reduced to the single paragraph above.

Also, despite lugging the big camera around all weekend, in the end I took exactly two pictures, both inside the hotel:

This is the most comfortable bed ever.

This is the view from our hotel room.

Ta-da.

But, really, thanks to all of you SF suggestion-makers.  I have an extensive & interesting-looking list of cool shops & etc. for the next time we go, &, frankly, there are worse things than organizing a weekend around great vegetarian food (to wit:  Millenium, Herbivore (we had very cheerful + efficient service at the Divisadero location -- beware extremely liberal onion use), Papalote, Weird Fish).

And, also,  I got to go to Britex.

It was a little overwhelming, but since when has being slightly overwhelmed stopped me from buying fabric?  The remnant floor was my favorite, but they'd also just gotten a fresh Liberty shipment in so I stood around & ogled for a while.

I made sure our "well, we might as well, since we're HERE" trip to Kinokuniya wasn't wasted either:

I especially like that little dress.  The mother/daughter matching isn't really my scene, but there's some cute kid stuff in this book.  (I would immediately return home & proceed to make some dresses from a completely different Japanese craft book, but that's another post.)

Those pictures are from after I got home, by the way.  Seriously, two pictures.  The entire weekend.