What Happened to July?

Clearly, July got the best of me.  Basically I was swamped.  A recap goes something like this:

• My desktop died causing me to have to finally break down and buy a laptop
• We had guests in town for a few days over the fourth of July and my son saw his first fireworks
• My husband and I spent a weekend at the Dave Matthews Band Caravan
• My son was sick for two weeks with a nasty cold and ear infection 
• I volunteered at a conference
• I spent an unimaginable number of hours in and around creeks, detention ponds and wetlands, helping with the inventory for my internship (which is watershed planning)
• I had to give a presentation for class
• I wrote an essay a week for my summer class
• I finished three baby blankets and a small pile of taggie blankets
• The vegetable garden has been going like gang busters

I think that about sums it up.  Here are some pics of all of that.

My boys on the Fourth of July...

A turtle out in the watershed and I think the berries below are nightshade.

A pretty frog.  No idea what kind.

American hazelnut.  By the way, I can now identify a handful of native species of plants as well as a bunch of non-native and/or invasive ones as well.

A green heron.

Dragonfly.

I'll post these separately, but here are the three baby blankets I finished.  I will also post all the pics of my garden and vegetables separately.

The two quilted ones were both super fast and done in maybe a couple hours each over weekends.  The knit one was what I carried with me and worked on the rest of the month.  

The nice thing is I have so many babies to make gifts for that I can post these and there is no way their respective mothers could figure out which one they are getting.  Total incoming baby count currently at 11.  Yes, eleven.  Between now and January.

Taggies for everyone!

And here is the fabric I have set aside for another baby quilt.  This one will be a bargello. 

And last, but not least, I have one more essay, one more class, and one more day of tromping through creeks before my family and I get my first and only true vacation of 2011.  To celebrate I finally got around to my first mani-pedi of the season (ridiculous).  Does this color say "vacation" to you?

1930's Prints

Someone must have thought I was a good girl this year, because I got this for Christmas. 

It's a bundle of 50 (that's right, fifty) feedseed fat quarters.

I've been wanting to start a collection of these for a while and now VOILA - here it is!

I'm thinking something bed-sized.  Like another 100 inches square.  And, clearly, scrappy.  Really scrappy.

AND, I got a snazzy new camera.  These pics aren't even in decent lighting conditions... hopefully I can show off its abilities better soon.

Upcycled Messenger Bag

Oh, blog land, how I miss you.  September is proving to be a rather trying month.  Grad school is a lot of work, a very dear friend of mine is getting married (on short notice) two weeks from today, and my sweet son has also decided to evade naps.  More specifically, I have a 5 page paper due Tuesday, a 10 page paper due Thursday, over a 100 pages of reading total, I've been commissioned to make that bride a guest log for her wedding and her headpiece as well (and I don't think I've gotten permission yet to show off the wedding stuff here which I think will be pretty cool), I have been trying desperately to get some stash busting projects done, and today is the first time my son has taken a nap in four days. 

I'm a bit over-whelmed.  In fact, I need to thank my husband for this post because he was watching me just sit there doing nothing while trying hard to find out where to start.  He said, "it doesn't matter what you pick, just do something right now."  Thanks, babe.

But I did finally finish a stash buster.  I turned this old, well-worn, much-loved pair of cargo pants:

into a messenger bag for school...

I swear the pants looked better on me than they look in this shot of the back.

I'd been using my bird seed bag, but my larger and very rectangular folders didn't fit well inside of it since it was a bucket shape, plus I needed something with a divider so I can separate the books from stuff like lunch and keys and wallet.

Not only did I try to keep intact all of the original pockets of the pants, but I added a divider inside as well as a double pocket.  I like to keep all of my junk sort of organized.

And I didn't have to buy a thing to make it.  Obviously the pants were upcycled, the lining and pocket fabrics were from my stash, as well as the burlap and the magnetic clasp.  I used some template plastic to shape the base of the bag and lined the whole thing with batting, both also from my stash.

I had big plans for Stashbusting September, but I'm not sure how many I can complete before the end of the month, which is dangerously close already.  I have already separated a bunch of old t-shirts and baby clothes to make my son an upcycled quilt, but I know for sure there is no chance it'll be done this month.  I have started a sweater for him, though, from my stash of yarns.

You can't tell in the pic, but there is some ribbing at the bottom.  As usual, I am ad-libbing the pattern and this is my first attempt at fair-isle knitting.  I kind of like it.  Either way it's a great project to take along on my commute in and out of the city for class.  I've found that I can read or study on the way in, but am usually too exhausted to on the way home.  This will be a better use of time.

Reusable Sandwich Bags

This is a project I've been meaning to get around to for a while.  Reusable sandwich bags. 

The thing is, once I started looking at ideas and researching fabric possibilities, it all got kind of complicated.  The pattern, not so much, but you would not believe all the controversy out there over which fabrics should or should not touch your food.  I am not going to make you suffer through the hours I spent reading these bitter online discussions.  Instead, I'll give you a link to the one site that seemed to sum them all up and from there you can make your own choices, like I did.

I went with cotton prints for the outside and rip-stop nylon for the inside (with the shiny, coated side away from the food).

But I also sort of made up my own pattern just like I always do.  I knew I did not want velcro closure on them like the majority of the ones sold out there have.  Why you ask? 

Picture this: there's a 35 year old woman sitting in a class room with maybe 20 other students, 90% of which are about 25 or so and none of which have children or had to get up a some ridiculous hour so they could commute 2 hours to get to class in the first place.  This woman decides to reach into her bag and pull out a snack to try and keep her brain functioning for the duration of the 3 hours she needs to sit there.  Do you think she is going to rip open a super loud velcro sandwich bag, thereby attracting  all sorts of unwanted attention?  Or do you think she will sit there for the next 2 hours thinking about the food in that bag and how it is so close, but just out of reach?

Right.  No velcro.

First I tried using buttons and a hair tie to make a closure.  That worked in theory, but not in practice.  The bags just wouldn't have stayed closed unless they were totally full.  So then I realized that they really didn't need to "seal," they just needed to keep the food in not let in much air.

So I just made it like a regular, pre-ziploc, totally old-school, fold over sandwich bag.  And it works.  Perfectly.

Here is one of the bags with the top folded open.  You just fold it back over itself to close.

All I did was cut 2 pieces of the cotton fabric and 2 of the rip-stop nylon at 7" x 8.5".  With right sides facing and a quarter inch seam (I am a quilter, y'all), I sewed around both long edges and one short edge (basically making a pocket).  I clipped the corners.  Then I turned the nylon pocket so that the "inside" part was now facing out and inserted it into the cotton pocket (so the right sides of both were together).  I aligned the top edge and sewed around it, again with a quarter inch seam, leaving a couple inches open to turn the fabric.  I then turned the fabrics and realigned the nylon pocket inside of the cotton one.  Then I topstitched twice along the top edge of the bag.  The last step is to fold the top of your pocket down, roughly about 2 inches (I eye-balled it every time) and stitch the edges down as close to the edges of the pocket as possible.

It's a little tricky trying to figure out which side of the nylon is the coated side.  It's the side that is shinier.  With the black fabric it was fairly obvious, but I could only tell with the orange fabric when it was held to sunlight.  You can also feel a difference between the two sides (the coated side feels more like plastic, while the uncoated side feels like fabric).

By the way, I went to JoAnn's for the fabric.  Not exciting in and of itself, BUT that was officially the last time I will be going there until October.  Why?  I'm so glad you asked!

Because I am a...





I will be participating in Stashbusting September, hosted by Robin over at The T-Shirt Diaries.  That means that for the entire month of September, all the lovely crafts I will be making and sharing with you will be made entirely from my current stash of fabrics and supplies.  You can get all the specific rules, if you follow the link (buying craft supplies for business use is permitted).  And other than the stuff I bought for this particular project, I did not go out and start stocking up on supplies.  That means that sometime in the next week or two, when I get around to making some reusable lunch totes, they'll be made out of my stash.

I'm actually pretty excited about it, because I've sort of been doing that already all summer (with not quite as strict rules, of course).  Any challenge that encourages me to buy less is a good one in my book.  I promise I will resist the temptation to use all of those lovely coupons that JoAnn and her friends send me every couple week.  For the entire month of September. 

So.  Do you think your stash can handle the challenge?

Well, I'm off to go make some more sandwich bags.  I need to make a big pile of them because not only are both my husband and I packing lunches these days, but one of us can only remember to bring home those bags about once a week.  I love him anyway.  :)

Recycled Bird Seed Bags

Sometimes I'll get an idea for a project and then get side-tracked for one reason or another.  I usually get back to them... eventually.  This particular project started as an idea two Earth Days ago.  I think I was just a little daunted by how I was going to pull this idea off. 

So it was Earth Day 2009.  There was, of course, a big push to use reuseable bags instead of plastic ones and I kept coming across these neat bags that were made from recycled rice bags. 

Well, I don't buy rice in quantities of bigger than, say, 2 pounds.  But I do buy 20 and 40 pound bags of bird seed regularly and those bags are made of that same nylon mesh stuff that you can't just recycle the usual way.  Now some of these bags are really pretty... here are a few examples.

I got the idea to use the bags as you would fabric.  And I also wanted to see if I could create something slightly more fun than a bag to just haul groceries in.  I already had a pattern that I liked - the Bella bag by Monica Poole.  I bought it online from Henrietta's Handbags.  I wanted to use a second fabric in the pattern to break up the pattern a bit and figured burlap would make a great contrast.  I found the lining fabric in the remnant pile at JoAnn's.  After that I just basically followed the pattern, except I did not use any Pellon or press any of the seams because I was afraid of melting the nylon mesh (and I really hate to iron, period).

Here's the back...

Oh, and there's my helper!  Always ready to sneak into a shot.

I used one of those neat recycled buttons they have at JoAnn's now.  I love how they're almost textural.

Now I don't see these as becoming quite so popular as the feedseed prints of the '30's, but I do look at the designs on the bags when it's time to buy a new bag of bird seed.  You can adapt almost any bag pattern to work with this stuff and it's free material if you're like me and keep your bird feeder stocked.  It would also make for great reusable lunch bags or totes.

Hope I gave you some ideas!