Christmas Tree Skirt

Last year after Christmas, I bought some great Christmas colored fleece on super clearance with every intention of making a new Christmas tree skirt to replace the old nasty felt one that was disintegrating. Naturally, I put the fleece on the sewing shelf and forgot about it until I pulled out that nasty old skirt again this year… and decided it was really time for a new one.

Naturally I’d seen lots of cool tree skirt ideas, but my main goals were:

1. Washable (no more nasty felt tree skirts for me)
2. Not too tacky
3. Short project duration (aka very easy)

High expectations, I know. I used my old tree skirt as a pattern, sewed a hem along the outer edge, and borrowed my friend’s cricut machine and cartridge to cut out lots of fleece flowers. This took a while but was the perfect activity for hanging out with said friend while she worked on another project. (Crafty and generous friends rock my world).

A few days later I was ready to attach the flowers so I laid it out for the dogs to lay on… wait… that’s what happened, not what I meant to do. Nonetheless, the dog laid in the middle of the project while I hand stitched the flowers to the skirt and she felt like we got some quality time in. Perfect.

And I love the finished product. Washable. Not too tacky. Short project duration. And even kind of pretty (and cheap, super super cheap). 

Pajama Eater Addiction

My friend Jodi over at SewFearless.com created this fabulous pattern for these adorable Pajama Eaters (you can buy your copy here). Pajama Eaters are designed to “eat” kids pajamas during the day (rather than having them thrown on the floor). Brilliant. Clearly designed by a mom with small children. Anyway, I thought they were brilliant and adorable and naturally wanted to make one… or twenty…
Yeah, they kind of ran away with me. First I decided that I’d try to make 11 of them for my 11 nieces and nephews for Christmas. I started early enough but was hoping I’d manage to get them all done. So I finished those 11 and accidentally made two extras (how does one make thirteen without even realizing it?) And then I decided to add my two goddaughters to that list. And a sibling asked for one. And I had a brilliant idea to use one as part of a white elephant gift exchange. Then I ran out of inspiration for my original gift for the three godsons and decided to make them PJ Eaters. and then I found this cool soft, weird leopard print fabric in the remnant bin, and…
I am totally out of control!!
Things I love about the pattern:

• The brilliance of the critter, adorable and practical
• Simple, easy to follow instructions with great photos and bright colors to keep me from getting bored.
• It was a fabulous starting point for my creativity to go wild. I ended up making the original monsters, owls, frogs, rabbits, three-legged one-eyed alien monsters, and more. So much fun!! 
• STASH BUSTER!! I bought one or two fabrics at the store and a few lengths of corduroy for really cheap at thrift stores… but mostly, these were from the stash. Awesome. (I did have to buy zippers, stuffing, and notions). 
• My friend Katie who needed a hobby was also fascinated by the concept so I taught her to sew while she surpassed me with her creative genius. She made a Hello Kitty, ninja, panda bear, owl, and… A HOBBIT. She is amazing. And was inspired to amazing creativity by this fabulous pattern.
• Okay fine, I’ll stop with the shameless promoting- seriously go get the pattern and try it!

Things I did not love:

• The legs. I’m not sure why, but I found the legs to be the hardest part. Hard to get the bottom of the foot on without puckering. Hard to connect the top just right. Legs. Not a fan. In fact, my favorite PJ Eaters to make were the owl – no legs. 
• Sewing pajama eaters out of minky fabric. The stretch made it difficult to sew the minky guys. They were incredibly soft and they did turn out, but a complete pain to work with- not to mention minky shedding mess everywhere… on everything. Basically, if you want soft and cuddly, I’d recommend flannel over minky any day… especially after making 4 PJ Eaters with various types of minky fabric.
• The pajama eater mess taking over my house for 2 months.
• Not having enough people to sew pajama eaters for.

Photo Round Up:

And then there’s this one… I totally love this one. My sister is in college and will be spending next semester in Europe studying and traveling. She asked for a PJ Eater and loved the three legged guy… and suddenly a crazy idea was born… a PJ Eater with backpack straps (made out of $1 cloth fabric belts from thrift store). She can put her wallet / phone in the mouth and then sleep on it on the train. Brilliant, right? Or maybe just ridiculous.

Hi. I’m Reenie. I’m addicted to making Pajama Eaters.
Hi Reenie.
Admission: Made a total of 21 pajama eaters… in approximately three months. While also working a full time job, having a full time life, and refinishing a lot of dining room chairs. Sometimes I amaze myself. And yes - somebody better stop me before this gets out of hand…

Ten Minutes on Tuesday

I’m not sure choosing the last waking 10 minutes is really going to get you good reading material, but here goes. It is Tuesday. Mid November. The election has come and gone. I wasn’t thrilled with the big name outcome – and yet, I can’t help but get frustrated at all the doomsday predictions. God is still God, He is still on the throne. We have work to do as His Church, but presidents come and go, and God is the same yesterday, today, and tomorrow. I’m sticking with that. And there ends my political thoughts for the time being.

Change is a funny thing. It is inevitable. The only thing you can depend on is that life will continue to change. And change stretches and challenges me. Maggie is reacting to the change in our house (her favorite roomie getting married and moving out) by stealing food and peeing in the house. Awesome. We’ve been having a lot of serious discussions about whether or not she’d like to spend the rest of her life in a cage. And I’ve gotten the mousetraps back out. Change. And somehow Maggie’s absolute resistance to change reminds me to learn to deal more gracefully with change in my own life. My impulses aren’t much different- I hate change, and though I still pee in the appropriate locations, I loathe it, fear it, and generally take a long time adjusting to it. Sometimes having your dog mirror your own behavior is a good reminder to shape up… (think metaphor here).

The weather has changed. Sunday it was nearly 70 degrees and BEAUTIFUL and today there was ice on my morning walk. Brrr. I had to get out the winter coat at last and I am slowly resigning myself to the fact that spring is over, summer is over, and fall is very nearly over.

I have been sewing up a storm lately!! After that quilt top in a month (and no, I have gotten no further), I had to do something… so I just finished 13 Pajama Eaters (pattern here) which are for my nieces and nephews for Christmas. They were a fun project for me, a good creative outlet, and here I am in mid November with a bunch of my shopping done! Not to mention that it was mostly a stash busting project—I had to buy some stuff to make them, but mostly I got the fabric out of my stash anyway. And I seriously don’t know how I’ve managed to make 13 of them in just 5 weeks! Especially with everything else going on.

Part of the everything else is that I’ve been in Monroe once or twice a week visiting my grandma in rehab and spending time with Grandpa. I love those people. And it’s been fun seeing aunts, uncles, cousins, and other characters during my visits. Family is such a gift!

I am also teaching 2^nd grade religious ed at my parish. I have wanted to teach for a few years, but with the job as it was, it just wasn’t possible. I’m enjoying my class, preparation for first reconciliation and first Eucharist—but they are definitely a squirrely bunch and keep me on my toes.

And with that, I’m off to bed. Happy Tuesday!

#2

I’m still plugging away at making Christmas presents (and staying up way too late, way too often). The original Pajama Eater now has a friend, faster and slightly better than the first one (of course). This one I used a pillow form for the body stuffing- thinking it would make them even more washable if you could pull out the pillow form to wash it. I should have gone with a slightly smaller pillow form or a slightly larger body.

The back is just overlapped to make the pillowcase. Like I said, if I use a smaller pillowform (12”x12” instead of the one I had 14”x14”) it would have fit better. Next one…

Pajama Eaters

My friend Jodi at SewFearless.com had this genius idea to make her kids Pajama Eaters to store their PJs in during the day. Brilliant if you ask me. I kind of need one myself.  Anyway, she went on to put it together into a fabulous pattern, which, of course, I bought. And to start off October decided to try my hand at my first one.

Not perfect, but pretty great. The next one will be better. In fact, I’m thinking about making them for all of my nieces and nephews if I can get my act together. Talk about a stash buster! 11 Pajama Eaters? Yes please.

Jodi sells the patterns over at her website and I highly recommend it!!

All told, it took me a couple hours to cut out two of them and sew the first one all together to completion. I’m sure the next ones will be faster.

More on that quilt

I told you earlier I was working on a new quilt. It has become a bit of an obsession in fact. I’m calling it my “Hey I’m getting margin back in my life quilt” because it represents a lot more than just scraps of fabric. 

So let’s pick up where we left off…
10. Change your mind about the quilt size and decide to make a lot more squares. Go back and repeat steps 3 through 9 again until you have the right number of squares. My quilt has grown from a twin to a queen so I had a lot more squares to make.
11. Iron all the completed squares flat.
12. Trim your completed squares with the rotary cutter so they are square and exactly 8” (in my case anyway). 
13. Once all of your chevron squares are completed, and ironed, and trimmed to be square, you get to lay them out.  This took me awhile. How to sort the squares?? There were so many different colors, patterns, themes to figure out what order to put them in. Not to mention now I’m making a queen sized quilt- so I’ve outgrown the dining room table. I eventually decided on the living room floor since that is the biggest space. There are a few obstacles to using the floor:

After the fact, I wished I had done a video of the evening of me laying out the squares, and the dogs taking turns sniffing, laying on, and messing up the squares – really quite funny and not terribly productive. But it is like a magnet, if I lay something on the floor, pretty much anything, the dogs are going to lay on it. So we bonded over quilt squares as I arranged and rearranged and then straightened and re-straightened…

14. Once you have the quilt squares all laid out, you can start sewing the chevron squares into rows.  Mine is eleven squares by eleven squares. And of course, the dogs wanted to get in on that as well.
 
Stay tuned on finishing the quilt top and then the actual quilting, backing, binding, etc. 

A new quilt in the works

Here’s how it goes…
1. Clean out your sewing area and realize how many small scraps of fabric you have from dozens of previous projects (including a bunch of extra squares from the quilt you made for your bed 7 or 8 years ago).
2. Get inspired by some blog where they were showcasing the Chevron quilt. Download the instructions. Decide it’s the perfect use for all of those scraps of beautiful fabric. Completely disregard the part about using solids since most of your scraps have some kind of pattern. meh. Decide that of course you have the time and energy to make a quilt right now.
3. Start cutting out squares. At home, on vacation, squares, squares, squares. And not the size they called for in the instructions, because 4 7/8” squares seems harder than 5” squares somehow. Finally finish cutting out a ton of squares, in the 200 range. Each square needs a matching one. This is great fun on vacation, in the sun, while visiting with friends and watching munchkins. This is also great fun at home avoiding cleaning the bathroom. The cutting takes a long time, but I found it to be enjoyable, especially using the rotary cutter.

4. Slice squares in half on the diagonal to make triangles. Fast. Fairly simple. This gives you four triangles (at least) of each pattern. Some of the fabric I had a lot more than 4, some just 4. Meh. It’s a scrappy quilt, we’re going with the randomness of it all. 
5. Start matching sets of patterns – 4 triangles of 2 patterns to make the squares. Even better, have your crafty friend matching patterns up for you while you begin the sewing.
6. Sew those triangles together along the diagonal to make squares. Four matching squares of each set of patterns. Get most of the way through the matching and about half way through the sewing. Take a break (and by break, it might be a coffee break, or it might be a ‘drive home from up north’ break, whatever works for you).
7. Get out the ironing board. Turn on a movie. Start ironing those squares flat and then clip the uneven corners. Do this for a long time (well, get through your stack of squares). 
8. Once that batch is ironed, back to the machine, sew the four squares together to make a chevron pattern blocks.
 
Note: Be careful not to do this. You’ll have to rip them out to correct it. Or scavenge your scraps to see if you have any scraps left to make more half squares to avoid ripping out. Or decide you didn’t really want that square anyway. It is a scrappy quilt after all.
9. Repeat steps 6-8 until you have enough of the chevron squares. So far I have 50 completed chevron squares (40 to go) and enough of the smaller squares ready to be sewn into the remaining chevron squares (I think). I thought this could take me years to even get to this point, but it goes pretty fast once you’re sitting there sewing. And I like this because there are a few different steps so you can mix it up if you have the attention span of a flea like me.
 
Even the clippings look fun!