Happy Howl-a-ween, Revisited

A year ago, I made this mini quilt, called Westie Halloween Treats. I didn't get around to sharing it in the blog until April, so thought I'd revisit it this year for Halloween. Every time I look at it, I get a major case of the giggles.

The pattern for this appliqué mini quilt can be found at FreePatterns.com; the link can be found on my Westie Quilt Pattern Links page. The original design features a Scottie and Chihuahua, but I made a few changes so that they resemble my Westie and Wauzer, Keli and Penny. 

The larger dog pulling the wagon is Keli, and I added a black button for her eye.  The smaller dog is Penny; her nose is another button and her eyeball is a french knot. I digitized and machine embroidered the text on the moon and side of the wagon. The pile of bones in wagon includes a few ceramic bone buttons from my stash. The yellow circles on the wheels and Keli's hat are fabric yo-yo's. Each appliqué piece was fused to the background with Steam-a-Seam light, then blanket stitched around the edges by machine. I quilted in the ditch along the borders.

The details are visible on the original size image.

Bibs & More for RJ's First Birthday

Our youngest nephew celebrated his first birthday a month ago.  In late September I was finally transitioning from Summer to an Autumn frame of mind, and found myself imagining bibs and shirts for boys with Halloween, Thanksgiving and football themes.

In an effort to use up blanks from my stash, I chose these applique designs to stitch on terrycloth bibs from Babies R Us. I still have a few of these blank bibs left in odd colors.

The football design is an applique I've had for a few years; I think I bought it at Embroidery.com, but can't remember the designer. I stitched this design for one of my other nephews about 3 years ago and blogged it for Thanksgiving 2007.

All of the other applique designs in this post are from Planet Applique. The Frankenstein monster design needed something extra, so I added the text with 4D Embroidery.

The pre-made bibs seemed a bit small for a one-year-old, so I made up some larger bibs from chenille remnants backed with colorful cotton fabrics:

The acorn is a freebie design. I had a little trouble embroidering the puppy on the chenille, mainly because I didn't secure the water soluble topper well enough. I fixed that for the other two, but then I mixed up the orange and yellow sections on the candy corn. The orange was supposed to go in the middle ... oh well.

After finishing up the bibs, I thought I'd make matching shirts for both RJ and his big brother, Ryan. I found some blank thermal knit shirts at Kohls in boys' and toddler sizes. They were having a BOGO sale at the time, so I picked up several colors -- used some now and saved the others for Christmas.

The Jack-o-lantern design on white shirts turned out great, but after they were finished, I worried they might be too 'sweet' for these rough and tumble boys. So I decided to stitch the Trick or Treat  design on dark blue shirts.  These would have been the perfect opportunity to use glow in the dark thread, but I didn't have any at the time.

I used Inspira Aqua-Magic Plus Dissolvable Adhesive stabilizer in the hoop and Sulky Solvy as a topper for each of these projects.

For the shirts, I also used a fusible wash-away stabilizer, ironed to the inside to keep the knit from shifting around.

When the embroidery was finished, I put everything through a wash and dry cycle. All the stabilizers washed away fine, except for the fusible backing -- it didn't dissolve completely and little pieces of the fiber stuck to almost everything in the wash load. I'm not sure if the water temperature was too cool or if my HE washing machine didn't agitate enough, but the next time I use that fusible stuff, I'll be hand washing and removing it before it goes in the laundry with anything else. Fortunately, I was able to get the sticky fibers off of most of the the other items.

And that's another good reason why I keep this blog - it helps me keep track of my trials and errors so I (hopefully) don't keep repeating them!

Insulated Water Bottle Carrier & Matching Lunchbag

I started making insulated water bottle carriers this past summer. My previous blog entry shared the first batch which included two that were supposed to be mine - the 'prototype' and a paisley terrier design. The former works, but isn't quite snazzy enough, while the later has been assigned to Bark Park duty for the Pesties.

I needed a new one for me and chose this Rogue Embroiderers' Guild design from Urban Threads. The design was a freebie last fall; I was immediately attracted to it at the time because, well ..... it's not a real guild. But it's still embroidery and slightly wacky. I just didn't know what to do with the design until now ....

The border color in the original design needed to be adjusted so it would show up against the black nylon fabric that I use for my water bottle carriers. But I wanted to keep the spirit of the original design, so decided to experiment.

For the first stitch-out, I used dark violet-blue thread with a permanent white topper under the embroidery. The stitching turned out really nice, but I wasn't wild about how purple it was.

Since the stainless steel water bottle I use most often is blue, for the second stitch-out I used dark blue embroidery thread, but omitted the white topper. I definitely prefer the blue color way, but wish I'd used the topper again. (see a large version of this photo here)

The blue stitch-out became my new water bottle carrier; I incorporated a number of improvements to the should strap and hardware that evolved during the creation of the most recently completed carriers.

I couldn't bear to let the first stitch-out become an orphan, so I used it for my lunch bag prototype. See how nice and crisp the white areas are? That's because of the white topping I stitched over. I definitely need to use that again in the future. (see a large version of the photo here)

This is basically a simple square bag with boxed corners at the bottom. Think classic brown bag, but with insulation and a carrying strap. There's a layer of Insul-Bright between the outer cover and the inner lining. For a top closure, I added some white velcro to the inside, but that was an afterthought. The design needs to be tweaked a bit if I make more.

It's just large enough to fit a small lunchbox ice pack, a sandwich or two, a snack plus napkins or utensils.

I used this bag to carry my lunch to the PA Quilt Extravaganza in September and it did a great job of keeping my sandwich cool. I still need to test how it performs with something that needs to be kept cold, like yogurt or pudding, but since the water bottle carriers have kept cold water very cool for several hours, the lunch bag should do the same.

You can see more photos in my Insulated Water Bottle Carriers set on Flickr

Jacket Embroidery

Ever since I finished this jacket a few years ago, I've wanted to add some sort of embroidery, but could not decide on a design or theme. A few weeks ago, I finally decided to give it a try with this design of an antique sewing machine, from Embroidery Library.  It's a border design from a pack called Stitches in Time.  I may add the corner design from this pack to the front of the jacket later on.

This was the first version of McCall's M5191, a jeans-style jacket that I made in June 2007. I've been wearing it a lot and decided it needed some sprucing up.

I finished a second version of the same jacket in white denim in May 2009, but still haven't gotten around to doing any embroidery on that one.

Experiment with Tea Dyeing

A few weeks ago as I was cleaning up my sewing area, I uncovered a Halloween pattern from Cottage Creek Quilts' "Backdoor Quilt" series that I think has been 'aging' in my collection long enough. The pattern is called Trick or Treat and is the last one currently in my collection. The other designs in this series that I've completed include Be Thankful, Winter Blessings and Sweet Liberty. Each of these mini-wall quilts is quick and easy to finish in a few days, so they are good transitional projects when my focus shifts from one technique to another.

Most of the fabrics for this piece were already in my stash, but I wasn't entirely happy with the background fabric I was considering. It wasn't the right shade and the white on white print was too busy for my eye.

A trip to the quilt shop didn't help me find a background fabric, but I did find a nice black fabric for another element of the design. (I'll share the project in a separate entry when it's finished.)

I don't remember what made me think of it, but I thought maybe I could tea dye a piece of muslin to achieve the color and texture I wanted. And as an added bonus, it wouldn't cost me anything, because I have tons of muslin in my stash and plenty of tea bags in the pantry.

Having seen the process on craft shows, I had an idea how do the dyeing, but I did a search anyway and found several online tutorials, including one on eHow.com and this one from Little Mysteries blog. I used elements from each to do my tea dyeing.

My tea kettle holds 7 cups of water, so I used 7 regular Lipton tea bags (that's what I had on hand). I let the tea brew for at least 5 minutes before adding a test swatch of muslin. Since my muslin is about 1 yard long by half the width (a 'fat half') I chose to brew the tea in my 8 cup Pyrex bowl.

The test swatch looked great after just a minute, so I dampened the larger piece of muslin in warm water and then squished it up and submerged it into the brew, making sure every fold was covered by tea.

I left the muslin in the bowl for about an hour, checking it and re-arranging the fabric about half-way through.

I wanted the dye to look uneven, so made sure some of the tea bags were rolled up around inside the folds.

After an hour, I removed the muslin and rinsed it in cool water to remove the excess tea and a few random leaves that escaped the tea bags. It took about 3 to 4 rinses to get to the point where the water was clear.

 

Since the project that I intend to use this muslin for a background won't likely need to be washed, I wasn't too concerned about getting all the tea dye out, but I didn't want to risk it transferring to other items like my ironing board. The used tea bags were added to the compost bin.

When the rinsing was finished, I rolled the muslin in an old towel and squeezed it to remove as much moisture as possible, then hung it to air dry.

It turned out great -- there's an unevenness to the shading that makes it look antiqued, which is exactly what I wanted for my project.

The entire process was finished in one morning while I was doing other housework - it was so easy!

I need about 12 inches wide of this piece for my current project, so I'll have a good size piece left over for others. Or for more fabric embellishment, like stenciling with fabric paints ...

In Progress: Upcycled Bark Park Bag

One of the projects I worked on in September for National Sewing Month was a Bark Park bag made from recycled tote bags.

There are a few charitable organizations that insist on sending us "gifts" in exchange for donations - I really don't want them and tried returning them, but the Post Office won't send them back. So I decided to re-purpose them to make something I can actually use - a bag large enough to carry everything I need to take two pestie Westies for a long walk or a trip to the Bark Park.

I've been planning this project on and off for about a year now, and sketched and rejected more than a few versions of a bag, because I couldn't figure out how to incorporate all the pockets and options I wanted and keep it down to a manageable size. Then one Sunday morning while attending mass, I noticed the handbag of the woman seated in front of me and realized THAT was the design I've been looking for all along. You could call it Divine Inspiration. I spent the next few minutes staring at her purse, trying to take mental notes on how to construct it without being too obvious.

As soon as we were home, I sketched out the new design and spent the rest of the day in my sewing room, planning and gathering supplies. I'll admit, I was a bit giddy at finally getting this puppy underway (silly pun intended!).

First, I needed to take the old tote bags apart and harvest as many usable pieces as possible. I started with 3 tote bags, which yielded 3 zippers, 6 nylon straps, several pieces of velcro, the nylon covers and linings of each tote.  One of them actually had a picture of a Westie on it, so that was saved for one side of the new bag.

I prepared two of the zippers by making tabs for each end before using them to create two pocket sections.

<-- this pic is a little dark, but you can sort of see how the bag is constructed from two pockets joined together to form a 'bucket' in the center. Each pocket has in inner lining and outer cover - one side of the outer cover meets inside to form the interior of the bag.

This layout gives me secure zippered pockets for carrying necessities like pick-up bags, puppy wipes, hand wipes for me as well as my wallet, cell phone and keys. The inside of the bucket will accommodate a portable water bowl, a tall water bottle, doggie treats and leashes for two dogs.

This pic attempts to show the outer cover of the back pocket. I used the 3rd zipper to add another layered pocket on this side. ------>

This pic shows the other side of the outer cover. --->

There were a few rips in this bag cover that I 'repaired' using duct tape on the inside. The tape was covered and enclosed by the pocket lining, so it's nearly invisible.

And that's as far as I managed to get before needing a break. The side seams where the two zipper pockets meet are a little bulgy and sloppy-looking, even though I trimmed carefully. The plan is to add nylon webbing and D-rings on either side to cover the seams, then create an adjustable shoulder strap with swivel hooks. I was going to re-use the nylon web handles from the original tote bags, but then I found some 1-1/2" wide webbing that does a better job of covering up the seams.

One of the zipper pulls fell off while I was turning the bag right side out. I'm going to try to replace it with the zipper pull from the outer zip pocket, which will get a recycled charm for a zipper pull.

This is so close to being finished,  I'm determined to get it done before the weather gets too cold for the Bark Park.