Playground Love

It feels like we’ve been insanely busy lately! All three of us had birthdays in the past few weeks. For my birthday, A spent the weekend with her grandparents in Abbotsford meaning, M + I had a dinner (Maenam- rating: awesome!) and a movie date (The Hangover- rating: meh, funny in parts)!

For M’s birthday, I surprised him with tix for the Phoenix Suns + Portland Trailblazers pre-season game at GM place. Although he checks the NBA site daily, somehow he hadn’t heard about this game! What a surprise!

So- goodies for you today include:

1. Pics of a dress…

…Made for A last year when I enrolled in a sewing class with the VSB’s Continuing Education. I pulled this out of the closet yesterday and am so happy it fits her. I had completely forgotten about it. I am so glad that I took the time to learn proper terminology and techniques for basic-intermediate sewing. I found out neat things like the existence of zipper feet, how important pressing and ironing can be and had a lot of fun in general creating all sorts of things.

In addition to the dress, I made a reversible blanket that is water resistant on one side and a fuzzy orange fleece on the other. This is really light weight and stuffs really neatly into a stuff sack made with the same purple water resistant fabric, a recycled rainbow guitar strap and a clippy thingy (so my terminology hasn’t advanced since the end of the class March 2008).

2. Pics of the sewing machine…

…I have been gifted with by my grandma. I am a bit daunted by all the fancy functions, but awed by it’s amazing construction (it’s metal, folks- not plastic!), comes in a great tiny fold-out table with matching stool (which I will repaint and recover), and also comes with an assortment of fancy add-on bits and bobs   (I see a zipper foot, yay!). I am really excited to get this up and running but first must track down an on/off switch which was sheared off during the packing for my parents’ WPG to YVR Cross-Canada Couch Surfing adventure.

3. Pictures of the birthday banner…

…I made for A’s party a few weeks ago. I used acrylic (the purple and white)  and wool felt (green) for this project. I had never used wool felt before, it’s got a really nice weight to it, where as the acrylic is almost a feather weight. Wool would not have worked with the crowns I made as birthday goodies.

I cut out a bunch of triangles, sewing the short edge over about 1/4 inch and threaded some yarn through to hang the banner from. I cut out rectangles of white felt to make the letters so that they would all be the same height and width and used scissors to design the letters from there. Easy and re-usable! I’ll be able to use this for many birthdays to come, and the “Amina” part of the banner can be detached and used for  or anyone’s birthday celebration.

4. Pictures of some scarves…

that Heather and I dyed up the other week. Kool-aid and food colouring does it everytime. When the scarves are all together, they actually smell faintly sweet- reminds me of my childhood. Although I can’t really remember drinking a ton of Kool-aid,  I do remember those silly commercials where the Kool-aid guy would crash through walls and things.

Hope you enjoyed! Upcoming projects: tie-dying and words of wisdom for camping with a toddler.

xok

I’ve had a lot of fun the past few weeks making some neat felt crowns for the babes and tots who came to celebrate A’s second birthday with us.   Before you all groan and complain about me being an overachieving parent, there were only 4 kids plus A attending. Talk about pressure! People kept quizzing me as to what I was planning on giving away as goody bag treats for the party. Sheesh! So I went with an earth-friendly re-usable dress-up toy idea. Here are some pics of the crowns and instructions below.

1. Measure your tot’s head. A’s head was about 18″ around. On paper, trace a rough outline of how you want the crown to be shaped. I created a pattern that was 14 inches long, allowing for 3.5-4″ for elastic to keep the crown taught. The crown I drew has three spikey parts, the centre spike being the tallest. In order to get them all equal (mirror images), I folded up the paper and drew 1/2 the biggest spike along the fold and then one other, smaller spike next to it. When you cut and open the pattern, you get exact copies of each side.

2a.  Now, if you want to keep things simple, you can trace this pattern twice- on the same colour of felt or on two different colours. I used acrylic felt for this as it is really light weight and doesn’t require any interfacing to stiffen it up (so that the material won’t flop).

2b. Since I used a back piece that was one colour and two contrasting colours for the side and front panels, I traced the entire pattern onto another piece of paper. I then cut it into three equal sections. I used one colour for the front panel, and another colour for the two side panels.

3.  If you want to embellish the crown with fancy pictures, sew them to the panel first before attaching both front and back crown pieces together, that way the stitching is hidden and safe from prying toddler fingers. See the picture with the dragonfly for clarification. I made girly crowns with butteflies, and dragon flies, crowns with rocket ships, stars, owls and whales. Pin and sew all front panels to the back panel together.  Remember to keep the two back sides that the elastic will attach to unsewn.  See the right side of the crown in the picture below.

4. Cut out a pattern for the  elastic panel that will keep the crown snug on your toddlers’ head. I used a piece of fabric 11″ wide x 14″ tall. Once cut, fold along the long side so that your piece is now 11 x 7. Iron and sew along the bottom edge. Flip the panel inside out so that the stitching is hidden inside. Cut elastic about 3.5 inches. Thread elastic into panel and pin to one side.

5. Sew elastic to one side of elastic panel. Push elastic end to the other unsewn side, pin and sew. Now your elastic panel will have a taught elastic and scrunchy material around it. (If you want to make a hair scrunchy, this is the same idea).

6. Take elastic panel, pin and sew to each end of the crown.

7. Place crown on toddler and declare prince or princess.

If anyone is really interested, I can scan the pattern pieces and put them up here [if you ask me nicely]