~E Made This!

I’m giving away this purse for Sew Mama Sew’s Giveaway Day. It is a nice little summery bag with button decoration and patchwork lining and spiffy yellow handles I pirated off of a thrift store find. It is about 9″ tall and about 14″ at the base.

To win, leave a comment here telling me what features you would put on your ideal purse.  For me, my perfect purse is a wristlet with lots of pockets and a lot of storage in a very small amount of space.  I’ll pick a winner at random on June 1st.  You may enter up until June 1st at 8 am MST.

We have 3, count them 3 weddings to attend this summer plus Nathan’s grandparents’ 60th anniversary celebration. Of course I want to try and make a dress for all of this fantastic shindiggery, and I’ve settled on this pattern that I found via angry chicken:

I way love the look of this dress…I love that it looks curvy-girl friendly and I love that it is breast-feeding friendly too.

I’m going to have to do some monkeying about to learn how to multi-size the whole thing because I am one size on top and another on the bottom.  I tried doing this hapharzardly on another dress and I got…well, haphazard results.  I’m determined to figure this problem out though because this is just how I’m shaped.

Projects with Noah take obviously more time, so this will be a project that doesn’t magically appear here one day but more likely will have regular progress updates. I’m excited to take it on. It’s such a beautiful dress.

The day before my wacky long labor started, I cut this apron but didn’t get to work on it.  Sometime in the past week between feedings (Noah is awesome by the way–he’s eating super great and letting both of us sleep for about 2-3+ hour stretches at night), I’ve stolen a few minutes here and there to finally put it all together.

I’m CONSTANTLY looking around for my marking/cutting tools as I prepare to sew and I’ve seen several utility aprons and I just combined what I loved in several to come up with this one:

The main fabric is vintage kitchen fabric from the 40’s that I bought in San Francisco over Christmas.  I added some blue Kona cotton from my stash and some red plaid that I also had in my stash that I bought at a thrift store.  The whole thing cried ric-rac to me, so I also bordered the edges of it and one of the pockets with royal blue ric-rac.  I super love it.  I know with all of my sewing tools in such a handy location my love of sewing will only increase.

Has anyone else heard about this?  I read on allsorts about Craft Hope–it’s a blog gathering handmade items to be given to children through mission work.  You can still participate in the 2nd project which is making dolls for children at an orphanage in Nicaragua.  The deadline is June 13th.  This is pretty close to my heart as I’ve been contemplating making handmade things for kids throughout the year for Operation Christmas Child for the boxes that go out in December.  Giving a child something handmade–something made with genuine love that they might know that someone else loves them so very very much–beyond what any of us could imagine…this is work that I want to do.

So join me and make a doll for a little boy or girl in Nicaragua.  If you’re in need of some help, Craft Hope has some doll tutorials on their site, and if you’re lacking inspiration, check out their flickr group.

After a really long labor, we finally got to meet our son, Noah James. He’s beautiful! We’re just so amazed by him. At the moment we’re just coping with the lack of sleep, so I imagine creative time will go by the wayside for a little while. Still, writing is soothing to me, so I may post more than I think I will. For now, this is what Noah thinks about cantaloupe (Nathan will disagree with me on this point, but I will freely interpret this face in such a manner for my own amusement).