Not a portal to Narnia*

We recently invested in a wardrobe for my son’s bedroom – but it had to be small enough to fit underneath his IKEA loft bed. And cost almost nothing. So Ebay it was. After three days of searching and bidding I then got the wardrobe I kind of wanted from the beginning (main criteria being size and price). It does need some love though. Aside from repositioning the hanging bar inside, we want to do something special with the outside.
We asked Matthew what he wanted and he responded “cogs and pulleys!” Robert’s response was “ooh, steampunk!” but I was a little more cautious in embracing this notion as:
a) Matthew is 7 and he hasn’t come across steampunk yet and
b) if it doesn’t contain bright colours he doesn’t want it; brass and sepia just don’t fit into this picture.
After a little more conversation I had a clearer picture of brightly coloured stencilled cogs connected by the occasional belt. A further search of Ebay, and a couple of hours later I had these:
Watch this space… possibly for a really long time, nothing happens fast around here.

* the actual portal to Narnia lives here. (no, honestly, just scroll down!)

Stopping by…

School holidays this month, so we have been very busy in not obviously productive ways. Apart from the sheer number of name tapes I have been sewing into school uniforms now that I have two in school from next month. Haven’t got around to checking the length of the new school trousers and sewing turn-ups yet. That can wait until the night before.
In addition I have half made a handful of dresses, but nothing to show as progress.
This month’s sewalong is aimed at the UFO – unfinished objects – but I’ve got a bit sidelined as I don’t really have any sewing UFOs, just DIY ones. Our biggest one is our lounge. We massively renovated it last summer, but  that left us with a bare room, which we managed to paint in time for Christmas. This year we took the floor up (again) to fix the wobbly bits we didn’t notice last year, and we have installed 2/3 of the skirting board. Now we just have to install the final 1/3 (which involves moving all the really big bits of furniture) and then paint 22 metres of board.

We have also built three radiator covers (I say we, I mean Robert) and am in the process of painting those too. Another few weeks and most of everything should be finished.

Fancy-dress

In the midst of all my dress planning we had another birthday come up (every year!) This time my 4 year old niece who, I have been told, is into all things pirates (Arrr!).
So it was pirate costume time. Thanks again to Dana of MADE for her pirate waistcoat tutorial/pattern. It needed a little resizing because Cali is bigger than the paper pattern she provides, but with a my own 4 and 7 year olds to measure up I think I achieved the right size.
A quick rummage through my newly organised fabric stash and I had some purple velvety stuff for the waistcoat, some blue voile for the sash and some blue and white paisley-ish cotton print for the trim and headscarf. Also thanks to my Mum who provided the ugliest/most pirate treasure-y buckle for the sash (4 year olds and knots aren’t a great combination).
And the finished product (as modelled by Piper, just before it went in the post – and don’t worry, she hasn’t lost an arm in battle).

My Dress

I have a plan!
I have a pattern
and I have the fabric
I even have the perfect occasion to wear it (smart Hen Lunch in London next month).
AND I have started making it!!

Rest assured this is NOT the final look. I do not wear yellow (even if it looks white), and it will have a skirt! This is however a toile (or the rough draft). I get to mark all the changes I need to make on it, try them out, try it on again, and assuming it fits properly then transfer the changes back to my original pattern pieces and do it for real in the actual fabric.
Watch this space for the completed item…

The Clothkits Peekaboo dress

Most mornings my elder daughter hops out bed and says something along the lines of “I want to wear this [insert description here] dress today”. Trouble is she keeps growing, so her selection of dresses is being whittled down to a very small number. So last week, instead of starting on my dress (no, NOT procrastinating) I reached for one of the Clothkits dresses that I was gifted from a friend, whose daughters had grown too big for them. 
It came together very nicely. My only real error was cutting it to fit Piper’s chest (age 4) and forgetting about her length (nearer age 5). So after realising that it sat too high in the neck and under the arm I spent the rest of the day unpicking everything that I had painstakingly sewn together.

I used the remains of the visible markings to extend the neckline and armhole and sewed the whole thing back together. Then I just had to wrestle with the placket. A lot. May add an invisible zip next time instead…
I must admit, I cheated on the button holes, as I was sewing it up at Mum’s house, and rather than learn the process on her fancy computerised machine, I just worked out the spacing, marked their positions and let Mum work the machine. Next time buttons, next time.
(I feel like I made up for this though by being more creative with my button choices!)
However Piper and I are both really happy with this – apart from the fact that it needs washing all the time – and it is already one of her go-to dresses.

And some of the other stuff…

Aside from the birthday fun we had in June I have been kept quite busy on other projects.

One of the school mums seems to have fallen in love with the backpacks I have been making for children’s birthday presents, and has been spreading that love among her friends (thank you!) so I had another four bags to make last month – three Butterfly Backpacks and a Simply Stripy one.

And then our soon-to-be brother-in-law Skip had a birthday. Cathy is trying to train him in her use of all the different towels and cloths to be found in the kitchen, so a while back mentioned tea-towels as a useful present. And because the children have great memories of scoffing raspberries straight out of his garden that is what we put on them.

This was swiftly followed by an emergency birthday present make for one of Matthew’s friends as we received a belated invitation to her birthday party. She already had a butterfly bag (the first one!) so she was due a pencil case this year.

My other sister also had a birthday, and she too is trying to get her house sorted out, so she got a carrier bag holder, a couple of lavender sachets (to match last year’s cushion) and a Beezer annual from 1979 (her birth year).

And then of course there were the bean bags. *sigh* I had made both bean bags on other occasions, but had slightly under-stuffed them so when the one my sister had commissioned came back I not only topped that one up, but also Matthew’s bean bag which was a little limp. The (big) downside was that my house was full of small polystyrene beads AGAIN (I am still finding them lurking in corners that I thought I had already vacuumed). he plus point was that I finally got to photograph the other bean bag which I made back around Christmas and despatched so quickly that my camera never got near it.

one very badly edited photo of the purple bean bag

On top of that I did LOTS of wedding related laundry – but no photos as they would be spoilers!

Tent for three

A few weeks ago we celebrated the all important third birthday of our little Robin (she has been looking forward to it for the last 9 months). Our dilemma was what to give her as a present when she already has everything the other two enjoyed when they were 3. After some trawling of the internet, and a chance comment from my Dad, I settled (and why not?) on a tent. And just in case it isn’t clear, there is also room for all three of them to fit inside.

My inspiration came from this reading nook tent I saw on Ana White’s blog, we just gave it our own take, especially as we wanted ours to be used in the garden. So a few lengths of timber and a couple of curtains from my stash later and we had something resembling a tent.

Not anything like pretty enough though, so I then spent some rather too much perfectly good sleeping time sewing up tapes to tie the canvas/curtains to the frame, and making bunting to wrap around it instead. This used up some more of two vintage sheets that I had already cut into for other projects.

Although I could make a case for this project meeting the June stash busting theme of “containment” – the tent has pockets in the side to hold books and toys - thanks to a quick redefinition I definitely get to submit this to the stashbusting challenge – and using up two curtains does make a nice hole in my stash! (well one box of stashness anyway).