Little to show

I don’t have much to show for my time these days. I’ve got a couple of projects in active progress (as opposed to the works in progress that have stalled for one reason or another): my fingerless gloves and a year-long sampler stitch-a-long with an online needlework group I belong to (which I’m already behind on, of course). My evenings are so busy right now that by the time I get a chance to sit down, I’m more likely to be taking a cup of tea and a book to bed than doing crafts.

I haven’t made any profound crafting resolutions this year. I have some projects in mind and some general goals, such as using the supplies I have and finally doing something with at least a few of the hundreds (thousands?) of photographs I’ve taken over the past couple of years.

I have spent quite a few hours lately tangled up with metres and metres (and more metres) of black fabric, making a cape as part of a costume for a teenage cousin. I don’t usually do this “Susan knows how to sew; let’s ask her to do it” kind of sewing, but this cousin has recently finished treatment for Hodgkin’s lymphoma and I’m so happy to see her feeling more like her old self again. How could I refuse her fuzzy-headed plea?

There was too much heavy fabric to lay the pattern out on the dining room table. The cats love when I cut fabric on the floor—I ended up having to lock Jamie up in a bedroom for the safety of his whiskers when he started attacking my scissors. Me? Not so much. My knees are not the young things they used to be.

What I've been doing with my summer vacation

Although it may seem like there’s been no creating going on here lately, I have been doing at least a little bit.

Inspired by the book Journal Revolution, Child Two and I made calendar journals in July. Her theme was flowers; every day she found or drew a picture of a flower.


I used words cut from magazines and junk mail to make a note about my day.


As I mentioned in a post on Always an Editor, doing this calendar journal helped me notice that I spend quite a lot of my time in rather serious pursuits, so I’m paying more attention to doing something fun or relaxing every day. The calendars themselves were a lot of fun to make and, apparently, they also make a fine place to rest.


I’m using my August calendar to remind me of one of the items on my list of things I’d like to be doing. I studied French for many years in school, and although I’ve never been truly fluent, I could understand it and make myself understood pretty well, and it was always one of my favorite subjects. (I am such a language dork that I actually love doing grammar exercises. Is that sad?) I'd really like to improve my French again; I'm determined to go to France one day, even if I'm 85 and tottering around with two canes by the time I get there. So this month I am reading something in French and recording one new-to-me word on my calendar journal every day.

I spent much of last weekend working on lined curtains for Child One’s room. I’ve had the fabric for ages (where ages = years), but for some reason I was hesitant to get going on them. I’m not sure why I was intimidated, considering I’ve made curtains lots of time and Child One is not one to demand perfection (or to even notice imperfection, for that matter). Part of the problem was not having a place to spread everything out, but now that that’s been solved, I’ve decided that I must get them done because I won’t settle down to any other sewing projects until I do. I’ll be too busy over the next two weekends to work on them, but given how long he’s been waiting, a couple of weeks more is nothing.

As usual, I’ve had some help,

although I’m sorry to report that there were some arguments over whose turn it was to guard the fabric.


I had hoped to spend a lot more time being creative this summer, but instead I’ve made major progress in my work and much-needed changes to how I run my business. It hasn’t been the lazy, freewheeling summer I’d hoped for, but the result is a much more manageable workload. If I stick to these changes, I won’t be working nights and weekends regularly and my stress level will drop, so in the long term I will get the creative time and energy I crave.

Projects for me! And weekly inspiration

These days (meaning in the last 13 years, since I was pregnant for the first time), I rarely make anything for myself. The last made-by-me sweater that I owned was a cute, short crocheted tank top, back in the days when I was still young and skinny.

But recently I stopped in at my favorite yarn store. I really wasn’t planning on going there and I certainly wasn’t planning on buying anything at all, much less anything for myself. I’d had a hard day and I wanted to go for a walk to clear my head; I just happened to choose a favorite walking spot that’s in the same neighborhood as this store.

I wasn’t looking for a retail therapy session, and besides, my form of retail therapy is usually very modest: a notebook or a magazine. I just planned to wander around in this store, looking at and touching the yarn. It was meant to be more of a quiet escape than a shopping trip.

But I ended up buying patterns and yarn for not one, but two summer sweaters for myself, one knitted and the other crocheted. Yikes! Neither is an in-front-of-the-TV project (as this is what tends to happen when I knit while I’m distracted), so I have to find some free time to devote to them.

The yarn and patterns have been sitting in their bag in my sewing room for a few weeks now and summer is fast approaching (although with our weather luck lately, we may still be wearing rainboots in August). I’m telling you about them in order to make myself find the time to work on them, instead of having them get buried in the to-do-someday pile. Keep me accountable, please. Just ask me how those sweaters are going once in a while.

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In other news, here are some fun ideas I found in my Internet travels this week:

Kathryn Ivy has a tutorial on dyeing yarn with Easter egg dyes.

Unplug Your Kids shows how to make beads out of straws and paper. You could use any kind of paper with this project—a couple of years ago Child Two and I used wrapping paper to make Christmas garlands.

Meg at Elsie Marley gives instructions on how to make fabric covers for tin cans. Hers are embroidered and she kindly shares her patterns.

Are your sewing tools little boring? According to Better Homes and Gardens, you can paint your shears!

At Big Huge Labs, see how to print eight photos on one piece of paper and then, using their folding instructions, turn it into a pocket-sized photo-album. I’m going to send some of these to far-away friends and family.

Old sewing magazines

I’m writing this post as part of the Apron Queen’s Vintage Thingies Thursdays. You can check out her blog for links to other posts about vintage thingies.

The Apron Queen posted some very cute vintage kitchen towels today. My kitchen towels might be old, but they’re definitely not vintage or in any condition for the world to see. So instead I’m going to share some sewing magazines that I recently found in my mom’s house, which used to be her parents’ house.

My grandmother (or oma, because she was Dutch) kept her yarn stash in a funny little seat attached to a built-in bookcase. The back and seat cushions can be lifted off, revealing a storage area underneath. I found these patterns intermingled with some old knitting books under the seat. They’re all in Dutch, so my oma must have brought them back from a trip home to the Netherlands, or maybe one of her sisters sent them over.

This was apparently a monthly magazine, and these issues are from March to June 1959. I especially like these two covers:

The magazines each contain dozens of patterns for women,

for men,

and for children.

What’s most amazing is that all the patterns in each issue are presented on two sides of a single large piece of paper. To use them, you had to trace all the pieces for the particular garment you were making. Can you imagine? It looks like a nightmare road map.

My great-grandfather was a tailor and my great-grandmother had a shop in which she sold handmade clothing (I think mainly children’s clothes). Eight of her ten children were girls and I know that at least two of them, my grandmother and my great-aunt Bep (who both came to Canada), were master craftswomen. I’m sure that at least some of their sisters (who stayed in the Netherlands) had similar talents. My grandmother, at least in the time I knew her, was mainly a knitter and crocheter, so finding these patterns was a big surprise for me. Her sister was a professional dressmaker and could do just about anything involving yarn or fabric. They both had a big influence on me and I plan to write more about them in future posts.

For now, though, here’s one more picture. This lady is obviously very pleased with her new suit:

Love those buttons

I saw on Abbie’s blog that Analise at Sugar*Sugar hosted a button challenge, asking bloggers to post photos of their buttons. I love my button collection, but after looking at some of the ones posted, my little guys look rather ordinary in comparison.

Nevertheless, and despite missing the challenge, this afternoon I spent time that should have been spent working taking pictures of buttons. (This is not the first time I've done this, as shown by two of these bookmarks.) The sun was actually out today (I’m still in shock) so I was determined to do it outside, even though it was very windy and I ended up with shadows of my blowing hair in half the pictures. Some of my buttons blew right off the table and rolled off the deck. I’m sure my neighbors were wondering what the heck I was doing later, peering around the carport looking for lost buttons.

So here they are, or at least here are the photos that don’t have hair shadows in them. Some of these buttons have lived in my button box for years.
Some were recently bought on a whim, with no particular project in mind.
After all the gloomy weather, I was happy to sort out the red ones
and the blue ones.
My collection includes buttons big and small,
buttons colorful and plain,
and buttons of many shapes.

I don’t know much about their vintageness. Some were inherited from my great aunt and my grandmother and some were bought at thrift stores. Many are left over from completed projects and others were bought for projects that never quite got completed. Some were found on the street and others came as spares with shirts and sweaters or were cut off worn out clothing. Most of them are either fairly plain in style or were meant for kids’ clothes.

Compared to some, my collection of buttons is more utilitarian than fancy, but I like it anyway. It reminds me of past projects, of things I’ve made for my children, and of people I care about.

Weekend failure and success

This weekend saw a failure and a success at our house.

First, the failure. I really, really wanted to make some fabric Easter eggs like the ones I saw on Abbie's blog. So on Saturday, after much fighting with my computer and printer to print the pattern at the right scale and, having gotten it close but not quite right, finally resorting to a pencil and a ruler, I opened my big box of fabric scraps, a box that hasn’t been opened in far too long. I chose two fabrics, cut out the pieces, and sewed them together. As I started to stuff this egg wannabe, it was pretty clear that it wasn’t very eggy. But I kept at it, hoping that if I stuffed it full like the directions said, it would take on an ovate shape. Alas, I ended up with an Easter ball.

I was pretty sure that the lack of egginess was due to my lack of sewing precision, so on Easter Sunday I tried again. The result, while more egg-like than the Easter ball, could in all honesty be described only as an Easter blob.

I gave both the Easter ball and the Easter blob to the cats, telling them that the Easter bunny had brought them some new toys. They, having been up all night playing with the Easter eggs that had been carefully hidden all over the living room, knew I was lying.

This effort, while it failed to produce the beautiful fabric eggs I was hoping for, was not a real failure. I rediscovered my scraps, reminisced about the projects they came from, and got inspired to open that box more often. I will keep trying with those eggs. If I start tomorrow, I’ve got 362 days to get them right.

The success was much more exciting. Child Two finished her first embroidery project.
It’s from a great book called Kids’ Embroidery by Kristin Nicholas. We found it at the library but it’s so full of fun projects that we’ve ordered it.

Kitty (as she’s called) is made from felt scraps left over from a Winnie the Pooh costume I made for Child Two long, long ago (at least I think it was for her and not for her brother, but finding out for sure would involve delving into the Photo Cupboard of Doom). We didn’t have any suitable colors of tapestry wool in the stash and BigName Craft Store doesn’t carry it (this is part of the reason we are on a quest for alternative supply sources), so we ended up getting Patons Astra for the yarn. It was a little too thick and it meant that I had to do all the needle threading, but it turned out fine.

Child Two is very happy with Kitty, especially because she did all the stitching herself. The book shows one model made from an old wool coat. We’re going to keep an eye out for fun and funky fabrics to make some friends for Kitty.

I also finished the purple scarf I started at the art gallery last month, but I couldn’t get a good picture of it. How I long for bright days, when my camera doesn’t ask for the flash for any close range photo! I’ll try again as soon as the sun comes out.