Fresh corners of my own

I read Soulemama's "Fresh corners" post earlier this week and desperately wanted some fresh corners of my own. So today, we tackled the kitchen. While Andi caulked and scrubbed, I emptied, scrubbed, weeded out, and reorganized shelves. It's amazing what a re-organized cupboard can do for your mood. So far...

I started small and manageable: the little tea cabinet. It was so stuffed, we couldn't shut the door properly! Now it all fits (barely):



(I've got to polish off some of that boxed stuff, because I want to fill this cabinet with my own grown and foraged herbs.)

That was satisfying, so I felt able to tackle a bigger mess: the cookbooks in my island. They'd outgrown their space. I gave each book a critical perusal, and was able to weed some out. Nice fresh shelves:



(There are toys interspersed because if I put toys in there, the babies and toddlers are less likely to pull out my cookbooks. The basket contains the heap of bibs.)

Time for something more fun. I did these shelves, refolding my vintage aprons and dish cloths and re-arranging a few tchotchkes:



With all that accomplished, I felt able to tackle the biggest task of all: the dish shelves. These were a wreck. The dust! The spider webs! (The stuff way up high is rarely used, or, apparently, cleaned.) Some of the shelves were crammed too tight. Some of the stuff we use daily was on the top shelf, where (short) Andi could never put it away. Some stuff had no place. Now, it's SO much better. (Of course, I still envy lovely cohesive things like Martha Stewart's all-white dishes, but this is more real-life us; things given to us or bought over the years, old and new, all mixed together.)

In the works...

Ooh...I finally got to a project that's been waiting (in the heap by the sewing machine) for too long. And it's coming out so, so cute! Not quite ready to show, but here's a peek. Crossing my fingers for lots of sewing time this weekend...

New inspiration on my bookshelf

For years, Andi and I have blocked out Thursdays on our calendars as "date night." It usually just means going downtown for dinner and maybe a bit of browsing, but it means we have time for just us. Now that Lucy's here, our date nights have become "family date nights." Tonight, we did our old favorites: dinner out, and a browse in a favorite bookstore to check out what's new.

Usually, we just look, add books to our wish lists, and dream. But tonight, while I was drooling over the new craft books and started showing Andi the ones I coveted, she said "buy it" at the first one. Yay! I got this one:


Shop Indie Bookstores

And did I mention that she picked out some crafty books for me for Christmas, too? She got me:


Shop Indie Bookstores

and


Shop Indie Bookstores

Good choices!

What'll I make first?

A few last gifts

Ok, I finally gave our last Christmas gifts tonight (yeah, a bit late). So now I can feel free to show them.

More "discards" inspired by Denyse Schmidts's Quilts:



This set of them included a lot of vintage fabrics, and I found that I really liked the contrast of the modern style with those sweet vintage patterns.

One last 10-minute headband:



And, best of all, the pencil pouch that worked! (Bless you, Noodlehead.)





This last was a gift for a four-year-old. I used his own handwriting as the pattern for the embroidery, and included a pencil and a pen and a sketch book (of course, his mom is the one who really loves it, with that precious handwriting).

edited to add: I can't take credit for the pencil-pouch idea; that was from my brilliant friend Julie, who gave embroidered pencil pouches to her friends' children, using her daughter's handwriting and drawing. Shamelessly stolen!

Who's the weirdo with the dishes in her purse?

Here's another one of the gifts I made for Christmas (well, made and bought).



This was a gift for a friend who's been inspired to make some green changes in her life: a zipper pouch filled with stainless steel straws and bamboo sporks, to help her family avoid plastic while eating out.

When I was in college, I carried my mug with me everywhere, clipped to my backpack (then, a new idea). I'm embarrassed to admit that for a while, I stopped doing that, and went back to buying disposable cups with my drinks. But at some point, I wised back up and started using a mug again for my coffee and a Kleen Kanteen for water. Then a while back, I was reading "No Impact Man" and he inspired me to start carrying a "weirdo cloth" in my purse (a bandana that replaced disposable napkins). Soon after that, I found bamboo sporks in a local store, and my purse became a definite weirdo zone, but my disposables consumption went way down (and by the way, those sporks are the perfect tool for feeding a baby off your restaurant plate).

This friend loves straws, so she inspired me to seek out non-disposable straws. I loved the glass ones I found, but went with stainless for a lighter load (my purse is getting pretty crowded, now! Oh, yeah--I bought straws for us while I was at it).

I thought I could wing making the pouch, but was thwarted by the zipper once again (I don't think I really have a zipper foot for my machine, and I didn't know where to put the zipper pull while I sewed, so it's a kind of a mess). Don't you know, the next day my Google reader fed me the perfect tutorial (thank you Noodlehead!), so now I know how to make a decent pouch, and I'll have to make her a new one asap.

Watercolor painting--10 month style

Ooh...this stuff feels so good on my hands!



Look, Mommy got another brush ready for me. Time to trade.



Hey, Mommy's dipping the brushes into that stuff over there. Maybe I'll try it!

Resolved: make gifts sooner next time!

Happy New Year!

We spent our day cleaning up from the holiday decadence, sweeping up pine needles, and weeding out old things to make way for the new.

I'm hoping we've weeded out a few old habits, as well, and made a little room in our hearts for new ones. (I'm reading Simplicity Parenting, and I love what he has to say about how a less-cluttered space allows children to play more deeply and fully; I think the same is true for us.)

One of the things I'd like to do better this year is to avoid the last-second stressful crafting of Christmas presents, and instead, space them out throughout the year. A friend and I are going to keep each other motivated to get right to work on those great ideas we come across, rather than bookmarking them for later.

Are you doing the same? Here are a few more of the gifts I loved making this year; maybe they'll inspire your plan-ahead crafting (these are the ones I'd hinted about earlier).

I was so impressed when I saw this lovely initial wall-hanging idea on Cluck. Cluck. Sew. And if there's one thing I have plenty of, it's vintage white buttons! I planned to make 5 of them: 2 for my nieces, 2 for my best friend's children, and one for Lucy. But the store had limited supplies of stretcher bars, so Lucy's will have to wait. Here are my versions:






This summer, I'd loved the headbands I made myself using Blue Bird Studio's 10-minute headband tutorial. I thought they'd make perfect stocking stuffers, so I made a bunch (I forgot to photograph a few of them, I think.)

Here are some extra-wide adult versions:



And some narrower ones for girls:



And lastly, inspired by my neighbor, I decided to try my hand at making scarves from old t-shirts. I learned a few things from this:

I love the feel of old t-shirts and would wear one of these scarves every day if I'd made one for myself.

Appliqueing t-shirt designs onto t-shirt fabric is fun and satisfying.

Sewing t-shirt fabric on my sewing machine is a horrible, miserable experience I don't ever want to do again! So out went the lame attempt at a two-sided scarf. Only the one-sided scarves were given as gifts, and I'm not nearly as happy with them as I'd have liked. This is one of those gifts that needed more time and thought.

This is the first one I made, and I like it quite a bit. The fabric was oh-so-soft organic cotton.



This one is not as nice, and I wish I'd had more time to give to it:



I like the applique on this one, and the super-soft blue fabric:



This is a project I'm definitely going to try again, but by hand and with lots more time to do it well.

And the last gift I'd hinted at was these coasters, using the pattern from Denyse Schmidt's Quilts:



These were harder to do than I'd expected. I'd printed the pattern from online (Sew, Mama, Sew!), but used the directions from the book, and I don't know if there was a disparity or if it was me, but the fronts ended up 1/2 inch smaller than the backs in one direction, so I had to trim them down and they ended up a bit wonky. I'd want to figure that out before doing it again, but I did like the mix-it-up nature of the piecing, and felt like I was learning quite a bit about quilting as I sewed.

What are you making for next year's gifts--any ideas yet?