B.Yazoo

Little Baby Pack Mules

May 162013

I’m still here! I’m still sewing, too, but I’ve been playing video games instead of goofing off online. :} Anyhoo, I made two kiddie backpacks recently-ish. One was for Cosmo because his preschool said he needed one for field trips, and the other was for a present.

I made both of these by generally following the Owl Tag Along backpack pattern at the Moda Bakeshop. I left off the side and interior pockets, added an exterior zippered pocket, and did the adjustable straps differently. For the car backpack, I used the back pattern pieces, which makes the backpack sit higher up. I guess that’s so your toddler won’t tip over, and it kind of looks okay on Sunshine, who’s two…

… but it looks weird on Cosmo, who’s four. Oh, but a four-year-old isn’t a toddler, is he? And I just noticed that I could have loosened the straps for him. User error all over the place!

The embroidery on the pocket is Shiny Happy World’s vroom vroom pattern.

On the pac-man backpack, I used the front pattern piece to cut the back, and I sewed the straps into the top seam like normal backpacks. I think that looks a lot better!

I had these grand plans to embroider Caleb’s name on in the style of this google game picture, but then I got lazy and just freezer-paper-stenciled his name on the pocket using a pac-man-like font. I like the way the tutorial tells you to put in the lining — it’s not awful on the inside, the double lines of stitching on the outside look pretty nice, and there’s no hand-sewing!

I’m often kind of mean about using really cute fabric for linings, but I’d hoarded my whale fabric for so long that it had gotten faded along the parts that were exposed to the window, so I didn’t mind using it all up. O_o

I didn’t put on piping since I didn’t have any (plus, I feel like making piping uses up a ton of fabric!), so the backpacks don’t hold their shapes as well as they could. I did put stabilizer behind everything except the zipper pieces so the backpacks wouldn’t completely collapse. I think it works well enough, especially since field trip chaperones end up holding the kids’ backpacks, anyway!

That was an awful lot of pictures just for a pair of backpacks!

May Resovolution

May 072013

A Lovely Year of Finishes is really helping me with my suuper late bee blocks — this month, I’m going to finish up poor Phuong‘s camera-related block. She was so good about getting everyone’s blocks done, and I haven’t made hers yet! If I finish it this month, it won’t quite be a year late. >_<

The theme was photography, so I wanted to do something like a camera obscura, but they kind of just look like boxes, which isn’t very fun. Instead, I’m planning to make the diagram of how cameras work (I think), and I’m going to see if I can English paper piece the weird box pieces together. Then I think I’ll applique it down onto a background fabric, embroider or machine stitch diagram lines, and applique the candles on. This is my plan!

The Squeaky Wheel… :D

Apr 142013

I finally finished Katy’s view master block for our Piece Bee. Yay…?

I’d meant to catch up with the bee in order, but I was having a mental block on (poor, diligent, completely-on-time-for-everyone-else) Phuong’s camera block because I had drawn the design with a ton of Y-seams, so I skipped to this nice and no-brain-power-requiring block. Also, I felt very guilty since I kept reading how Katy received very few blocks. :> But the good thing is that the view master’s instructions made me realize that I could put together the camera block with less stress by using freezer paper and hand sewing it like an English paper piecing thingy! Wahooble!

Easter stuff

Apr 112013

Back at Easter, I tried to get together a variety of things for the kids’ egg hunt, since last year I filled their eggs with only like three different things, and it seemed a little boring when they were opening their eggs up. One of the things I made were wallets (using Modest Maven’s tutorial) since then I could put coins, dollar bills, and coupons for goodies in their eggs.

I modified it a little by replacing one of the card slot thingies with just a plain velcroed pocket for coins. It made the corners of that side of the wallet a little difficult to topstitch through, and I could have avoided that by just adding velcro to the back of the card pocket, but I thought it was nice to have a cute panel of fabric, especially since the kids don’t have many cards to put in those pockets.

The kids also got bunnies. (There are a bunch of them because I also made some for my little cousins’ Easter presents.) I had a lot of fun browsing Etsy bunny patterns until I eventually found Zooguu’s pattern, which I think has a really cute ball shape. (Oops! I turned their ears up to show the different fabrics I used underneath, but I didn’t manage to catch them in the picture.)

Cosmo super duper likes having his names on things now, so I stamped the kids’ names on their bunnies’ ears.

The pattern was nice and easy, so I almost didn’t mind being a factory with all the bunnies. And it’s fun when I get a lot of use out of one pattern!

Dinky projects: they’re the dinkiest!

Apr 042013

Dinky project attack!

Item 1
My brother-in-law is studying Russian for a year, so I made him a pillow cover with Russian phrases stenciled on it for his birthday (I cut the stencils out of freezer paper). I found this wonderful forum where people are willing to do free translations, so I asked how to say, “tummy tight. purple cup.” That was because my niece had recently had a sore tummy, so my sister gave her some flat ginger ale in a purple cup. She liked it so much, that afterwards she kept saying that to try to get more yummies.

On the back, I put a normal proverb, “East or West, home is best,” and my brother-in-law recognized it, yay!

I used House on Hill Road’s tutorial to put a zipper flap on the pillow case. It took me a while to understand what was going on, but once I did, it was neat! I like that now I can put nice closures on pillows without having to stock up on invisible zippers, which I don’t normally use.

Item 2
Cosmo was asking for a star since he was good, so I used Wild Olive’s star template from her Rainbow Road Coffee Cuff project to make him a wand. It only cost me a dollar or so for the whole thing since I just had to get a dowel from Lowe’s, and I managed to make it in the half hour I had before picking him up from preschool. (Amazing for me, cause I’m slooow.) I still have two thirds of the dowel left rolling around my kitchen counter — no one’s needed more wands, yet!

Item 3
Cosmo had a field trip to an aquaponics place, and since they were going to do fish paintings, he was supposed to bring a big shirt to use as an art smock. I’ve been keeping my eye on art smock tutorials, though, so I wanted to make him one, but now that it was time, I didn’t want to use nice materials for something that’s meant to get messy. Scroogey Yazoo strikes again! Serendipitously, I stumbled upon one dollar shopping bags at TJ Maxx, and used one to make an easy, super cheapie art smock.

All I did was:

Chop off the edges and the handles
Cut a hole in the bottom of the bag
Resewed the bottom, since the seams unraveled a bit after I cut the hole
Melted the ends of the handles with a match (too lazy to fish out the fray check from my notions box)
Sewed the handles back on for waist ties

And voila — one dollar art smock! Which Cosmo didn’t end up using, because the aquaponics people didn’t give the chaperones any time to put them on! Anyhoo, here’s Cosmo using his model posing skillz.

Bebeh Clothes

Mar 232013

I’m usually too much of a scrooge to want to make baby clothes (they use so much fabric! and babies can only wear them for a little while!), but generous bloggy people have been sharing free patterns for them, and I got sucked in.

When Rae released the 0-3 month size of her Little Geranium dress, I was all, I’m going to have a 0-3 month sized baby! Glowbug was too little for it when she was born, and then this week I noticed that she was finally the right size for it. She’ll probably fit it for two weeks, heh.

My little niece turned two, and I made her a Prudent Baby snappy shirt, but I was worried about it fitting until I realized that I have a two year old that I can test it out on. Double heh! (I had to bribe him with M&Ms, though.)

This is why I should just follow patterns

Mar 212013

I finished a quilt for my cousin — yay! Due to my inability to plan, I think I have enough leftover blocks to make a second quilt — boo!

It’s based on the Juicy quilt from Modern Quilts from the Blogging Universe, but I didn’t follow the directions because I didn’t want to cut and piece 232 triangles. O_o Instead, I used The Sometimes Crafter’s tutorial for making pairs of hourglass blocks and Connecting Threads’ tutorial for making four flying geese blocks with no waste. Those are awesome!

However, I changed too many things at once (I also planned for 8.5″ finished blocks, instead of whatever it is the real pattern calls for), and when I laid everything out, I found out that I could make a queen-sized quilt! I revised my plan — I thought that round about 9 blocks by 7 blocks would be a good lap-sized quilt.

After I sewed the whole top together, I found out that it was now a twin-sized quilt. Dur! I took off two rows to make it a more reasonable 72″-ish square, and in the end, I had all these leftovers.

I busted out my zippity fast Juki to do the quilting, but even though I was sewing in the daytime, I felt bad about how loud it was (plus we live in the upstairs unit of a townhouse), so I only quilted very lightly along the diagonal lines. Then, over the next couple of days, I hand-quilted around the print squares. I normally use just a soft leather thimble, but it was really not up for hand quilting, and it developed holes. I have two black spots in my finger now from when the back of my needle poked through and pushed some of the thimble fibers in! I didn’t want to wait a week for a new thimble from Amazon, so I went to my local craft store to get a coin thimble, where it cost twice as much. Gahhhh!

Some of the light neutrals are Essex linen, and I really like the texture and heavier feel it got after I washed the quilt. If I ever get rich, I’d like to make a quilt all out of Essex linens. Oh, and a quilt out of double gauze and voile, while I’m in wish land.

I made this for my cousin who’s having chemotherapy, since I read that it can get chilly during the sessions. I hope he thinks the green and yellow color scheme is cheery in a guy-ly way!

Sara’s a busy gal!

Mar 122013

Sara released her Petrillo Bag pattern yesterday, and I was lucky enough to be one of her testers for it. I was excited to make it because the teardrop sides make for an interesting shape.

I had a fabric happy and a fabric sad when I made this — my fabric happy was that I had a perfect shade of orange-ish solid to go with the orangey diamond fabric on the flap. That was pretty amazing because I only have about three kinds of orange solid in my stash! My fabric sad was that when I laid out the grey flower print on my cutting mat, I found out that the yard of fabric was actually only about 32″! I don’t think I bought a remnant, I don’t remember which fabric shop I bought it from so I can’t check my receipt, and I definitely didn’t get any short cut notifications or mini refunds recently… boo! And harrumph. When online fabric stores run out and send what they have, they usually give a small refund, yesno?

Anyhoo, I had a crazy time getting those sides on — look at this porcupine!

I totally dig the teardrop shape of this bag, but I kept wanting it to be a messenger bag or backpack. The bag has a big padded pocket for a tablet; unfortunately, I have no tablet. I must be secretly grouchy about that, because I took a picture of the zippered pocket instead of the tablet pocket.

The first time I finished making this bag, I found out that I’d put the magnet that’s inside the top flap an inch too high, so the bag didn’t close correctly inside of the straps. Gahhhh! After some pouty time, I ripped things out and put it back together properly. I keep having to relearn that the time I spend being mad and anticipating the hassle of ripping things out and fixing them is longer than the time I actually spend ripping things out and fixing them. heh.

Sunshine’s Little Chair

Mar 072013

We have this little stool that I got from a Japanese you-have-to-be-a-member store, and it’s the perfect height for Cosmo and Sunshine to sit on in front of the living room table.

They fight over it constantly, so I thought for Sunshine’s birthday, we’d make him his own stool! (Actually, I would have been happy to just buy him one, but we don’t pay membership for that store anymore, and I couldn’t find where to buy a similar one online.)

Mr. Yazoo’s dad was awesome and made the actual stool by looking at our original one, and he was very nice and didn’t make any comment about how I brought the original stool over, said I was going to use his tools to make a copy, and then sat back and let him do all the work.

Then I just did the upholstery part. I forgot to take pictures, but I covered the wooden seat with batting, taped the edges down (because I didn’t have a staple gun), and cut some cushion foam to the bean shape. I even made a test cover with some waste fabric, which is more prep than I usually do!

It’s so nice — since we gave Sunshine his little chair, there haven’t been any more fights over who gets to sit on what in the living room. The two of them still get into a majillion other tussles, but at least one’s gone…!

March Goal

Mar 042013

My goal this month is to completely finish a quilt for my cousin. I’ve been making a ton of teeny projects, and now I feel like making something big! I’ve gotten as far as cutting everything out, and as usual, it took me longer than I expected.

Part of the reason it took so long was that I had to make it pretty scrappy since I wanted to make the quilt from my stash, and I really didn’t have enough of my solid dark and light fabrics. See that pile of five brown fabrics? That’s supposed to be one brown! It’s hard to see, but I’ve also got three different off-whites in that light pile. Anyhoo, I tried to plan out where different colors would go, and only realized that my plan could never work after I’d spent a whole lot of time staring at (and nodding off over) my color chart. Shucks!

I made some test hourglass and flying geese blocks to make sure I was going to cut my fabric correctly, and I was all proud of myself until I realized that I had used actual fabric for the quilt in my made-to-throw-away test blocks. Dur!

I’m optimistic about finishing this by the end of the month — since I threw out my colorchartplan, I can do super duper mindless chain piecing. We shall see, though… here’s hoping!

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