Backpacks for the kiddies

Posted on October 21, 2012 by admin

Kids’ Backpacks

This is a bit of a late post — I kind of forgot about posting this project until I came across the photos while doing some photo housekeeping.

I made these two backpacks for my niece and nephew’s birthdays, which are usually celebrated on the same day at one big party because their dates are so close. My nephew Magnus was about to start school, so this was mainly something he needed, but since I could get the fabric in boy and girl colours, I thought why not make them a matching pair?

Girl backpack

The fabric is called “Zoo Pals” by Dwell Studio, in blue and pink (purchased from the good people at Tonic Living), and I chose it because the packs hold their shape better when constructed out of a canvas. This is 100% duck cotton, 7.75 oz per yard. I used Made by Rae’s Toddler Backpack pattern, however I enlarged it by about 30% on a photocopier, and I made a small modification in that I added the front pouch using a simple velcro enclosure. I kind of felt that the backpack, at the larger size, was a bit plain on the front and could use the extra detail.

Boy Backpack

I needed to make the pack larger because Magnus needed one that could carry a certain number of items laid out by the school, and because my other friend who I’d made one for said her child had to stop using his because his school said it was too small. So I wanted to make sure it was big enough for everything — his lunch, a sweater, a book I think was the list. Maybe also shoes. I can’t remember exactly. But it seems to be big enough and Magnus exclaimed, “It’s Perfect!” when he opened his birthday present. You gotta love when a four-year-old says something like that!

Kids’ Backpacks — Back

Miss Vu, as we call my niece, isn’t really talking a ton yet, at 2 years old, but she put hers on and trucked around wearing it with a giant grin on her face. Adorables!

Happy Birthday Boy

Modelling his new Pack

Happy Birthday Girl

Another backpack with owls, another sleepless morning

Posted on May 6, 2011 by admin

Backpack for Auria

Here I sit, at 4 a.m., when all other reasonable people and creatures (at least in my household) are sawing logs (rather loudly). This has been an extraordinary week at the ol’ day job, and as a result of the insane number of balls in the air, my brain just can’t let go. Even though all the crazy (or most of it) culminated in a big bash last night celebrating OCAD University graduates; even though the end is in sight. Even though by mid-day tomorrow (Friday) I’ll finally be able to relax. Sleep alludes. I realized about a half hour ago (at 3:30 a.m.) that I was hungry. And then… oh yeah! I didn’t get dinner last night! Sigh.

Backpack for Auria

Up until this week I’ve actually gotten quite a bit of sewing and a little bit of knitting done. I’m prepping some gifts for overseas that my parents will take to a friend and her family in Norway. I made the toddler backpack above for my coworker’s little girl, too. I simply adore this fabric. I think my friend Alice’s infatuation with owls has rubbed off! And there is just so much great owl-themed ephemera out there these days. This fabric is called “It’s a Hoot, Jewel” by P Kaufman, and I picked it up via Tonic Living. Isn’t it adorable?

I’ve also continued on with my bread experiments using the methods in the book Tartine Bread. The first batch of loaves turned out not so edible (a post to come soon) but the second batch was really fabulous. This week hasn’t been a good bread week but I intend to get right back on the bandwagon this weekend. I think I can safely say that I now have a really good grasp on the properties and procedures to making great artisan sourdough breads.

Anyway, time for me to try my hand at courting the Sandman again.

Hanging out with the owls

Posted on April 7, 2011 by admin

After a bit of a rough day yesterday, I sit here coming at you at 2:30 a.m. wide awake and yet sleep deprived. Have I mentioned before that I’m an occasional insomniac? The problem has improved since I started my treadmill routine last fall, and then added on the yoga once a week this year, but sometimes there’s just too much stress that even a good work out can’t cure. Yesterday was one of those days.

So perhaps it’s appropriate to post a couple projects featuring owls, since right now, I kind of feel like one.

Quilt for Baby Crummell

Recently I discovered the fabulous online fabric retailer, Tonic Living, where I found most of the above fabrics. Besides their excellent wide-ranging selection of not only quality quilt fabrics but also outdoor and upholstery fabrics, they offer FREE SHIPPING to folks like me who are in the GTA (I believe the deal is available to those with postal codes that begin with L or M, although its not stated on their ‘about us’ section of the site — it must come up when you’re in the check out) if you order over $50, which is of course not hard to do at all when you’re buying fabric.

The baby quilt above was made for my friend Alice, who is a couple months away from having her second child, this time a girl. Alice is a little owl crazy, as is her little 3 and a half year old Calvin, so it wasn’t hard to know what direction I should go with in choosing fabrics for this quilt. I also wanted to steer clear of typical pastel baby colours, which are so not Alice’s thing. Oranges and limey greens are way more her style.

"Aromatherapy" and "Zen Garden" by Patty Young.

"Urban Zoologie Owls" by Robert Kaufman, with Kona in Pomegranate

"Kiss Me Owls" by Suzanne Ultman and "Zen Garden" by Patty Young.

The fabrics I can identify by designer and manufacture are:

“Kiss Me Owls” designed by Suzanne Ultman produced by Robert Kaufman;
“Urban Zoologie Owls” by Robert Kaufman;
“Aromatherapy, Sherbert” designed by by Patty Young produced by Michael Miller;
“Glass Tiles, Sherbert” by Patty Young produced by Michael Miller;
“Zen Garden” by Patty Young produced by Michael Miller
Kona solid in Pomegranate and Charcoal, and
“Meadowsweet Citrus” by Michael Miller.

The square with the lime green two-tone pattern is the only fabric pair I’m not certain about the designer or manufacturer. I got those through the monthly stash-building subscription I have going with Sew Sisters, another fabulous quilt fabric retailer I order from often.

When I found the above owl prints, I also came across this super cute print, called “Night Owl” (not sure who the designer is) in a heavier 10 oz. duck canvas. I thought it would make for a really cute little tote bag for Calvin, who I thought might appreciate a little present all for him that features owls. Then I found this adorable toddler backpack pattern by Rae Hoekstra of made-by-rae.com, and knew it was perfect for the little man.

Backpack for Cal

This was a unique project that tested my sewing skills; I’d never sewn piping into anything before, and really it’s the first zipper I’ve done in likely 20 years. It was actually ridiculously easy and the project took only a couple of hours to complete. I’m telling you, buying that new Baby Lock was the best investment I’ve made in years. I can’t believe I held out for so long before doing it. All I want to do now is sew all the time.

Backpack for Cal

I gifted both these projects to Alice on the weekend at a clothing swap we had planned, when we decided last minute to take advantage of our all being together to give the mama-to-be some well wishes, and they were of course, a huge hit. I already know some other little people in my life who just might need toddler backpacks of their own!

Baby Shower Cookies

And lastly, check out the yummy cookies I whipped up for the event! My icing skills are improving ever so slowly!

The negligent blogger

Posted on December 5, 2010 by admin

I’m still here! Really! Just super crazy insanely busy. Have I mentioned before November is my busiest work month? Throw in the Christmas shopping, home renos and a holiday knitting project list, and well, I’m either running around like a soccer mom or parking my ass in front of the TV with some knitting.

I haven’t even had time to process photos, so this will be a photo-less post.

I am however super stoked to mention that I’ve finally caved and bought myself a new sewing machine! It’s a Baby Lock Grace — a nice, streamlined machine with some great features like 40 programmed stitches, built-in automatic button hole maker, a built-in needle threader, free-arm sewing for things like sleeves, and just general reliability and piece of mind that I can count on. I had taken in my 40-yr-old Singer for repairs; the tension knob continued to give me issues, and the repair guy told me it had seized up. I asked about suggestions for a machine good for quilting, and well, I fell in love with this here little machine.

I’m not giving up completely on the old Singer, it’s getting some TLC, but I’m just tired of wrestling with it constantly whenever I want to do something. It will still be a great back up machine, for straight, simple sewing. Nothing fancy!

As for the home renos, Chris has been working madly up in the attic to prepare it for adding some blow-in insulation, and doing some wiring. It’s hot, messy business, and I am just super glad I’m not up there. I think he’s almost done so that’s great. Not sure when we’ll get to the insulation part, we need good, dry weather, and daylight, that’s getting harder and harder to come by.

Totally addicted

Posted on August 17, 2010 by admin

So I know I posted a while back about a finished quilt top, but not the actual finished quilt. I did finish it months ago, but it’s waiting for a special someone to arrive into the world, and that special someone is due to arrive TOMORROW! So stay tuned!

In the meantime, I’ve finished a second one! This one is another gift and for someone I doubt reads my blog, and dammit I’m busting at the seams with my new found addiction and how pleased I am with the results, so surprise be damned.

Baby Boy Quilt

So this is the very same pattern as the first quilt I made (by Elizabeth Hartman of Oh Fransson!), but a different set of fabrics. This is made predominantly of Cloud9 Fabrics My Happy Garden, which is so adorable it defies all measures of cuteness. Fabric like this is a big part of why I’m so addicted to this new craft, even though I’ve barely just started.

My Happy Garden in 'Meadow' and a speckled pattern called 'Sun'

'Flock' and 'Sky'

'Toadstools' and 'Blue Yonder'

'Lines' and 'Grass'

The fabric in the square below however is from the Textile Museum of Canada’s annual ‘More than Just a Yardage Sale’ from last year. The brown in it picks up the gray-browns from the Cloud9 fabric, and the solid blue and binding is Kona fabric that I ordered from Sew-Sisters (BTW they are having a free shipping event until August 22 — I <3 their free shipping events!).

Mystery fabric and Kona solid

I am so pleased with how this turned out. Now I had my fair share of problems with the quilting, again, but it was definitely better than the first time I tried it. I suspect that this is due to a combination of nit-picky tension on my machine which continues to totally baffle me (not to mention I swear it adjusts itself on the fly) and a general dislike the machine has for this kind of work. It is after all a 40-some-odd-year-old Singer Stylist. But I refuse to give up on it yet, in part because I need to win the lottery before I can afford the Ferrari of the sewing machine world, the Bernina 830 (it goes for about $12,000 USD). I can dream, can’t I?

Detailed view

I’ve been rest assured by several repair shops that my Singer is a keeper and running just fine, but I suspect something has gone wonky with the tension controls. Then there is the matter of the sensitivity of the foot pedal, which resists moving until it goes off like a shot, and this seems especially worse after I’ve been using it for a while and the pedal heats up. Chris and I took it apart tonight to have a look-see, and it has a very old-school ceramic resister tube with metal that runs through the middle, and Chris suspects that metal is broken in the middle, but the machine still works. I wonder if the resister can be replaced. Anyone had experience with such things?

If anyone has any tips for machines or classes of machines (older and newer) that are especially well suited to machine quilting, I’m all ears.

Embroidered signature

Because I am so hooked on this.

I’m a quilter!!

Posted on May 6, 2010 by admin

So I’ve been building towards a new hobby lately… one I’ve been curious about for some time. Problem is I don’t have time for any extra classes. At least I don’t think I do. Maybe eventually. Maybe after puppy classes are over. In two weeks Luna graduates from puppy class but then immediately starts the intermediate class. And I have to say she’s a rock star. Yes, I’m biased.

Anyway, back to the new hobby: quilting! I kind of started this last year with some simple tied quilts, but I wasn’t really using nice cotton fabrics and I really didn’t know what I was doing. Recently I bought a pattern from Elizabeth Hartman of Oh, Fransson! with really great instructions and lots of commentary about buying fabrics and what materials work best for what.

Finished blocks all laid out

I was lucky enough to take some pretty extensive sewing classes back in high school. I remember in fact one of them being a whole semester devoted to making a garment. I chose to make a denim blouse. That’s right — a blouse — out of denim! My mom helped me find a light weight fabric that worked fairly well, but the resulting blouse was probably about 4 sizes too big for me. I don’t know what ever happened to it, but I definitely got some skills out of the class.

I would never call myself an expert sewer however, and even now it’s been years since I followed a pattern for clothing. I’ve been browsing the Interwebs lately for patterns though, so you never know. There’s something so empowering about having the skills to sew your own clothes.

An 'A' block

One of the complementing blocks

The other thing I’ve done to get ready to do more serious quilting is I signed up to receive monthly mailings of four fat quarters of complementary fabrics from Sew Sisters, a local quilt shop. This is really helping me build my fabric stash, which is so necessary if you want to make even a small baby quilt. The centre squares of the blocks above and below are from these mailings.

Another block

So things are coming along. I’ve yet to try out my darning foot on my sewing machine, the tool that will be key for machine quilting, so that will be the real test. I’m sure I’m going to find it awkward to maneuver such a large piece of fabric around the machine, but I’m hoping for the best.

Quilt block detail

I also feel I need to work on my fabric pairing skills, but seeing these blocks all laid out tells me that I’m not half bad at this. It’s very hard to choose fabrics that match and to try to envision how they will look in the overall project. This quilt is destined to be a gift for a new niece, who is expected to arrive in August. Let’s hope it turns out!

Serenity now, serentity now, serenity now…

Posted on July 15, 2009 by admin

Gotta love when the shit hits the fan at work, in the middle of summer, when things are supposed to be chill. Oh well. Looking at this photo will help:

Summer sunset at the farm

The farm is my happy place. There is a certain change of pace that happens the moment I arrive there. And then there are the occasional treats like the glorious sunset we had on Friday night. Preparing to leave turns me into a whiny little kid, “but I don’t want to gooooooo!” Because I have to come back to the city. To problems like the one that arose today. I love my job…I love my job…I love my job…

So, to detract from the work life insanity, I’m making pickles. My hair is a all skewed in a humidity frizz at the moment, and the house smells like vinegar. But I love it. A pickle post is coming soon.

Baby boy quilt

I finished this little baby quilt several weeks ago. It was gifted to our friend Bronwyn, who is expecting her first baby boy in the next few weeks. I think this one turned out much better than the first one I made, if only for the colour and fabric choices. I’m by now pretty determined to learn how to quilt properly. I’m in the process of finding a class that suits my schedule and will cover the techniques I want to learn.

Baby boy quilt

I applied the quilt backing to this one differently. With the baby girl quilt, I assembled it kind of like a pillow case, sewing it together inside out and then turning it around and then quilting. This time I quilted before sewing the binding, which was sort of more successful. I hit a speed bump when I could not for the life of me figure out what had gone wrong with my machine’s tension. The thread in the tensioner was bouncing all over the place, and I was having problems with jamming, like I’d had for probably decades before I took the machine in for some TLC.

Then I discovered that after having wound a new bobbin, I’d missed a key step in re-threading the machine. Which then lead me to think perhaps that had been my problem all along, for years… for all the years I’d been thinking that machine was fubar. Which makes me feel like an idiot…because I have the original instruction manual and all the parts for this 1960′s era machine, which had been my mother’s. I’ll just blame the manual’s rather stylized illustrations for the mistake. Yes. That’s it. It’s the manual’s fault.

Baby boy quilt

Growing things and sewing things

Posted on May 14, 2009 by admin

I’ve finally begun disseminating the tomato and chile seedlings. I just repotted a second batch of seedlings because I had run out of room earlier with the first batch. They’ll take a week or two to catch up but the ones I repotted about three weeks ago are huge and need to go in the ground ASAP.

Graduates

Over the last couple weeks I’ve been working on hardening them off. Considering that means moving dozens of small plants in and out and in and out, it’s been quite a bit of work. But they’re now quite acclimatized and I think it’s safe to leave them outside at night from now on, barring any more risks-of-frosts like we had on Monday night.

Baby tomatoes

I’ve given out a few here, a few there and I’ll have a few more to go. Next weekend I’ll be planting some in the garden.

Baby quilt - my first

As for things crafty, I’ve taken a stab at making my first quilt. I guess technically it’s a baby quilt. A couple of months ago I was really interested in taking a quilting class, but I couldn’t find anything that started at that time (most places’ classes were already underway), and I didn’t really know what kind of quilting I wanted to do. I recently found a place to get my mom’s old sewing machine fixed, a Singer from the late 1960′s. I’d had the machine for probably 10 to 15 years, but it always jammed, and other places I’d taken it to didn’t do squat to fix the problem. I didn’t have the heart to get rid of the machine, and many a fibre artist had told me that you just can’t get machines like it anymore. So I held out hope and finally, through my friend Michelle, found Sewing World (ironically, located in my old neighborhood in a plaza I went to nearly every weekend to do my laundry and shopping). $100 later and my machine is running like a charm.

Quilt detail

Given that I haven’t had any quilting classes (yet) I kind of had to muddle through on my own, with the help of some books, but it was not that hard as this is a simple design. I have more of the same fabric in “boy” colours, for another one (there are a few babies on the way in my social circles). I had read that a cotton-polyester blend would be fine for quilting, however, at the fabric store the woman who cut my yardage said that most quilters she knew swore by 100% cotton, and now I can understand why. This fabric is very, very thin and flimsy, without a lot of structure. As a result the quilt has a bit of a “manufactured” feel, which I dislike.

Quilt back

But at the same time the fabric was super cheap, and I didn’t want to invest a ton in it in case I made a mess of the whole thing. I was a bit stumped with how to do the binding (edges/seams) but I did some reading online and tried a pillowcase method. It works well enough for this but it means that the quilt bunched up when I did the machine quilting. So for the next one I’ll do the quilting first, and then figure out the binding later. I just found online instructions about binding are quite difficult to grasp.

I also tried “stitching in the ditch” and that was sort of successful. And for the tying, I tried embroidery floss first, in little “x’s” and that wasn’t working so well. So instead I used yarn to tie off the quilt, and because I didn’t want the yarn to undo, I put a dab of Fray Check on each yarn knot, which should bind the fibres so they don’t come undone.

Since I’ve got my sewing machine in excellent running order, I’ve been doing other little repairs and hemming and things I’ve avoided because whenever I tried to use my machine I ended up pulling out my own hair in frustration. Now I’ve got hemmed curtains in my bedroom instead of safety-pinned curtains (imagine that!).

Diggin' the Dirt

A little gardening, quilting, knitting, cookin' and more.

Tag Archives: sewing

Backpacks for the kiddies

Another backpack with owls, another sleepless morning

Hanging out with the owls

The negligent blogger

Totally addicted

I’m a quilter!!

Serenity now, serentity now, serenity now…

Growing things and sewing things

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