Travel Sewing

Obviously, going travelling means sewing right? Well for me it did. When faced with the troubling prospect of organising and keeping safe all the different travel documents (passports, visas, car hire info, accommodation, tour bookings etc!) I was struck with the sudden realisation that we needed a document-holder-type-case. 

Now, before jumping to a sewing conclusion, I did investigate potential purchasing options. There was a pretty one in Kikki K that I coveted for quite a while, but in the end could not justify the $80 price tag. Even if I would use it again. Even when I looked online, I was put off by high price tags or expensive shipping costs. 

So, determined that I could make something just as good, I reviewed the sewing options by looking at the different cases and bags in iKat Bag's Zip a Bag collection. The Single Zipper Tape Pouch/Case seemed to be the best fit for what I was wanting. Namely that I would lay flat so I could get to everything, and also fold and zip to keep everything safe and sound. 

I did make a prototype which was using what I had lying around the house and was pretty hideous. But, it taught me some valuable lessons about how everything went together and confirmed some of the things that I knew I needed. After thinking that we might be able to get away with using the obscenely ugly prototype for about a week, we realised that the amount we were going to have to pull the thing out to use it in our travels would be such that it was worth a second try. 

So I went to Spotlight and splurged on some really pretty, heavy duty material and a new zip. Even with this splurging, the case came in under $20, so I'm pretty happy with that. I couldn't find a zip that was long enough to go all the way around (like in the tutorial), but I managed to MacGyver up a solution that works quite well. I possibly should have trimmed the bottom end of the zip, but it's extra length helps to distinguish between the top and the bottom of the pouch, so it stays for now. 

Hidden inside the layers, is some plastic that I ripped off the cover of an old art book. Under the advice of a good friend, I cut it in two and sewed it in sections so that it would fold easily. All advice was that the plastic would be too hard to sew through with the fabric and interfacing, so I glued it with basting spray. Then I went with my gut and tried to sew it anyway. I did succeed, so that plastic is going nowhere.

On the inside, each of the pockets has two lines of top stitching to make it pretty, which I used the shiny gold thread that I'd used in mum's confetti bunting for. The metallic thread was as tricky to sew with on fabric as it was on the cardboard. I did try to use it for the outside of the pouch as well, even so far as to try two strands of it at once for reinforcement, but to no avail.

I'm still so happy with how things turned out and that we have this great travel wallet for all the documents for the future. Totally worth the money on the fancy fabric.

Table Tent

Be warned: This is a long post.

I've been teasing you guys about this latest creation since the middle of October. Even though that's only four weeks ago, it feel like I've been working on it a lot longer than that. Maybe I have, but it can only be a few weeks longer, so, given the scope of this project, the fact that it only took six-ish weeks is pretty stellar.

I had seen ideas for this kind of thing on the internet before, (which is probably why, when people tell me I could sell a pattern, or start making them, I tell them I don't think so. It's not really my idea at all!), but we previously had a round-ish dining room table, that had all four legs doing some strange curvy thing into the middle before coming out again to support the table. It was not conducive to play at all.

Then our chairs fell apart. Then we got free ones from Steve's work. Then those chairs fell apart too. And for the first time in our lives, we were thinking about actually having to purchase dining room furniture. It was a little daunting even just thinking about it, let alone actually shopping for it. Thankfully, right as we needed to make a decision, the people who lived diagonally behind us announced that when they moved they wouldn't be taking a dining room set and would anyone like it, for free? Yes please! Let's put off being grown ups and buying dining room furniture just a little longer shall we? :D

The new dining room table has legs on the outside, and is rectangular. All the things it needs to be to allow for a table tent to be made. My time had come!

In an effort to continue using up the material in my stash, I started there. For a table tent, you need quite a lot of fabric, it's ideal for recycling things like sheets. Luckily, I had some sheets. A linen one that was from my great Aunts, kind of special actually, because I can even remember the day they gave it to us: Steve and I had gone around for afternoon tea to tell them we were engaged. My Aunty Vi disappeared into a room at the back of their unit and came out with some sheets for us straight away. When I showed them to mum, she said they must have come from the hotel that they had once had. Special.

Anyway, there was another one that I've no idea where it came from, and some blue checked ones that Steve used as a teenager that his mum gave me a while ago (probably with the space sheets), and a cot sheet of blue stars that my friend Megan from down the road had given me (when she gave me the other star cot sheet that became Rachel's dress). Then I had a heap of a bright yellow material (not a bed sheet), which I think came in the same lot as the blue floral from this post, though I'm not sure. I do know that I didn't buy it. Finally, some green checked material from the lady at church. It was kind of soft and flannel-y feeling.

Finding all of the fabrics was step one. Thinking about how things would come together was step two and took a lot more time. I knew I wanted it to be fully lined, so the inside walls would be different to the outside. I worried that it would be too hot, so it obviously needed windows for ventilation, not just fun. I ummed and ahhed over curtains but ended up not bothering mostly for the heat reason, but also because I was a little over the windows by that point.

I also took ages to figure out what I wanted to do with the door, for which I didn't initially have fabric for. Luckily, I took all of the sheets over to my parents house to cut out (because they have a table big enough and space for kids to play and not be in the way while I was cutting) and as I cut, mum mentioned she had some red fabric she wasn't using. Turned out it was the perfect amount for the door. And I mean the perfect amount.

Then I thought a lot about whether or not I would put words or windows on the door, and how it would come together. It's the thinking that takes the most time! I also knew I wanted the garden part of the house to be usable and interactive for the kids. I was a little bit inspired by Ikat Bag's Little Blue House (of course), but I also know my girls like things to be useful or changeable. They play with it much longer if there are options.

Anyway, when I finally got sewing, things came together pretty quickly, though I did keep adding details, which lengthened the process quite a bit. If I were doing this for anyone that was not my daughters, I'd probably not bother with fully lining it, because that's really overkill for a play-tent. And would make window instillation much easier.

My friend from down the road Leesa had just started a sewing studio in Moorooka, which you can check out here. It's a great space to sew in and they have all sorts of classes that you can do. I went along with mum on a few Wednesday nights of Social Sewing to work on the table tent. It was really good to sew with other like minded people who I could also bounce ideas off.  First thing I made was the bunting, out of the cot sheet. I was going to sew it in to the tent, but mum suggested using velcro to make it removable, which I liked even more.

Then I put the walls together (sewing the green grass onto the bottom of each outside wall) and worked on the gardens. The gardens look spectacular when they were a work in progress and lay flat on the ground (as you can see in the next WIP photo), but they don't look as great on the actual table, or so I think. The weight of the flowers makes them droop, and because the gardens are so close to the floor, the hang of the fabric means you can't see some of them.

Not the end of the world though. The girls still love picking the flowers. It was one of the first things they did when they discovered the house in the morning.

After they had picked the flowers, they asked where they could put them, which made me so grateful that I had thought to sew a basket on to the front for them to display flowers in. There are two kinds of flowers, those on stems (green pipe cleaners) that are kind of droopy, that get "planted" into the longer green clumps of felt grass.

Then there are smaller flowers with no stems that are buttoned on. These can be unbuttoned and put on the decorative buttons on the basket for display. I hand sewed all of those flowers out of felt. Again, using  up felt from my stash. It was a nice change of pace (as always) and I even had a little bag of the cut flowers, needles and thread that I could take out into the yard and work on while the kids played. Ahh the serenity.

I also put a mail pocket on the other side of the front door, obviously for mail. As yet, unused, but it's only been a day.

The door splits in two. There are ties up the top, so you can roll up the top half and tie it out of the way. Sophie just lay it on top of the table though, so I guess that works too. The bottom half lays flat to be a mat. When the door is "closed" it's held together by velcro dots.

Inside the house are the a pocket on the wall for the bunting to be stored in, when not in use, and some "art work" which I "framed with some more material. The pictures are actually some spare fabric I had from the Colouring In Kindy Dresses so Ikea material. I had the girls colour random bits and then cut them out and sewed them in.

The pocket material is left over from some cot bumpers I made in 2014, and I feel like I've used it somewhere else, but can't think where. The frames on the pictures are some left over material from the Pink Flowers Bunting that I made in 2016. I really like the "pictures" because I feel they are something special for the girls. They even signed them with their wobbly-learning-to-write signatures. Love!

I feel like I should talk about the windows, but they were honestly such a pain in the butt to sew that I really don't want to. If people are interested in their story, they can ask me in the comments.

Finally, here are some little detail shots of the gardens. I sewed a few little extra buttons on for Rachel, who loves her bugs. There are two bees and one little lady bug.

And several felt butterflies flying around too, making the garden beautiful.

When it's all packed up and done, it looks like this:

Which is a lot of material with copious amounts of play potential. Provided it stays with this table, because it is exactly the right size.

Thanks for making it through the post (if you are indeed still with me). I hope the pictures and my ramblings do this justice. The girls and I just had dinner on the floor of the kitchen because they are so busy playing in their table house that they've moved half of their rooms in. What have I done?!

Diversion

I'm still working on the sewing things, but over the weekend, the house was clean enough that I got excited about something else. Something cardboard.

The first half of this term, I had pulled the Cardboard Rocket out of storage under the house for everyone to play in. I didn't realise it is a year old now! It was out for the first four weeks of term, and because it's so big, some other toys had to be put away to make space for it. Actually, the entire living room needed to be reorganised. Anyway!

The kids loved it, which was great, but unfortunately they were a little too robust in their affection for the rocket and I knew it probably wouldn't live much longer. Which was fine. It was fantastic and they loved it while it lasted, and it was only cardboard, so it was never going to last forever anyway.

With the rocket gone now (still under the house, but I think after I take the gadgets off, it will go out with recycling soon), there was lots of space in the living room, so I got excited about more cardboard. Enter the cardboard castle.

I'd been thinking about making another cardboard castle for a while actually, but they do take up space and are somewhat inconvenient given the amount of space they take up tends to be all of the space available in the living room. But, with Steve away in Seattle at the moment, I figured I've got one less person to inconvenience, so now was the best time! Also, the weather is already incredibly hot, even in October, so new play things for inside is a good since we can't really venture outside much. :(

All it takes is some nice cardboard, that you think of was walls and cut battlements into at the top. I also scored this one below so that it would fold nicely to be a corner.

And also add windows if you want/need them. I didn't bother with windows that actually open and close this time, because though the kids love them, they are too rough with them and they are usually the first things to go. Notice the girls in the background? They were eating popcorn as they watched Totoro.

Anyway, when you have your nice pile of cardboard walls with all the bits cut out, then you start to assemble them. Rachel insisted that we have an "open close" door, so despite my misgivings, they got one.

Assembly is pretty easy, hot glue gun and some sticky tape. I am really lucky with my cardboard, because not only do I get lots from obliging people like my parents who just bought four new chairs that all came in lovely boxes, I also live in a great community where strangers give me cardboard too.

What is this? I hear you say. Well! Someone posted on the community grapevine that they worked in a place that didn't recycle much, and since he was sad to see so much cardboard get thrown away, he was wondering if anyone would be interested in some. Yes please! He even delivered it in his car in the evening for me. So nice!

For the bits of cardboard that were just straight cardboard with no tabs (as in, I didn't unfold them from boxes), I used other bits of cardboard as braces for the corners. For one end of the castle, I used a wipes box that I put a brick into for weight, and then cut a slit for the castle to slide into. This end can go anywhere it likes, because the box keeps it stable and upright.

Then, because I designed it with turret/tower rooms, the castle zig-zags across and that keeps the rest of it upright. I can slide the other end between furniture if I like, to help stablelize it, or it can just stay free and help make the castle a different size or shape. Here it is as a wall across the living room:

And here it is more curved in the morning, to give the stuffed animals (that you can't see, sorry) more shelter inside.

Though the door is good and works, they often choose to go through the "secret passage way", which is the small flap on the bottom of the second picture above, on the far right, near Rachel. I don't know why, but crawling through that is apparently a more appealing way of entering the castle.

Hang in There

This pile of material at Sally the Sewing Machine that is my current work in progress is coming along nicely and will be ready soon.

Stay tuned, because you are going to want to see this one!

Kindy Dress Mark 2

Sophie's Kindy Dress has received much attention and talk from the other kindy kids and mums. Maybe there is a business opportunity here, but thankfully, Ikea don't have the fabric anymore, so I can't get too carried away.

Anyway, one of Sophie's friends from kindy is going back to Malaysia at the end of the year with her family, and when Sophie mentioned that she liked the dress, I suggested that we could sew one for her as a gift. I had enough fabric left for a dress for Rachel (for next year) and one more, so why not?

Sophie's friend came over and they had a grand old time colouring the dress in together and after they left, I sewed it up while naps happened.

It's much more coloured than Sophie's was, so we might add some more colour to Sophie's now. And Sophie's dress, after only four weeks of repetitious wear, looks a much different colour to the new one too. You can see the pattern is repeated on the girls dresses, although in different locations. Sophie's doll and pear tree are further down, while Sonia's is up near the neckline.

Sonia chose the square buttons that I put on (so hard to get through the button holes, but I guess that's not really my problem...). I had to do the button holes myself actually, which is always an ordeal.

Sophie wrote the tag/message in yellow and I traced over it in the blue. She is super excited to give this to her friend on Wednesday. They are both planning to wear them on Thursday.

Sweet.

Tomatoes

They grew from this to this:

We picked them.

Some had caterpillars in them, much to Rachel's delight.

The plants died (of natural causes), and we had lots of fruit.

And now we eat them in lunch boxes like this:

In the Making

I'm a little bit excited about what is in the making right now. It's not finished and I don't want to give away too much, but it does include some of my favourite thing to sew. I'm trying to take more progress shots than I usually remember to take, but since I'm working on it predominately at night, the photos are pretty ugly.

Making things is fun though, and I love to see it come together. Some nights I lay it out and I'm daunted by how much there is left to do, and other times I'm spurred on and think it's nearly done.

There is a lot of thinking to do with this project. There are a whole lot of steps that need to happen before other things can be sewn. So far, there have been no mix ups of the order that require unpicking, but I'm really trying to think things through so I don't make any mistakes that do require unpicking. So far so good.

Even though we don't really celebrate the slow, sometimes painful, making process, I'm glad to be in it, because it reminds me that God has me in the making. I've been reflecting on this a fair bit lately. I've been following Jesus for over thirteen years now, and it occurs to me that it's a long road to eternity. The making process is not always easy or glamorous. Not something that we often photograph, but it's a process, and each step is one step closer to that finished product.

So here's to being in the making, and to the fabulous end product I'll have to show you, hopefully soon.

Kindy Dress

Sophie asked me if she could wear a dress to kindy before the holidays, but she had such a great time at kindy playing and painting, that whatever she wears is inevitably going to get completely trashed. She has plenty of dresses, but they are all pretty lovely, either made by me (like this one, or her Easter Dress, or her Bear Dress) or my mum (recently this gorgeous new Japanese-print dress, and a dinosaur dress), and I wasn't ready to risk any of them just yet.

Enter the Ikea fabric that I'd bought a long time ago. We are talking a long long time ago actually, like, in the Time Before Children. I bought it so long ago that they don't even stock it anymore. It's so cool though. I made the most basic dress I could, (which I've made before, here and here) and then let the girls colour it in.

I helped with the colouring too.

After it was coloured, I sewed it up, iron it and washed it, as per the instructions (to set the ink). Now, Sophie has a kindy dress!

It's perfect. She wore it the first day back after the September holidays, and also the second day back, which was photo day. Yes, two days in a row. It was totally trashed after the first day (as all of her kindy clothes are) and I had to wash it, but she was pretty insistent about wearing it for photo day, so I didn't mind too much. I mean, when your kid really wants to wear something that you made for photo day, you can't complain right?

Too Fast

I've been thinking about blogging for about three weeks now. I'll see things that remind me, or make me think: "I should blog that", but for some reason, the actual blogging has not taken place. We have been really busy, and, for the most part, sick. I guess the sickness is pretty self explanatory, but the busyness of late has been more than the usual.

Allow me to explain. Back in March, my younger sister was up from Melbourne and we were all having family dinner. It was a Friday night. Parents, us, Fiona, Sarah, her Steve and Hugo. The topic of Christmas came up. Fiona had realised she would have time off this Christmas and asked about our plans. It was a strong likelihood that Sarah and I (both married), were going to be spending Christmas with the in-law sides of the family, not in Brisbane.

So Fiona announced she wouldn't bother coming up then, but travel somewhere else. At which point my parents said they would also travel, since no one was going to be a round. And suddenly, in the strange commotion that is a loud semi-Greek family having dinner, we were talking about a white Christmas and Sarah was looking at air fares.

By the following Monday, people had begun to book. In less than a week, everyone was going.

Unbelievable.

In fact, we had organised air fares and accommodation in about two weeks. Then it took me a good three months to get my head around the fact that we were actually going. Passports were organised and the months ticked closer. (Honestly, the passports have so far been the funniest part; getting the girls to stand still for their photos. They took it so seriously, and I was dying of laughter as they over compensated with every movement. "Don't smile" was translated for Rachel as "scowl at the camera". "Sophie, tilt your head up a little" meant "look directly up at the ceiling with your entire face". Words can not describe how hilarious it was; they were just trying so hard.)

Then Steve came home from work one day and said he'd been asked to go to Seattle for six weeks. I can't say too much, because details are not finalised and there are some NDA's floating around, but suffice to say, I'm so proud of him and the work he has done to be selected to go. I pretty much have the best husband in the world. He was even leaning towards saying no because it would mean leaving me alone with the girls for six weeks. Such an amazing opportunity though.

So we re-looked at our travel dates. Now, Steve was going to be flying back from Seattle on a Sunday, and we would all be flying out to Budapest (on an extremely long 24hr flight) the following Friday. It just didn't seem like a great idea. So we looked at options and all of a sudden, we are extending our two week holiday by a week to include some time in the US.

What is this madness!?

It is madness. I still can not get my head around it. 2017 was supposed to be relatively quiet year!

Anyway, we've spent the last few weeks now planning not only for a white Christmas, but also time in LA and trying to figure out what it will look like to have Steve gone for six weeks. If the three weeks away with the girls wasn't complicated enough, it's even more complicated knowing you have to plan most things before Steve leaves so you can do it together.

We also have some small trips planned before we go too, can you believe it? We've had one already - heading up to Bundy for a long weekend for strawberry picking with friends. That turned out a little differently to what we expected but was a generally lovely time.

Our other getaway is for Steve's mum's 60th, which is at the end of October. Actually, Steve will leave for Seattle from there, so we have to pack a beach suit case for all of us, a Seattle work suitcase with whatever else fits for Europe for Steve and then I've got the left over suitcase with the rest of the Europe things in it at home. Can you see how this is more busy than usual? I'm so looking forward to that weekend though, with Steve's mum and John, Aroha and the kids too.

I think next year will have to be a quiet one, because this year is racing towards the end and it's all happening just a little too fast for me. Anyway, I'll endeavour to be a little more on top of things in the weeks to come. And really, when Steve is away, I'll have no excuse right? Because I'll have loads of free time in the evenings for productive things like blogging. :P