Halloween Hooked on Napkins

Hooked on napkins is the second project in my learn to sew book, 1, 2, 3 Sew.  Initially I wasn't excited about this project (we don't need hanging napkins!), but once I decided to turn these early projects into Halloween decorations for Lucky's second birthday party I knew I could have fun practicing mitered corners with vibrant Halloween fabric.

I cut three 12"x12" squares of fabric.  The measuring and cutting is starting to go a bit faster.  I'm getting a little more confident.  It helped that once I had cut my first piece I could use it as a template to help line things up for the next two pieces.

Unfortunately I ran out of black thread when I was creating the ruffled streamers for the party.  I still need to go pick up some more black thread (maybe I should always have some backup spools on hand...) but I do have enough to start the mitered corners on three napkins even if I can't do the hemming quite yet.  I think I can get waway with white thread to hem all three fabrics, so maybe I'll just the black for the corners and the switch back to white.

I got some air soluble markers to mark where I needed to stitch the angle.  It took a week for the marks to dissappear but they did eventually go away without any washing.

For the loops, I have some orange 1/8" ribbon (Offray brand).  I cut three 5" pieces.  With my first attempt to sew on the ribbon I did it backwards. Thank goodness I had a seam ripper on hand and checked before clipping the corner.

The corners aren't perfect, but I"m really pleased with this first result.  Now onto the second napkins.  This is getting easier and easier.  I'm not sure my placement of the mitered corner is exact, but these are looking pretty darn good if I do say so myself.

For the hemming.  In the first (purple) napkin, I stitched 1/2 inch away from the hem with the wrong side up.  This left a gap between the edge of the hem and where my stitches were, so for subsequent napkins I stitched about 5/8" in.  Stitch close to the very edge of the fabric was very easy, although I did start stitch RS up on one napkin and then had to rip out the stitches.  It looked strange seeing the top side of a stitch for the outer border and the bottom side of the stitch on the inner border.

 Looking closely at the stitches, I'm realizing that maybe I should be stitching with the RS up because that is where the stitch "looks" better.  However, this blog post and this other blog post show people sewing with the WS up (so you can see the fold), so maybe I'm doing things right.  It is possible my tension is too low, but we'll see more about that once I use a different thread and bobbin sometime.

Over all, this was a simple project whose only real purpose was to give me a new skill.  These hooked on napkins are cute, but will add very little to the Halloween party decor I'm trying to create.

Project #2 is complete!  The next project is a table runner and THAT will be a central part of my decor.  Mitered corners and pockets, here I come!

Project started 9.14.2015

A Search for Mardi Gras Knitting Patterns

Knitting has a place in every celebration and holiday, and that includes Mardi Gras! In this postI will share with you free Mardi Gras knitting patterns that I found in my research. Unfortunately there aren't that many free Mardi Gras knitting patterns available. Designers, here's you chance to fill in a niche! Please let me know in the Guestbook if you find any other relevant patterns.

Free Mardi Gras Themed Knitting Patterns

• Knit a Beaded Necklace for Mardi Gras
  Knit a large tube and fill it with some styrofoam balls to create a knit beaded necklace!
• Knit Mardi Gras Mask
  You will need to create a free Ravelry account to access this pattern
• Mardi Gras Mask Dishcloth
  Click on the "Mardi Gras" link to get the pattern for this Mask Dishcloth
• Wee Tiny Mardi Gras Sock Knitting Pattern
  This adorable little sock is rocking the purple, green and yellow!
• Loopy Mardi Gras Hat 
  You will need to create a free Ravelry account to access this pattern

Surprisingly, there weren't too many patterns to knit for Mardi Gras.  Do you know of any patterns?  

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When the platform Squidoo existed, ChemKnits did multiple focused free knitting and crochet pattern searches.  These "lenses" were migrated to Hubpages at the end of 2014, but the Hubpages platform does not like Hubs that contain multiple links, especially if these links go to the same site (such as Ravelry.)  I am reposting the search here on ChemKnits.  I did all of the searching to find this list myself, and the descriptions are of my own writing unless otherwise noted.  Please let me know if any of the links are broken, I am working to migrate many pattern searches at once and may have missed one.  

Pumpkin Chevron Birthday Banner - FREE PRINTABLE!

Another birthday, another banner right?  Well this time the banner is BOTH a Happy Birthday and a Happy Halloween Banner!  The free pdf that you can download (via Google Drive) will say both of these celebratory phrases plus have some blank pages so you can add a name of your own.

I really liked the chevron fish birthday banner I created for Lucky's under the sea birthday party, so I wanted to use that theme but make it more appropriate for a Halloween/Birthday/Housewarming Party.  I modified the black chevron background and pumpkin silhouette and then started looking for some fun Halloween Fonts.  

 From top to bottom: Jackie O’Lantern, JI Pumpkins, Zombie Holocaust, Serpents, Punkinhead, LT White Fang, LCR Pumpkin Face, Ghoul, Alpha Shapes Pumpkins.  All fonts downloaded for free from www.fontspace.com.

This Halloween party I planned was supposed to have the joy of Halloween, but not necessarily be spooky and scary.  I didn't want the fonts to look like blood or something that belonged on the cover of a Stephan King novel.  I started looking for Halloween fonts in August, but when I searched again on October 1 there were suddenly more available.  In looking through the 400+ fonts available I pulled 15 before narrowing them down the ones above.  In the end, I thought that LCR Pumpkin Face would be super cute on top of a pumpkin background, but wanted to do a test to make sure it would still be readable.  

I printed out a few pages at font size 225.  I also wanted to get the orange of the pumpkin just right, so Keith drew me the pumpkin silhouette in three different colors so we could pick our favorite based on the way they come out of the printer.  I like the color of the "P" pumpkin the best so that's the one that will become the focus of the sign.  

I wanted to use these banners for multiple events:  Lucky's birthday party and his birthday photoshoot outside.  Whatever we use on his actual birth day can double up for his birthday party, too.  

To help these many words fit in a smaller space, I printed the letters two to a sheet of paper, but you could make a much larger banner by printing one page per piece of paper.  

We took the Happy Birthday portion to use the banner for Lucky's 2 year birthday photoshoot outside.  I was a little worried that the letters would be hard to read but you have no trouble seeing the Happy Birthday of the signage!  The photoshoot itself would be really easy to recreate - find a location in the late afternoon light and add a stool and a pumpkin.  Technically I did "make" the stool.  When I was 10 years old or so my grandfather and I made it was a project while I was staying with him for a week, but I think I mostly did a tiny bit of hammering.  I've held onto it all of these years and it is really fun to have Lucky use it on his birthday.  

For Lucky's birthday party on Halloween we used the entire banner - Happy Birthday AND Happy Halloween.  What a fun way to celebrate!  I'll share more details about his Halloween Birthday Party in the next few months.

This banner is perfect for your kids or friends who have October birthdays, or to use for just a Halloween Party.  You can download the Pumpkin Halloween Chevron Birthday Banner through Google Docs to use at your own party.   Enjoy!

The contents of the Pumpkin Halloween Chevron Birthday Banner PDF

I loved the birthday photoshoot so much that I set up a little photobooth for the Halloween party.  Here is Lucky in his costume with a generic banner made with a blank chevron pumpkin and more of the LCR Pumpkin Face font pumpkins.

Ghost Printed Tea Towels

It's time to  1, 2, 3 Sew! and start learning how to do some of the basics with my wonderful new sewing machine.  

The very first project in the book is a tea towel project to learn how to make a basic hem and folded corners.  The project suggests making fruit stamped towels, but I don't really USE tea towels so what on earth would I do with them?  Since I was in the process of planning Lucky's second birthday party I realized that I could do some fun footprint ghosts on black towels.  This will be a fun part of the party decor PLUS we will be able to reuse them every Halloween in the future.  (This was, after all, part of the inspiration to do a Halloween themed birthday party in the first place.)  

For the ghost tea towels I purchased some cheap ($2.98/yard) black cotton broadcloth.  The reviews on this particular fabric (#BCR-002) indicated that it picks up lint really easily, which I noticed immediately after prewashing the fabric.  Since these towels will only be used once a year at most I'm not worried about it.  

I could make these towels any size I want.  I'm struggling because since these are purely decorative I could potentially figure out a way to make more than 4 towels from one yard to practice.  In the end, I decided to just cut the fabric into fat quarters (20"x20.5").  I expected each to turn out a slightly different size but to my surprise I was able to end up with even squared up quarters with very little left over from the trimming (to square things up.)  When I got a piece 20" wide I did fold it in half to maximize the use of my fabric, so that helped keep things even.  

The book has you stamping the fabric before you sew, but I want to decide how I'm going to fold the towels after the hemming is done so I can decide on the placement of my stamps.  Time to start hemming!

I've done some hems with Lucky's Lion costume but I didn't do proper folded hems where the raw edges couldn't be seen in the wrong side.  This time I'm doing the first fold of about 1/4" and the second of 5/8".  Well approximately.  I suppose if I keep sewing that I'll get really good at eyeballing these small measurements.  I think my 5/8" is closer to 3/4" but I suppose that is still pretty darn close to my target.  

I can see why learning mitered corners in the next lesson is going to be helpful, these corners are bulky after just the first fold.  Even without any stitching yet this tea towel already has a nice finished looking quality to it.  I can see why doing these folded hems is worth the effort!  I was able to finish pressing all of these hems within a portion of a nap time.  This way I'll be ready to start sewing while Lucky is at school tomorrow without worrying about interruptions or continuously running up and down the stairs.

For the love of fiber, please tell me if I'm doing something wrong.  I'm stitching with the wrong side up on my machine so I can stay close to the edge of the fold.  The bobbin and thread are the same black.  If this is NOT what I'm supposed to do will someone let me know?  

I focused on following the folded hem versus trying to make a straight line with the edge of the fabric.  I think that at one point I started to try to get too close to the edge of the hem because the fabric started bunching up under the foot a bit.  I moved over a bit more and it got better.   I can see what I'll need to practice on in the future!  The first square stitched up in no time.  This is a nice project for a lot of practice with my machine.  

After the sewing was competed I wasn't quite done.  I still had to trim the threads (hey, this is WAY better than weaving in loose ends) and then press out the hems again so the edges would be nice and crisp.  Now I'm ready for Lucky to get home from school so we can do some fabric paint prints

For the placement of the ghosts, I folded the tea towels in half to print along the center line.  (I plant to hang these tea towels folded in thirds.)  On a bath night, much to Lucky's delight, we painted his feet with Tulip soft matte fabric paint in Glacier White and stamped the tea towels.  

After the ghost bodies were stamped, I added eyes and mouths using Scribbles 3D fabric paint in the color "night star".  I would have preferred black puffy paint, but this is all I found at my craft store when we went there.  Unfortunately on the one ghost I tried to paint the face came out really pale.  I think I'll just sharpie on the faces of the other ghosts once they dry.  (Maybe this night star will dry darker, but right now I"m not feeling very optimistic.)  

I did date and initial the towels "LAB 2015" so I will know years down the road which child made these towels.  It is possible  the slight white in this puffy paint will dry clear so you will barely be able to see these marks, but that is a risk that I took.  

Wow, the glitter night star color is way more visible than I expected.   I love the glittery sheen and will add eyes and mouths to the remaining 5 ghosts towels.  

The first project of "1,2,3 Sew" is now complete!  These towels might be more the size of cloth napkins but I'm really glad that I got the chance to practice my hemming.  I cannot wait to start the next project!  

Project started 9.10.2015

Stashbusting Market Bags

I made a discovery lately.  A crochet market bag is the best way to use up random balls of sock yarn in my stash!  I'm on my third ball of Patons kroy Socks FX that has been in my stash for years, this time in Cameo Colors (44 g, 146 yards).  I am so happy to have a pattern that I love to create darling crochet grocery bags.  (This is a free pattern. You will have to check out to download the pattern, but no payment is due since the cost is $0.00) 

Since you've head me talk about this pattern twice now, I'll just say that I completed the bag with 12 rows in the last step before the decreases when 14 g of yarn remained.

This project was one of the last ones I wanted to complete before I packed up and moved away from Evanston, IL.  Somehow, no matter how many rows I add before starting the decreases I end up with 5 g of yarn left over!  This is enough yarn for a hexipuff... (another project that I've let hibernate for way too long.)  

I love this pattern so much that I have to really hold myself back to not buy more skeins of Kroy Sock FX!  I have to keep reminding myself that I'm trying to solve my stash problem, not make things worse.  I do have other yarns in my stash that would work great with this pattern so I have a feeling that I will be making more of these crochet market bags coming up.

These bags look small but they hold so much stuff!  I've shown them holding 6 cans of food, gallons of milk and now two 2L bottles of soda.  These are perfect to use as reusable grocery bags.

Let it Snow... so we can Snow Dye More Fiber!

With winter season, and more importantly, snow,I wanted to share with you some snow dyeing experiments I did last winter.  I've already share with you the first video where I snow dyed yarn with rainbow KoolAid colors, but I also snow dyed roving with food coloring, roving with KoolAid and even silk hankies with KoolAid!

Previously (in the last two days), I created two snow dyeing videos, one with results that worked fantastically and one that was a bit of a flop.  Well I think it was a flop, because the fiber hasn't dried yet as I'm writing these notes.  Before it was over I wanted to take advantage of the snow so I set up some snow dyeing when I went to bed and would check in in the morning.  No intermediate photos or vidoes in these ones, these are short, and too the point.  Check them out!

Is handpainting fiber and yarn easier and faster than snow dyeing?  Absolutely!  But snow dyeing is SO MUCH FUN!  And it is an activity that you could get into with even young children. There is a lot of waiting involved, but the look of the snow changes so you can ask the kids to check for updates.  (My son is not quite 16 months old yet, so he is still too young, but by next winter I bet he'll LOVE painting the snow colors even if he can't understand that it is to dye yarn.

If I learned anything from this experiment, it is that dyeing with snow requires a lot of patience.  It can take a LONG time for snow to melt!

The final products?  Watch the videos to see where we ended up!

Snow Dyeing Wool Roving with Kool Aid

Video Contents (Skip ahead to the part you need!)
[0:00] Introduction and Materials
[1:50] Adding the snow on top of the fiber
[3:52] Adding KoolAid to the snow
[8:10] 1.5 h after adding dye
[10:21] All snow melted (overnight)
[13:25] Microwaving the fiber to set the color
[13:40] Washing the fiber
[15:04] Reveal of the dyed fiber and conclusions


Snow Dyeing Silk Hankies With KoolAid

Video Contents (Skip ahead to the part you need!)
[0:00] Introduction and presoaking 6 g of 100% silk hankies
[1:25] Adding snow on top of the silk hankies
[2:48] Adding KoolAid to the snow
[4:43] 1.5 h after adding dye
[5:13] All Snow melted (overnight). Prepping fiber to heat to set the dye.
[7:36] After microwaving
[8:23] Washing the silk hankies
[9:50] Final reveal and conclusions

A Beatles Themed Baby Shower!

A close friend of mine, Laura, had a baby this fall and over the summer my family threw her a baby shower.  We asked Laura if there was a theme she would like and she replied, "The Beatles."  Now, there is a lot of Beatles stuff out there but at first I struggled to come up with some ideas that would make a cohesive theme.  I was tasked with the decorations (no food planning for me) so I started researching Beatles Baby Shower ideas on pinterest.

There are two main things I did to make the theme as Beatles as possible: 1) I made three different Beatles Banners and 2) I created origami flowers out of Beatles sheet music.  Unfortunately I'm not sharing any of the banners I created for this party in this post.  I used a lot of copyrighted art and would not feel comfortable sharing that without permission.  Hopefully the designs that I share will inspire you to create your own banners.

For the first banner, the one you would see when you entered the venue, I chose a simple round shape that is similar to something I found on Pinterest.  I downloaded a free Magic Mystery Tour Font and since I wanted to make the text psychedelic I learned how to make gradient letters in PowerPoint.

The second banner is very psychedelic.  I used the same Mystery Magical tour Font (but in white without a shadow) and every Beatles themed piece of artwork I could find.  I made some of the backdrops using yellow submarine, strawberry and walrus clip art, some album covers and then some other fan art.  "Blue Harvest" was the en utero nickname for the baby, his legal name isn't Blue.

The third sign was just a little piece of fun.  If I had access to baby photos of the parents and older siblings-to-be then I would have used those in the portholes, but instead I wrote their names.  Keith helped me a lot with this banner.  He expanded some clip art that I found to have 5 windows and then made it higher resolution so we could print it over multiple pieces of paper.  I then taped the submarine together and hung it in the party room.

I have already shared with you how I created the sheet music origami flowers and now I can share with you how we used them! We placed multiple clusters on the large party table and also scattered them around fireplace mantles and the food tables.

Not shown is the big sister-to-be collecting an enormous bouquet of these flowers to take home!  I'm excited that some of them are still in a vase in the home of the new baby.

"Here comes the son!" was a theme of the party since Laura was expecting a little boy.  (This little boy is simply amazing! Lucky loves him so much and constantly requests to see pictures of him.)  I wasn't in charge of food but did help pick out the cake theme, based on the yellow submarine clip art used in two of the banners above.  

Finally, I sneaked a baby book into the decor.  Laura gave me the book Rocker Babies Wear Jeans at my baby shower and there is an Abbey Road scene that is perfect for a Beatles Baby shower.  I used a plate stand and had it sit on the beverage table.  

I had a blast helping to plan this shower!  Hopefully some of these ideas will help you in planning a Beatles themed party in the future.