I scored these Ikea curtains at the Goodwill last year. No idea what I was going to do with them. (Now, that sounds familiar.)
Well, we've been enjoying the view of this beautiful plastic dog crate for the past year since we adopted Chloe. Pretty, hmm?
Better? It's like a play tent for the plastic crate.
She looks pretty cute in there. As soon as I started working with her bed she jumped right in and went to sleep for 2 hours. It's a good-dog day.
Here it is closed up for bedtime. Definitely an improvement over the previous combination of gray plastic and old car towels.
But don't forget about the scraps! How about a cool Swedish canvas belt?!
Still another curtain left -- what else should I make?
After spending 48 hours alone at home, during which time I could have sewn anything I wanted in complete secrecy, I thought of making Bill a shirt for his birthday. But by the time I came up with this, he and Frances were already on their way home from the desert field trip. So I got it cut out Sunday afternoon and then frantically sewed Tuesday and Wednesday, while turning a blind eye to the dishes, groceries, and housecleaning, and finished it with plenty of time to take pictures!
The bowling-shirt design is a modification of the pattern I used for Bill's Hawaiian shirt. I attempted this modification on a more traditional men's shirt pattern a few years ago, but I could see right away that I needed to use a spread-collar shirt as the base. I paid particular attention to matching the patterned fabric -- didn't I do a nice job?
I found a place for my label at the bottom of the front -- I was worried it would be too itchy in the neck and I thought of all the many labels I have cut out of clothes. That wasn't going to happen here!
And here's the "keeping it real" picture -- this is the melted interfacing from the shirt front. When they say fusible I don't think the idea is to fuse it to the iron. It took a good 10 minutes with the magic sponge and some very careful knife scraping to fix this. When will I learn to check the temperature?!
Here's the second of the graduation present quilts -- I looked into the freezer case at Baskin-Robbins the other night and spotted Kelcey's quilt in the Rainbow Sherbet!
I copied the bricks pattern from Diary of a Quilter -- thank you, Amy! This was really the polar opposite of the previous quilt with the 5 X 5 and 5 X 10 blocks and I loved how it came together. Frances picked out the fabrics, first the hot pink and orange polka dots and then the solids to go with them. I don't think it took 2 hours to cut, arrange, and piece the top. Love!
We picked out this bright pink for the back and I pieced a strip of the polka dot leftovers to make up the difference. I am really liking this plain diagonal quilting -- I think it works well with the squares and rectangles, and I can pull it off with just my walking foot on my plain old sewing machine!
We found this cute print with both the pink and orange in it for the binding -- I think we picked out the off-white for the top before we found the binding fabric. For next time: don't forget to match the whites!
Here are both of the graduation quilts! Cute. I can't wait to give them to the girls!
