wienerdog tricks.

I am living the life of the ultimate barbie doll alternative.

The Sunshine Family, I mean. I'm living a Sunshine Family life. 

(Did you have a 70s chidhood too? My mother did not buy me a barbie doll because she was bothered by Barbie's--wait for it . . .it's not the boobs--lack of underpants. Wish I were kidding. Am not. So she got me The Sunshine Family, the intergenerational small-chested boot-wearing hippie family that travelled around making crafts and had worse hair than Barbie and were, to put it mildly, wildly average looking.)

Right now I swear all I need is a craft van to round out my current small-chested boot flip-flop-wearing craft-making life. Actually, my totally average white mini-van is a decent substitute, but it does not have nearly the 70s panache that the original did. I used to own the real thing, and I'm telling you it not only had a sink, but it came with leather goods you could WEAVE in your free time. 

I also, apparently, need more hiking boots, because I remember all the Sushine Family women wearing hiking boots. Mom, Dad, Grandma, Grandpa. I also remember that they all looked like brothers and sisters. Luckily, I was 11 and so not completely creeped out by this.

But I digress from my point: I'm getting ready for a craft fair. And it makes me both happy and a little evil--mostly in that basic craft-mania way where the kids are constantly within a 10 inch radius of me and I'm constantly muttering Leave me alone and let me sew.

I'll post pics of my Craft Fair Goods soon. Heads up, though: no leather goods on the docket. Lots of polyester and thrifted love, but no leather goods.

It was inevitable: the polyester baby dress.

How did I not see this coming?

I mean I love polyester. And so there I was, wildly sewing up a little sundress-ish doo dad of a baby dress for the Baby-o and it was like the yellow polyester just called out to me. G - i - n - g - e - r  . . . . I looked up (in the middle of a very important sentence my husband was putting together for my benefit)  and pulled it out of the stack. Resolutely.  I will be making this next.

And I will be sewing 80 or 90 more of these, I think. I'm off to the sewing store to talk to a bunch of non-sewing quilters about how to use my machine to make the insides of these look finished. Would love not to have to go buy a serger--but please DO chime in here if you know anything about finishing seams. In my tote bag/apron-making world, I haven't messed much with it yet. I'd love some help! (And I won't lie: I'm completely scared to death of the quilt ladies at the store, so I don't know how much I'll remember of what they actually say to me.)

One Something A Day: Weeks 2 & 3

I'm working on sticking to my make-something-a-day plan. Here's my latest makings . . .

8 Garden Aprons: 

 

3 Little Girl Dresses (out of a bedsheet, an old curtain and a linen tea towel):

 

One Matching Mini Apron:

 

And then the modeled shot:

I'm not sure I've got many more gardening aprons in me, but I can promise you that I have about thirty kabillion more baby dresses in me. It happened. No patterns for these--I was with my grandma and she was telling me she used to make them and convinced me that they were in the category of Easy Peasy. And then it was like baby-dress-making angels descended and I saw that the whole thing is just a bunch of TUBES. So I started sewing and didn't stop. 

 

About the TUBES idea. You literally only need one baby body measurement: the chest one. And this doesn't have to be with a tape. I did it with the yellow bedsheet fabric for the first run and then matched the others to it. Once you know how big to make that TUBE (sew the tube with the backside of the fabric facing out, flip it right-side out, leave it flat) then you can cut a big fat RECTANGLE that matches it for the body (I did some pleating and such for fun but you could skip it) then you make two MINI TUBES for straps, pin 'em in and then sew the thing up. 

 

I can already tell I'm going to write a PATTERNLESS BABY DRESS tutorial. That's for later.

Yes, we should remember. But we don't.

A few weeks ago, I invented this. In my mind, I mean. I was driving and thinking, Wouldn't it be great if I could get an email reminding me when I was going to fall headlong into the PMS Pool of Irrational and Unattractive so that I wouldn't have to panic every month? Then I thought, EVERYBODY NEEDS THIS and then I start writing the business plan. It was only going to take a small bank loan to get the thing off the ground.

Then I found out that somebody else thought of it.

 

This happens to me a lot.

 

There's a HITCH though, because the Somebodys who thought of it are apparently of the non-PMS-experiencing persuasion. That is, they're a bunch of somebody's boyfriends. And they've devised their site as a sort of Weapon of Mass Self-Defense. As in, "Find out when your girlfriend's PMS-in so you'll know why she's such a hag!" and "Don't be caught off guard!" and "Dude--know you'll why she's just that way!" 

 

Well, that's my translation.Here's their actual pitch:

 

 

I find this both highly annoying--and yes, I have Bonafide PMS as I write this and they would say that's why I find it so annoying but that is NOT why I find it annoying because if they were actually women they would know that you're never annoyed during your pre-bleed days by things that wouldn't normally completely annoy you it's just that you're actually able to SAY how annoyed you are and to FEEL more deeply than usual what you would otherwise already feel and it's not because we're hormonal that we feel these things we would feel them anyway.

 

Let's just say that PMS Buddy is not my buddy. . . plus I'm afraid of the junk mail I might get if I sign up.

 

But I need a reminder because every month I have a tiny little self-reflective breakdown about why I am the way I am. And to actually remember that this is hormonally induced would be terribly helpful.

 

So here it is, girls, a tutorial with the likes of Us in mind: Set Yourself Up a Personal Email PMS Reminder So You Don't Think You've Lost Your Ever Lovin Mind or That You're Always This Fat or Angry: A Tutorial.

 

For reals.

One Something A Day: Week One.

So, I've decided to make one something every day. 

My buddy and I are planning on having a booth at a local craft fair next month, and if I'm going to have anything on the table, I've got to get to it. Right now when I look at my big fat thrifted stash of fabric, all I see is gardening aprons, so I've been pumping them out.

 

Monday:

(fabric: one state of Oklahoma tea towel, stash sea blue cotton, somebody's jeans)

 

Tuesday:

(fabric: one stash striped tea towel scrap, stash orange cotton with dandellion star, somebody's jeans)

Wednesday (swerved away from the gardening aprons and over to frankensteining some vintage placements)

(fabric: two 70's quilted spice placements, one ruffled brown placemat for pocket, stash brown cotton, brown ric rac)

Thursday (finally made a kiddo apron out of a vintage circus placemat I've had):

(fabric: one vintage cotton circus placemat, candy striped cotton, fat yellow bias trim, yellow ric rac)

 

Friday:

(fabric: one olive linen scrap,  the rest of that beautiful deep teal upholstery scrap, somebody's jeans)

Saturday:

It was 4th of July. I watched a parade, rode my bike a lot and ate a lot of tri tip. And saw fireworks. 

 

I'll keep you posted on Week 2 of One Something a Day. Promise.

The ways in which I am not like Caroline Ingalls but wish I were.

1) Smiling. The woman was always smiling. I think she might have smiled through labor in the back of a wagon if they'd taken the camera in there. She always pulled off Beautiful Indignance. I don't remember any Irrational Crabbiness.

2) Warm Voice. I think she sounded tender even when she was calico-whippingly mad. There was no like, "Girls, supper's ready so go wash your hands at the well and get Carry off the roof and tell Albert to stop slapping that mule's butt. Right now. I mean it. Girls? Girls! Right now!  . . . I don't care if the water basin's frozen and Carrie thinks she can fly and the mule stepped on Laura's home-grown fledgling okra plant, wash your damn hands." Nope. Just, "Supper's ready girls" and then they all came down the ladder like a little calico waterfall and sat at the table with their gi-normous wooden stew-eating spoons. And closed their eyes when they prayed.

3) Always Thankful for Charles. I mean, with the tight, pocket-less pants how could she have concentrated long enough to get mad about the mud he must had drug into the kitchen with his boots?

4) Maintaining a Reputation for Kindness While Seriously Hating Mrs. Olsen. I feel like I'm at risk of losing my reputation for decency all the time if people find out how much I hate the constant line of Mrs. Olsen's who seem to drip through my parenting life declaring their children's perfection and my children's, um, wild averageness. Yes. Go ahead and say it. You don't think of me as somebody who HAS  reputation for decency. I knew it. See?

5) Bottom line: always pretty. Sorry, but even when her hair was in that lame-ice-skating competitor bun and she had just tilled a field behind a mule, she was striking, as I remember. Lovely.

(Though I have to say there's nothing like a quick Google Images search to really ruin a perfectly good reflection on a 70's family show and the use of the word lovely.)

But there are these things we do share:

1) Enough food in the house. Usually. Even when Doc drops by after tending to Old Man Whoever and his gout/croup/weepy leg the stew can be thinned a little if another friend shows up (though I don't particularly remember the episode where she slopped off to the well for water to thin the stew). 

2) A penchant for cooking in cast iron. After this last camping trip, I am sure that if I set up a tripod in my fireplace I would enjoy making dinner every night WAY more than I do right now. 

3) A readiness to love whoever shows up. I don't mean in that extra-place-setting-for-dinner sort of way that I mentioned above. I mean in the adopt-Albert sort of way. I think Caroline had it right when she said things to Charles like, "Charles, the Good Lord has given us the boy." Okay, so she never said that, but don't you remember how ready she seemed? Okay, I'm not as ready as she is. But I'd say I want to live like that.

Well, now I have fallen into sentimental reflective blather. And now you know that I've always wanted to be Caroline Ingalls. Don't lie, you wanted to be Carol or Ginger or Maryann or Daphne or that sarcastic red-headed lady that was Valerie Bertonelli's mom. Or Hot Lips Hoolihan. That's who you wanted to be, huh? 

Made One for Myself.

A gardening apron. Here are the action shots:

I have now lost my mind cutting off the loops of all the old jeans I'm using and adding LOOPS to everything. Dangit. When I say lost my mind I simply mean that if you entered my house right now wearing jeans, I would ask you to please take your pants off so that I could cut them up to use to make gardening aprons. I am otherwise perfectly sane. Though I do have three children, so there's that low marking on my sanity-ometer.

I liked the comment that Anne V. left on the last post with another good idea for loops too. I've got them here as tool loops--she's suggested them for actual belt loops for the ties (would not ever have occurred to me to use belt loops for belt loops--another ding on the sanity-ometer). 

Like I said last time, go make yourself one. I'm the happiest plant-waterer in my neighborhood.