doll cradle + bedding

Donated to the silent auction at the kiddo's school:

 Birds & Branches flannel doll quilt

 

Tufted flannel mattress

 

Pillow and pillowcase

 

Refinished vintage cradle with leather insets

Yay! It sold!

You can see a previous vintage doll cradle project here. I might make this an annual thing. ;)

p.s. want to see some more detail? click a photo to see a larger version.

chevron wedding quilt (part one)

I'm a bit in over my depth here, having never completed a queen-sized quilt. But I'm making progress.

Here are the square patches, each stitched from two triangles of grey/yellow/black/white fabric.

Most of the fabric was used on the tables at my sister's wedding reception, with some filler from the fabric store in the same color range.

After I'd used up all of my fabric making blocks, I made a chart in Illustrator to work out the pattern. I counted my patches and made a simple replica of each one, grouping, copying, and pasting the right number of copies before arranging them in a simple chevron pattern.

Much easier than trying to find a wide, clean, preschooler-free space to lay everything out, believe it or not. I'm using shaded overlays to keep track of which areas I've already completed: the white shaded areas on the left are completed; the grey shaded area is stitched into short rows, waiting to be assembled to finish that section.

The blocks are coming together. Instead of long strips, I sewed the first 2/3 of the top in nine- or twelve-block sections and then sewed the sections together. The hope was that I'd keep the corners well-aligned this way, but you can tell from the photos that despite my careful ironing, trimming and sewing, there are still some "off" corners. I'm trying not to obsess over it, with limited success.

The good news is that with the prep work done, the the sewing is going quickly. The bad news is that I have no idea at all how to stitch all the layers together on something so large, and still keep the wrinkles at bay. We'll have to wait and see how that goes.

This careful measuring, ironing, trimming, etc. is very different from the way I usually work with my hands. This is more like graphic design, where I treasure rulers and rules. So it's a switch, but I'm enjoying it, I think.

Wish me luck with the finishing stages!

all i need in my tool kit

Fig. 1

Maybe your kid is one of those who leaves stuff alone, but ours repeatedly kept tearing the foam guards off of the safety rail on his toddler bed.

Fig. 2

When hot glue continued to fail, I found some patterned duct tape (this one is Scotch brand), et voila! The foam stayed in place until we replaced the toddler bed with a twin-sized bed earlier this week.

Fig. 3

I purchased our jogging stroller used from a kids' consignment sale. All was in working order, but the foam grip on the handle bar was the worse for wear.

Fig. 4

A little patterned duct tape, and it's not only more functional, but also easier to spot in a crowd of strollers.

I'd offer tutorials, but I think you can figure out how to operate a roll of tape. These fixes are pretty quick, look kinda cute, and prove, once again, that duct tape has a million uses. Make that a million-and-two.

Thanks for reading! 

(p.s. Scotch didn't pay me or send me freebies to use their tape or write about it; if that were ever to happen, I believe in full disclosure. My tape came from Target. Which also didn't pay me.)

progress

Promised: shots of this room in progress. I'm not always awesome about updating the blog on a project from start to finish (there are still, for example, a few dozen Alice in Wonderland shots from last summer that I keep meaning to post), but I'm really excited: a) to have the back room useable (the kiddo loves to wrestle pillows on the bed, and bounce, and read Heedley Pecked Me in the Eye for the umpteenth time); b) to have completed such an insurmountable task as cleaning the space out; c) to be able to have visiting friends and family stay with us when they visit, as opposed to a hotel, a campground, or someone else's house. Have I mentioned how grown up that makes me feel at age thirty+? Really, really, really.

Here is the earlier "in progress" shot from a few weeks ago. The headboard is a cut-down old door from Bring. The bedframe came from Craigslist. No, we did not get robbed at gunpoint.




And here is a current "in-progress" shot. The room isn't done yet (is any room in our house ever done?), but you can see, we'd now be comfortable hosting guests here.



The sheets, dust ruffle, and white curtain panels are recent Target clearance. The name-embroidered pillow is a re-worked wedding present with fabric from Ikea and Troismiettes. The coffee sack bolster is made from the remains of the coffee sack I recently blogged about here. The small rectangular pillow is a Target clearance item from four or five years ago, unearthed in The Great Clearing, with added vintage button details. The grey tweed wool on the square pillow came from the Assistance League of Eugene thrift store shortly after I moved up this way. The finger paintings are the work of my favorite baby boy, hung with vintage wooden pant hangers.


This next photo shows a close-up of some really cute little tiki shot glasses from Archie McPhee, repurposed as tiny planters for some hens-and-chicks and baby tears (don't succulents have the best names?). You can see these in the previous photo as well, on the headboard.




Shown here is the night stand vignette, also still in progress.



The night stand is the first piece of furniture my father's parents bought together after their wedding: a sewing machine table. Inside the hinged front panel is where Grandpa, an electrical engineer, attached the foot pedal to the wall of the cabinet so that Grandma could use her knee instead of her foot to operate the machine. This was probably VERY helpful with little kids around; I've discovered how much my kiddo likes to go after the pedal of my own sewing machine when it's sitting on the floor. Being able to keep it away from little hands while in use as well as when put away is pure genius.

The little spatterware pot is something I picked up at the Olde English Flea Market last weekend. Great for holding the watches and earrings of house guests. The book is the aforementioned Heedley, which is well-loved around here. The lamp is a piece of red cedar we kept from our old rental house when we left. The mister cut both ends flat and sanded off all potentially splintery or pokey parts, and I attached a lamp kit.


The search for the perfect shade has turned up this St. Vinnie's drum shade ($2.50). It's not quite right yet, but I'm still considering how to change it into something fabulous.




The window wall. The clock was on the wall for thirty+ years at the BookMark, the first bookstore to ever employ me. There used to be a large sign over it that read, helpfully, "CLOCK". I still have the sign somewhere, too. The barn star only looks old; it came from the craft store. The tin "Days o' Work" art is actually an antique chewing tobacco mold that came from the Salvation Army's local antique/vintage store, Tea & Crumpets. It's a regular old Salvation Army store now, but for awhile it held a pretty awesome collection of 1920s-1930s inlaid British wardrobes, old photographs, and glassware.




Our Ikea chair folds out into The World's Most Comfortable Cot. People have been sleeping on this in our living room or {former} office for years. Now it makes this room perfect for guests with kids. The corduroy pillow is a Fred Meyer clearance pillow (from six or eight years ago) that I tufted with some buttons. The coffee sack pillow is blogged here. The pillow covers on the seat of the chair were purchased with the bedspread (see bed photo) at Value Village. More about that in a minute.




One of my favorite collections, rediscovered in this room a couple of months ago, is my collection of vintage rackets and paddles. You can find these inexpensively at almost any thrift store, but one of these is my hubby's high school racket. Can you spot it? It's the one peeking up in the bottom left corner.




This is the first racket I ever bought, back in high school. The Salvation Army used to run a salvage store in my home town. Maybe they still do! You could buy clothing there by the pound, and I did. I think I paid a buck for the racket, too. Everything was way underpriced, even by thrift store standards. I later used the racket in a college tennis class, and the PE teacher thought it was awesome. Still strung tightly, with lots of bounce. The Scrabble letter sign (from a vintage 1970s set found at Value Village) takes on a double meaning when displayed with the rackets.




There are a million little details I'm still working on, and I'm saving the closet makeover for another post, but this should give you an idea how things are progressing. It's been so much fun arranging little treasures in here, and we've spent more time in this room in the past couple of months that we have in the past five years. It's been like increasing the size of our house by 10%, and we love it.




One last note, and a nicely lit bed view: The bedspread you see here came from Value Village, together with the two pillow covers you saw on the chair seat. They were a deep charcoal gray when I bought them. Too dark, I thought, for the room, but I liked the texture, and the size and price were right. So, despite knowing better from years of textile and surface design classes in college, I decided to try and fade the color with bleach.

Bleach doesn't just fade black. In fact, if you soak most black textiles in bleach, you'll get some variation of yellow, brown, or orange, not white. I ended up with a bedspread that was Beaver State orange. Over-dyeing with Black Velvet and Jeans Blue Dylon dye turned it chocolate brown. Not at all what I'd intended, but it'll do for now. Sometimes dye accidents aren't the end of the world. In this case, it goes nicely with the reproduction Swiss army blankets from Mills Fleet Farm.



There you go! Consider yourselves updated!