The little girl's puppy purse

While the shirt may have had a bit of a setback (drafted new sleeve and armhole this afternoon though) my other project came off beautifully! One of the books I got with my Christmas Fishpond book voucher was Kata Golda's Hand-Stitched Felt. I'd had it on my wishlist for ages, after reading a great review of it on Heather Ross' blog. There was also this very cute little video for it



The book arrived on Thursday and since I was doing some babysitting for a friend that night I cut out the felt to do the Little Girl's Puppy Purse and sewed it up while I was out. I even managed to forget the book and it still came together without instructions and I had plenty of time to watch lots of really bad tv. Seriously easy project! And very cute



Hazel loves it, mostly for the puppy I think. She's fascinated by the fact that one of its ears flops



The only thing I regret about not having the book with me while making it was the puppy placement, mine is all square and centred, the book's is on an angle and looks a bit more playful. That's so me though, everything all lined up and squared away ;)

Most of the other projects in the book look like they'd be as quick and easy as this one - it's all hand-sewing and simple stitches. Nothing fancy here! Several of the projects are guaranteed to send small (and larger) girls into transports of cute, but there are lots of home decor and personal items like glasses cases, mug cosies etc. for the grownups :) My only quibble with this, and I'm not even sure if it's a legit one, is that part of the reason the projects look so gorgeous is her lovely felt, which the books says is available from her website, but in reality it's only as kitsets for the projects and they're fairly pricey. Found out that her felt comes from OhMa Felt and you can buy by the piece. You can get nice felt pieces from other sources, but it's not cheap even in that form and some of these projects call for a fair amount, making them potentially very expensive. I think that if you were going to get serious about having a set of large felt buckets then either you learn to felt your own wool, or you go with cheaper non-handmade versions. This purse was made from a thin blended felt and I doubt it will last for long as the handles will eventually stretch out. Still, it's perfect for carrying around little things, which is what Hazel's all about these days :)

Creating not blogging

...for once! Well lately anyways. But yay, got the crafty thing going on again, thanks to the pink wool slippers and a book that showed up last Thursday. The small baby steps and quick project success led me on to bigger (but not necessarily better) things, which is actually sewing Mat's shirt. To be honest I've been putting it off and putting it off because I was scared of a) screwing it up because I haven't sewn a shirt for ages; and b) Mat not liking it because the last shirt I sewed him about 12 years ago he hated. But maybe my sewing skillz have improved over the last few years from doing other things, or perhaps collars were never as hard as I remembered or what, but it's going very well technically* and Mat really seems to like it so far! Hopefully pictures to come tomorrow or Tuesday. I don't like doing a post without pictures, but I think I can be brave and hit the 'publish' button without them!

*other than that the fusible interfacing on the collar bubbled a bit after a few hot irons. Bugger! Not sure what to do to fix it. Anyone have advice?

ETA: Aieeee!! I jinxed myself! Yes, technically everything was going fine, but the pattern let me down. I had the first sleeve in and sewed up the side and tried it on Mat. The sleeve was waaay too tight around the underarm. So I let it out by about a centimetre and tried it on again. Better but still not great, it had a nasty pull into the underarm area both front and back. I was a bit distraught but Mat was very reassuring and kept saying it would be ok even though I know it's not nice to wear clothes that bind. We both puzzled over why and then Mat had the great idea of checking it against some of his other shirts. We discovered that while the dimensions of the two shirts were almost identical, the armhole needed to sit further in on the shoulder and curve into the body more. I actually had vague memories of mum telling me something similar about armholes when we were initially figuring out what was wrong with the fit. So anyways, I think the situation is salvageable - I'll take a pattern off one of the shirts and recut the armhole and sleeve and start again. Needless to say there won't be any photos tomorrow or Tuesday!

My current project

Wicker dolls pram, originally uploaded by Hazelnutgirl.

Or one of them anyways! My cousin passed on her old wicker doll's pram to Hazel this Christmas. It was a hand-me-down for her too, so not sure how old it is but I love it! It needs a bit of TLC but is otherwise in fabulous condition. When she sent me an email asking if I'd be interested I just about fell off my chair in my haste to reply and say "Yes!"

I spent an hour or so scrubbing the hood with soapy water this afternoon and have come to the conclusion that wicker is bloody hard to clean! I'll get there eventually though! And maximum result too, it's going to look really nice. I think it's important to fix the things that might result in it being badly damaged - like the jury-rigged hinge on one side of the hood and maybe some of the little spots of rust, and to replace that rubbery grip stuff on the handle which has perished away. Otherwise we'll leave it as is, worn paint and all. Hazel got a lot of attention when we went for a walk down to the shops with it a couple days ago. One lady even stopped us to talk about her old pram that she'd given to her daughter!

Week 2 of the 52 Friday self-portrait challenge is here. If you're interested in joining the 52 Fridays Flickr group, we're here!

Easing back into it

As my friend Jess suggested earlier, the perfect way to get my craftyness on again is to start with a pair of pink wool baby slippers. Not that her advice was completely unbiased but I'm sure she mostly had my welfare at heart :)) So here's the start.



I first started making these little slippers when Hazel had just learned to walk and they're really very simple to make. I can't find the link to the pattern I've adapted, but will find it for when I've got some completed slippers to show. Here's Hazel's chubby little toddler legs in the first pair I made. Eeeee so gorgeous! Even now I could just eat them up. The legs, not the slippers.



I do believe that Jess has this pair as well now, though from memory the green was darker than they show in this photo - maybe they're not the same. I've made so many they start to merge together!

My cup runneth over with the 2+2 blouse as Oliver + S linked to it again in their ongoing series on how to use fabrics in clothing. It's really just so nice when other people like your stuff as much as you do! It's a great bunch of posts that series, if you're interested in making stylish clothes for kids it's all there.

Squirrels in my pants!

Well no, not really because we don't have them here in NZ but it was either that title or "Eeee!". I popped over to my stats as I do periodically and I'd had 450-odd visitors today which is about 4x normal. I looked at referrals and nothing looked obvious so I started to panic a bit thinking my blog had been posted somewhere undesireable, or worse. Not that I know what worse could be but I'm sure it exists! Anyways, on page three of referrals I found the answer - Oliver + S had posted a link to my 2+2 blouse in their newsletter. Phew! So nice of them, I'm really flattered and much nicer to have them as the source of the visitors than what I'd feared! :P

Which just goes to show, checking your stats can be bad for your mental health. Let me be a bad example! Still, if I hadn't checked I wouldn't have known of my brief flirtation with publicity :)

A new year a new header

Well, another try at a new one anyway! I like this one much better, although it does bear a striking resemblance to the last one - but hey, let's just say I like to work within a theme and each year will be variations thereon. Yeah, that's it... I obviously like similar colours for the blog though, I thought that when I changed the photo that I'd need to do more matching of colours for post titles and links and so-on but apparently not. Nope, many of the colours appeared to be the same more-or-less, not that I discovered that until I'd pulled all the html codes for the various colours in the image and plugged them in and...not much changed! Ah, it's a sobering realisation when you think you're really moving away in a new direction only to discover that really you're just doing a small zig-zag in your rut :))

Actually, I wrote that and then had a fabulous idea for a different header which I'm currently exploring - stay tuned!

52 Fridays: A self-portrait challenge

When I read in Holly's Two Cheese Please blog late last night about her aim to post a self-portrait every Friday I thought it was a neat idea, and then Ellie at Petalplum did it too and I was sold. Not entirely sure why, except that it's definitely going to force me out of my comfort zone because I've never liked photos of me and I have reams of them of other people and very few of me. I think making myself put up a photo of me, unretouched, every week might actually be good for my soul. I don't actually promise to remember every week but I'll try!

So here's the first one. It was taken last night about midnight, after I came back from seeing Avatar.



I was up until 1am last night which is hugely late for me these days and then what with Hazel coming into bed with me around 2:30 and the cat throwing up on a rug in the bedroom at some point after that, I feel rather hung-over and crap this morning!