stuff i made
I'm planning on posting a few crafting entries this week: short blog posts with pictures of some stuff I made over the past month. I have mixed feelings about doing this. I've recently fallen out of love with craft blogs. All of a sudden I decided that posting pictures of stuff you make seems so... so... self-congratulatory. Like, did you enjoy making it? Is it useful? Great, why not just leave it at that. Why does it need to be also: and then I made my friends and family feel inferior by cataloguing my creative gifts plus my perfectionist drive to do hours and hours of extra work while healthy people would be resting.
But whatever. I made some shit and I took photos. And I may want to have a record of my projects for the future. So I'm gonna post them in the hopes that my stuff is so low quality that no one reading this blog will feel at all inferior.
In that vein, let's start with the quickest, lowest quality sewing project of the month. Ninja turtle masks. This was a birthday present for our neighbors who asked for them specifically. I took about an hour-and-a-half to make four of them. Not too bad.
heroes in a half shell
They tie behind like the real masks on the cartoon characters. How did mothers accurately recreate superhero masks before Google image search, I'll never know. Here's a lame picture of me squinting into the sun while trying on Raphael's.
cool but rude
The kids looked much cuter in them, of course, but I didn't bring my camera to the birthday party. Because I have a very low level of commitment to my craft blogging.
dehydrator cover
A few weeks ago I got a free dehydrator from my sister-in-law. Well, I should back up in this story. A few months ago I was standing in front of two large bunches of kale looking like they were too big to ever fit in a pot, and I was thinking to myself, "I want a dehydrator. I want to make kale chips. How come everyone else can buy all the stuff they want and I can't get a dehydrator?"
And then I didn't even look up dehydrators online. Because we don't actually buy things.
Then we were in Ithaca and my sister-in-law whipped out this old dehydrator from her closet and said, "Do you want this? I bought it for $10 at a yard sale and I never use it."
Suddenly there were A LOT of kale chips.
After a few hundred kale chips I realized why someone might want to GET RID of a dehydrator. Because while it's awesome for dehydrating food and all, it's not awesome for constantly being in the middle of your kitchen and being the size of a small oven.
imposing
I decided I needed to make a dehydrator cover.
"You should make it quilted!" said Dan, who still hasn't gotten his custom queen-size quilt that he asked for over four years ago. I don't love quilting.
But because it would be pretty in the kitchen, and because it's quicker to make than a queen-size quilt, I set about to make a quilted dehydrator cozy. Here is how I do quilting:
First, I look through my shelf of cotton fabric, which is mostly tiny pieces of fabric that other people have given me, and I hold up colors together until I have chosen five or six fabrics that look lovely in a stack. Then I congratulate myself on a project started and go do something else. This step is marked with elation and over-confidence.
A few days later I set about cutting the fabric into strips. This is where I start to get disheartened about quilting. Cutting up all this fabric? Only to sew it up again? Everything is meaningless! Also, I realize some of my fabric isn't big enough to stretch across the dehydrator, and I go to choose more fabric, and then I don't like the colors of the second string fabric, and then I start to complain, "How come everyone else can buy all the fabric they want and I have to sit around piecing scraps of fabric?" And then I remember: because that is the actual original purpose of quilting. To make bigger things from scraps of fabric. In my cheapness I am like a reborn pioneer! The feeling of smug self-congratulation carries me to the next step.
Which is sewing. Sewing can happen only when the children are awake and happily occupied without me. If they are asleep the sewing machine will wake them up, and if they are bored they will try to destroy the office until I yell at them. So I do my quilting in 20-minute increments right after they have a snack.
At some point I have made enough quilted fabric to sew up the dehydrator cover. I do the final steps at warp speed while Dan has the kids at the library. I hastily sew the sides and hastily hem the bottom. Turns out the cover is a bit big because I didn't account for the stretch in the fabric. Too bad! I'm not redoing jack! I am already 100% fed up with this project.
covered.
After all that cursing, the final project blends in with our kitchen almost (ahem) effortlessly.
finished.