Gift Rug Colors

This post is for Mark W.B. and Mark alone, really. I bought some fabric for the rug I'm making you and Ian as your moving gift... These are the colors I picked out, sortof following the Asian theme I got from you, though it ended up going more in the Tibetan Buddhist direction than anything else. Maybe I should throw in a copy of one of HH Dalai Lama's books with your gift?

a dress, i guess

I actually followed the pattern pretty much straight through, though I got lazy on the lining for the back of the top/bodice. Tucks, I still hate doing, though I am good at them when I want a thing to look nice- I recently got a nice (I think, my mom says "it hurts to look at") button up from the thrift store, and I noticed that the tucks on the bottom face the same direction... that is weird to me, I always make mine radiate from the center. I need to take in the armpit a little bit still, it's gappy, but I'll get there eventually. Needed to use my bloggy energy spurt to get this out there!

My computer is still broken.
I never posted A LOT,
but now I just get lazy when I have to think about charging my camera batteries and going to school and using the computers there to upload pictures to my flash drive and then post a new bloggy post...
):

Mac Pillows!

"the lil mac guy pillow is cute as hell," says my brother, of his new pillows he got for his birthday, in reference to the 'finder' icon. I got the idea when my friend J sent me a link to this website: www.throwboy.com. The pillows are all fleece, polyester stuffing. Smallish, but not tiny. They were quick and easy to make, kind of fun too! I just used a tight zig-zag stitch to applique the colors on top of each other.

Skirt

I made myself a green skirt. I've been sitting on this fabric for a while, deciding what to do with it. A couple days ago I pulled it out of the basket to look at it again and decided, after looking in the mirror, that it was a little too busy and bright and intense to make a good shirt, but would work well lower down, as a skirt. I sifted through my stock of patterns and found a good one that's relatively simple, seams on the sides, seam in back, facing at the top, hem on the bottom, zipper on the side, and went to work. All in all it was only 6 pieces to cut out, so cutting (my least favorite part) went really quickly, as did all the seams. The trickiest part was the zipper, but mostly because I didn't happen to have one on hand, and had to trek all the way out to Joanns to get one. And because I was coming from a different direction than usual to get to Joanns, I got myself and my roommate a little bit lost on the way. But it all worked out eventually and early afternoon today I finished my skirt! Sorry the pictures are a little dark and fuzzy, it's hard to take pictures of myself.

Boxers!

My lucky boyfriend got some homemade undies recently. 2 are in the brown pattern (lower in the picture), which I have TONS of, this is the fabric that backed the quilt that I made for my brother for Christmas that I talked about in my last post. Also, one in the Chicago Bulls pattern (upper in the picture). They're alright, they get the job done, the only thing that I didn't do (got lazy) was modify the pattern to create a front flap/opening. So, except that they are a little short, they are kinda like shorts. The only patterns that my mom and I could find that included the flap were either not in stock, or only for special order. And I'm not willing to special order underwear patterns. Also, getting rid of the flap made churning these out E-Z. Just a quick project to keep me busy over my long winter break, that is about to end. ):

Lobster Blanket

I made this way back when my sewing machine wasn't working because I was dying for lack of things to make.. It's really easy, just two pieces of fleece flat against each other, then with fringe cut and knotted together.

On the upside, the only thing that was wrong with my sewing machine was that I hadn't oiled it in 3 years... So that's solved, and now I have a little bit of oil in my sewing desk for use as needed.

On the downside, I made a quilt for my brother for Christmas, but didn't manage to get any photos of it before I had given it to him and gone back to Chicago. So I just have to talk about it. On the whole, I tried to use cooler, darker colors, like browns and blues, to keep it from looking to girly, or too much like something he wouldn't want to use. The design on the topside was simple, rows of boxes, with long columns running the width of the quilt between them. I still don't know much formally about quilting, everything tends to be as-I-think-it-up, so I probably won't get to more complicated designs for a while. On the inside I just used a layer of fleece. And on the backside I used this very art-deco fabric that I inherited A LOT of (more of that later, you'll probably see it in the next post).