FPSI

After coming home this weekend to an obscene amount of dog fur on my new pillows (from Kelly + Elena), I'm officially inventing a new unit of quilting measurement:  FPSI, also known as Fur Per Square Inch.

Why? Because all pets are inherently drawn to handmade items. It's a scientific fact.

Also, it seems there's a positive correlation between how much you love an item, and the FPSI. Pets can sense these things. Here is photographic evidence. He knows...oh yes, he knows....he's literally licking his chops over how much fur he's gonna rub on it...

Sensing my absence this weekend and Ray's general lack of concern, I'm pretty sure Whiskers did barrel rolls on my pillows while I was gone to increase the FPSI of my most beloved new pillows, and slowly claim them as his own.

It took not one, but FOUR sticky roller sheets to take the FPSI from 100 back down to zero.

It's a vicious cycle, but this isn't over dog!

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Playing Catch-Up

Due to the massive number of Christmas presents I had to sew, I kind of unofficially took a break from blogging back in December, so there are a ton of things I never posted on here.

For starters, I received an adorable mug rug and an awesome bundle of scraps from Ulrike! She has the best fabric, and I love the charming little details she puts into everything she makes. I won a pillow in one of her blog giveaways a few years ago, and it's one of my favorite holiday items (the hubby loves it too).

And my favorite part? The hilariously accurate portrayal of me reaching for cookies, and Whiskers making off with a stocking. Both of those things happened numerous times over the holidays ;)

I honestly made out like a bandit this year, because my friend Kristy made me a lovely holiday item as well! She wanted to get her husband a special Kindle for Christmas that was only available in the U.S., so she had her purchase mailed to me and I forwarded it to Aussieland. As a thank you gift, she sent me this pillowcase and some chocolate treats. I was dumbfounded when I opened it because of all the intricate piecing and quilting - it must have taken her forever to do all that circular quilting!

And she even included one of my favorite holiday prints - the snowflake print from Happy Zombie's Holiday Happy line! I've been debating buying those prints for a while, but hadn't taken the plunge because I need more Christmas fabric like a hole in the head. But after seeing how cute they were sewn up in a project, I found some on clearance (for $5/yard) and bought 1/2 yards of the snowflake and triangle santa prints. Yay!

Since her package didn't arrive until after Christmas, I'm thinking about sneaking it onto the sofa because it's too lovely to put in storage for a whole year. I think I can get away with people not realizing it's a Christmas pillow, so long as they don't turn it over and expose the trees on the back!

Oh. And I have one more thing to show you. It's more of a confession, really. I went on a bit of a bender during the pre/post holiday sales...

But I'd like to officially blame Angela for the Safety Pin prints, because she posted about a shop that had them on clearance for $3.99/yard. I can't be held responsible for my decisions when informed about fabric that cheap.

My other splurge was in my friend Ayumi's shop. I bought those adorable laundry and baking fat quarters on the left, and because she's a sweetheart, she added all those cute scraps you see on the right! She is so, so nice and I love having email chats with her :) Isn't it wonderful when you get the chance to "meet" one of your crafting heros, and they're even nicer than you imagined?

That being said, you guys probably know what's coming next. The great post-Christmas fabric purge of 2012. I just put up a bunch of new listings in my Etsy shop including some cheap fat quarter bundles, an It's a Hoot Layer cake, and various cuts of fabric. I also put together about 5 scrap bundles because my bins are overflowing from all my recent sewing. They're organized by color, and what you see is what you get - I'm pretty generous with my scrap packs, and everything shown in the photo will be included in the bundle.

As always, you can use the code PLAIDSCOTTIE10 for 10% off anything in my shop :)

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Lookit! I cross-stitched!

 

I'd like to say a big thank you to the talented ladies at the Frosted Pumpkin Stitchery, because they have single-handedly made me interested in cross-stitching.  Before I stumbled across their adorable designs last year, my interest in cross-stitching was zero. zilch. nada. But since I first laid eyes upon their illegally cute PB&J pattern (which never fails to make me sing the Peanut Butter Jelly Time song), I've been toying with the idea of picking up a new hobby. The final nail in the coffin was when I read Kelly's post about these adorable macaroons and their new Dessert of the Month club. Ten bucks for a year's worth of precious wee dessert patterns that smile back at me? Sold.

I had my fingers crossed they would email the new pattern before my lunch break today, and sure enough, the crafting gods were smiling upon me because it appeared in my inbox right before noon, so I was able to run to Joann's and pick up the necessary supplies. I was crazy excited to find my store had the metallic embroidery floss they mentioned on their site, because I love the sparkle it added to my little champagne truffle! It was a lot harder to work with than the regular floss, but well worth the effort. The only thing I was disappointed about is that I couldn't find dark aida, which the ladies at FPS recommended because many of the patterns will contain white. This Oatmeal one was the darkest I could find, and I was too lazy (with a splash of impatience mixed in) to attempt tea-dying, so I'll have to come to grips with the fact that my patterns might be a little muted.

I've never done any cross stitching in my life, so this was quite the adventure - full of google searches for tutorials and the making up of my own rules like, "and being ignorant, ye shall marketh a grid on the aida using a blue water soluble quilting pen. and it shall be done. and it was good. amen." I was going to take it slow and use it to pass the time in the break room at lunch tomorrow, but once I got started, I quickly became obsessed and finished it in one sitting while watching reruns of Once Upon a Time (LOVE that show!)

So yeah. Needless to say, I'm pretty excited. It probably looks like crap in a handbasket to you seasoned pros, but I'm more than a little giddy about it. I have it draped over the sofa arm next to me, and I keep pausing while I type to reach over and pet it. My precious. *nuzzles against face*

I love how the crafting revolution that's going on amongst our generation is reaching all aspects of handmade items. People like Amanda & Ashleigh are out there breathing new life into other oft-neglected arts besides sewing and quilting, and I think that's pretty freaking cool. 

...and speaking of cool, there's a lady at my office with a globetrotting daughter in college, and she's always bringing me fabric from all over the world to turn into things for her dorm room. Last time it was a printed panel of a scene from the Sahara, which I turned into a wall hanging. This time it was some absolutely stunning fabric from Tanzania. It's typically used as garment fabric, but she wanted me to make it into pillows for her bed. I fussy cut the blue and black print to showcase that fab medallion, and I may have snaked a few of the smaller scraps for myself *wink*  (I warned her I might the day before, just to make sure it was okay)

I forgot to take pictures at home, so they've been lovingly staged in my cubicle chair (ooh! ahh!). My friend Sherie snapped the photos with her iPhone and emailed them to me. She even knew to take one all-inclusive picture + close-ups of each pillow, without me having to say a word. That's true friendship, right there ;)

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A Human Moment

Can I have a human moment and admit that I constantly overcommit myself? And that I'm more than a little bit terrible, because I was 4 months late giving my brother-in-law's girlfriend her birthday present? Yeah. I know. Four months is pretty bad...*sheepish grin*

I've known what I wanted to make her since her birthday in January, I just haven't had time to plop my keister down and do it. So, to make it up to her, I thought it only fitting her pillow should be the first thing I made in my new sewing room. She knows how much I sew, and I thought that declaration might earn me an extra brownie point or two, lol!

My Rain or Shine quilt is her designated "movie quilt" whenever she comes over, because she's a LSU alum and die-hard fan, and half of the things she owns are purple and yellow/gold. So of course, she needed something similar to take home with her :)

I used the fabrics from my favorite block in the quilt, and it's backed with the best polka dot print ever created - Echino in Grape.

P.S. Wanna hear about another human moment of mine? I sliced clean through my iPod headphones with a rotary cutter while I was working on this yesterday. I knew that dangling cord wasn't a good idea...

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A Room with a View

As you know, we had our NOLA Modern Quilt Guild spring retreat this past weekend. Ray's amazingly kind aunt and uncle have a massive 3 bed/3 bath condo in Gulfport, Mississippi, and they were gracious enough to let me, Lana, Kelly, Angela, Cherie and Karen invade with our vast quantities of sewing stuff :) It was like paradise compared to the old, spidery house we stayed at in Baton Rouge last time. They had blackout blinds over the windows and the floor was so dirty my feet were black after walking around for 5 minutes. I kept referring to it as Shawshank during our stay, lol! They charged over $100/person and the lady remembered to tell us we'd need to bring all our own linens and towels, but conveniently forgot to mention there'd be no toilet paper, paper towels, trash bags, etc...yikes! That was an interesting thing to discover, haha!

Instead, we got to drink our coffee out here in the morning...

And have a Modern Family marathon while relaxing on these plush sofas - ahhhh!

And you see those lovely pillows on the sofa? Well those were made by the talented gals in our group as a 'thank you' present for our hosts! They're actually 26" down/poly floor pillows, but they looked so cute on the sofas that we left them there for the time being :)

We found an awesome home decor fabric shop right down the street from our condo called Ole River Fabric. It was one of those diamond in the rough places that you could easily drive by 100x and never notice, but their prices and selection were amazing! They had some gorgeous Ralph Lauren fabrics on sale for $2/yard, and the fabrics pictured above were only $7 (stripe) and $10 (floral) per yard. Don't you love stumbling across places like that? If they'd carried quilting fabric, I'm sure they would've had a bolt of mythical FMF Gray Seeds, lol!

We also found some cute flip flop fabric for $4/yard, so we couldn't resist buying some to make a 3rd pillow for the kids room. There are two sets of bunk beds in there and the grandkids always gather around the bottom of the beds, so I thought the extra floor pillow would be perfect to throw in there :)

Front

Back

I can't wait for them to see the new pillows when they come down in a few weeks!

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Huzzah for presents!

Remember the pillow I made for my friend Dana as part of our annual craft swap? Well lookit what she sent me in return! She's taking a book-making class, and she made me a letterpress sketchbook for all my designs (fancy ribbon placeholder and all!). And she was even sweet enough to throw in some fancy-pants colored pencils....definitely better than the Crayolas I'm currently rockin! I heart you Dana-nator :)

The best part? It's lined with my favorite - houndstooth!

I wish you could feel how nice the paper is! Unfortunately, cameras can't capture that (yet)...maybe they will some day when we're living in Jetson houses and eating food capsules, lol

It's so lovely and fresh that I'm a little scared to mark in it. Maybe I'll be inspired to draw some fun new designs worthy of this book while I'm on the retreat this weekend :)

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Yes, I'm Alive

Sorry I've been MIA for two weeks! I thought I'd be able to pop right back on here after we moved last weekend, but the past two weeks have been sheer madness. Everything went great with the closing and it only took us 30 minutes to sign all the paperwork and get the keys to our new house! So that definitely wasn't the problem. But the move was exhausting! I'm still recovering....seriously! When I woke up last Sunday morning, I felt like I'd been run over by a truck. We got the keys to our house on Friday at 1, and we had to completely move out of our apartment (and clean it) by Saturday night.

Why is it that whenever you think you're making headway and might get ahead of schedule, you find some other huge pocket of crap that you completely forgot about? We thought we'd moved 75% of our stuff out when we wrapped things up Friday night...but boy were we wrong. We didn't end up leaving the apartment and turning in our keys until midnight on Saturday. You know, there's nothing like moving to confront you with the disgusting amount of stuff you own. And most of it's just that..."stuff". Things that you keep and move from storage space to storage space without ever actually opening or using, yet for some odd reason never get rid of. We have "stuff" that was packed up when we got married 5 years ago and hasn't been touched since. It's now sitting in our attic, where it will probably sit untouched for another 5 years.

But anyway, less of my whining about moving, and more pictures of crafty things! This was the last thing I made before we moved, and I haven't had time to take pictures or post until now. One of my good friends (and former roomates) from college was an art major, and we've gotten into the habit of having annual craft swaps. Last year she made me an awesome painting (which I dubbed Portrait of Monsieur L'oiseau) for our dining room, and this year she's sending me a letterpress sketchbook completely assembled by her...how cool is that? I can't wait to start filling it with my random sewing ideas :)

I had the unmitigated gall to flat out ask her to make me a letterpress sketchbook when I found out she was taking classes, so I told her to scrounge around on my blog/photostream and find something she liked. This pillow piqued her interest, so I made another variation of it.

The body is pure linen, and the felt is regular craft felt from Joann's that I cut using my Olfa rotary circle cutter (that thing makes life SO much easier! I whipped 60 circles out in just 15-20 minutes.) The ruffles are individually sewn onto the front, and the back is a simple envelope closure with a strip of Kei Dots in Brown along one edge (same as my other pillow, except in a different color).

I hope to get this in the mail on Monday, along with some swap fabrics and blocks that I'm behind on, courtesy of aforementioned move.

We're painting the kitchen and my sewing room this weekend, so I plan to post some fun Before & After pics for ya'll on Monday - woo hoo!

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Urban Home Goods - Finished & Mailed (woo hoo!)

Please excuse me for making this short and sweet, but I'm exhausted from standing on a chair, screaming and flailing my arms for awesome throws until midnight last night. But it was 100% worth it, because I caught some awesome throws...including a rubber chicken! HA!

The machine cover was waaaay too big to try and model on mine, so I apologize that you can't really get a good feel for how it looks from these pictures :(

 

The inside is lined with a snuggly print from Anna Maria Horner's Folksy Flannel line.

And this is the back side of the cover. I got the idea for the grommets from I Love Patchwork, except I moved them up from the bottom to the center.

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Urban Home Goods - Item #1

I finally found some time this past week to finish my first of two items for the Urban Home Goods swap. I first got the idea here, but didn't want to make an entire pillow out of felt, so I adapted it. My partner loves linen, so the body of the pillow is pure linen, while all the ruffles are made out of regular crafting felt from Joann's. There are 60 ruffles in all, so I had to cut fifteen 3" circles out of each color.

If I'd had to individually outline and cut every single one of those circles, I probably would have slipped slowly into madness. But luckily, I bought one of these when I first started sewing and was able to cut all the circles within 20 minutes. The downside is that the felt dulled the crap out of my new blade, so I'll have to go buy a new one...but it's a small price to pay for convenience :)

And here's funny story for you. I wasn't feeling well on Sunday, so I laid on the couch pretty much all day and hand-sewed these babies onto the front piece. Well I was have having a little Netflix marathon of one of my guilty pleasure shows (Stargate SG-1...it's so cheesy and nerdy and kinda awful, but I can't help myself because I loved the movie and am nostalgic about when I used to watch the show on Showtime with my mom back in middle/high school)...but anywho, I got a little distracted when some alien robots were attacking their ship...and I managed to sew the pillow to my pajama pants. So that was a real party, haha!

As for the back...my partner likes things that are clean and simple, so the back is made out of linen as well, but I sewed a small piece of Kei Dots in orange to the end of one of the envelope enclosures to spice things up a little :)

P.S.  Today is my 1 year blogiversary, so I have some awesome, awesome things planned for the entire month of March! Hope you guys are ready for a little March Madness!!!! (and I'm not just talking about my beloved UK basketball team) Woot woot!

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Super Mario Mushroom Pillow Pattern

I hope you can see everything okay in this diagram. I didn't want to color too darkly or else you wouldn't be able to see the graph lines. The finished pillow will be 20" x 20".

Here's what you're going to need (I put the colors I used in parentheses out to the side):

For the 1-Up Mushroom:
(36) 1.5" x 1.5" green squares (Kona Grass Green)
(38) 1.5" x 1.5" white squares (Kona White)
(24) 1.5" x 1.5" flesh-colored squares (Kona Flesh Pink)
(68) 1.5" x 1.5" black squares (Kona Black)

For the Background (Kona Medium Gray):
(2) 20.5" x 3.5" strips
(2) 6.5" x 1.5" strips
(2) 7.5" x 1.5" strips
(2) 5.5" x 2.5" strips
(4) 4.5" x 1.5" strips
(2) 3.5" x 7.5" strips

For the Lining (Kona Medium Gray): 
(1) 20.5" x 20.5" piece
(note:  this piece isn't a necessity, but I like to add it to the back of the mushroom panel to cover up all the raw seams on the inside)

For the Back (It's an envelope enclosure. Kona Medium Gray):
(1) 12" x 20.5" piece
(1) 18" x 20.5" piece

I wanted the background to be rather solid and have as little pieceing as possible, so sometimes I assembled a single row at a time and then attached the background strips to each end, and sometimes I assembled rows in groups and then attached the background pieces. For instance, rows 7-13 were assembled (postage-stamp style), and then I attached the background strips to the sides once that big hunk of squares was completed. Rows 15-16 were done the same way. I tried to put brackets on the right-hand side of the diagram so you can see how the rows/background pieces are grouped.

Here's a close-up of my pillow so you can get a visual:

For the back: Grab one of your back pieces, measure 1" down from the top edge and mark a line. Fold the fabric down so that the crease is on the 1" mark, press, and then fold down once more (another inch). Top stitch along the top and bottom edges of the fold. Repeat for the other back piece.

Layer as follows: Mushroom panel (right side up), Lining piece, and the Back envelope pieces (wrong side up). You'll need to overlap the back pieces in order to get them to line up with the rest of the pillow. Sew a 1/4" seam all the way around the pillow. There's no need to leave an opening, because you'll turn the pillow right side out through the opening in the back.

I intended for this post to be brief & basic rather than a full-fledged tutorial, but if anything's unclear, let me know in the comments and I'll try and draw and extra diagram or two.

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Super Mario Mushroom Pillow!

Do do do, do-do do-do, do do do do do do do do do do....thanks to this pillow, I've been humming the Super Mario Brothers theme in my head all weekend. I've had a Mario quilt designed on graph paper for over a year now (for my sister), but since I haven't made any progress on it, I decided to make her a Super Mario-themed pillow instead. 1-Up Mushrooms were like gold back in the glory days of 1990's Mario gaming, so I thought that would be a fun icon to start with. Plus the design and color scheme will mesh with a living room a little better than something crazy like a koopa troopa or spikey turtle thing (that's their technical name by the way..."spikey turtle thing") If I have time, I'm going to make a red Super Mushroom for the other side of her couch.

I made this pillow from start to finish yesterday in about 7 hours, so my poor family was a little neglected this weekend :( My husband and dog watched Lord of the Rings and napped on the sofa to pass the time...and then my brother-in-law and I decided to give Ray his Assassin's Creed: Brotherhood game a little early. So I think that made up for my sewing marathon yesterday :)

Look how cozy he is in our living room! I think he wants to stay :(

P.S. If you're interested in a hilarious Mario video, check out this French comedian that drove a go-kart around Paris in a Mario costume. My sister and I watched this together while we were on the phone a couple years ago (her in Kansas City and me in Chicago), and both of us laughed so hard we almost cried when he threw an actual banana peel in the street, haha!

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