Crib Sheet

For my second project of my 2014 craft challenge, I went with something both simple and veeeeery useful, a crib sheet for Snorzy's bed.  I had made three flannel sheets for his cradle before he was born, but the cradle lasted only until he was about 4.5 months old before he was too big for it.  Such a bummer to have to put aside those handmade sheets! 
I did a little research (hello Pinterest, yes I'm talking about you again) and came up with three or four more projects that I'll do for this craft challenge.  However, many of them are toys-- if I could do anything in the world I'd be a toymaker-- and I began to worry that my craft challenge is going to result in spoiled kids (especially Snorzy) and a house full of extra...stuff.  So in resistance, I decided my second project would be something that I would have had to buy anyway, if I didn't make my own.
I was excited to hit Jo-Ann fabric and pick out something cute, something with critters on it, maybe in flannel...but all the 'diy crib sheets' direction I found online called for fabric of either 44 or 45 inch width, and sadly all the cute, nursery prints and flannel were 42 or 43 inches wide.  Why is that?  Maybe I could have done better at fabric.com or something, but I was looking for nearly-instant gratification here, so I settled for some lovely aqua quilter's cotton (44 in wide).
I was able to bang this together in very little time, from remembering to prewash the fabric this afternoon just before going to pick up my niece D from the high school so she could watch the boys for me, (pause, find other things to do while I wait for the fabric to come out of the dryer) to ironing, cutting, pinning and sewing the corners just before I had to bring D home, to after dinner and nursing the baby finally finishing the last bit and putting it in his crib before bedtime tonight.

Next up, toys! (maybe)

here I am, sewing the casing for the elastic (thank you to my photographer, Primo):


And here is the finished result in Snorzy's crib.  Other handmade items in view: bunny lovey (mine) crocheted blanket (made by a good friend, Jen F.)

Bunny Lovey 1

Lessons learned from my first attempt at sewing a lovey:

1. using my blue Mark-B-Gone pen on the 'wrong side' of the ivory swirl fur fabric was a bad idea.  Little did I know that the blue marks would show right through.  And I have a sinking feeling that they will not B-Gone when I wash the finished lovey.  I'm not sure what I could have used instead-- disappearing ink would have disappeared from one naptime to the next, before I finished the project.  And chalk would have wiped off.
2. the ears needed to be super-sized compared to the pattern in Moebes' book-- I traced around her pattern on separate paper to make ears that were probably more than 50% bigger, giving me the 'voluptuous flop' that I crave in a bunny
3. the part that I thought would be the hardest, sewing the curved seams on the head, was actually not bad at all. 
4. sewing the straight seams on the triangles to form the square blanket was where I made my biggest error, probably because I thought I was on the 'easy part' and got careless.  To my horror, as I was topstitching the blanket after sewing on the lining I found that along one of the blanket seams, for several inches, the seam had come apart because I had actually sewn into the fur at the edge and not the fabric backing at all, which leads me to:
5. when the directions said to sew a 'generous 3/8" seam', I needed to be more generous for sure-- I was too worried about the whole thing coming out too small when I should have been thinking more about making all the seams *strong* to withstand baby boy manhandling.  I fixed it in a kind of 'Frankenstein's monster' fashion by sewing by hand with ivory colored thread.  My hand sewing technique not being up to snuff, this is not an invisible seam of hidden stitches but a big hard ridge of sloppy stitches forcing the seam back together.
6. I stuffed the head firmly using little pinches of fluff as suggested by Moebes, I think I would have liked it better a little understuffed and floppy, to match the general floppiness of the ears and the blanket.
7. in the future, I'll have to find a way to mark out the circle around the base of his head for sewing last of all-- mine was a funny little lopsided spiral rather than a perfect circle, and it shows when using a solid colored lining as I did here.

Overall, I am over the moon about how easy this was to sew, and how cute it turned out even with all my errors-- this one will be under the tree for Snorzy's first Christmas, and hopefully Lovey's bunny charms will lure S away from his horrible, tacky store bought 'Taggies' bear that I got him just for 'second best' and that he ended up falling in love with and needing in order to sleep, every day and night.  I plan to make more of these bunnies, which I will continue to customize away from the original pattern (the head and neck are a little too skinny and weird for my liking).  I managed to make this, despite my inexperience, in 2 1/2 naptimes-- one for cutting and sewing the ears, another for sewing the head (very quick), and one more to do everything else but the embroidery (which I whipped through while watching t.v. the evening after finished the rest).  I don't know what I'll do with more bunnies but I do know that I won't be able to resist making at least one more of these, I think I have enough fabric left over from this one if I cut carefully!

Bunny Ears

I guess I mean this to be mostly a homeschooling blog, if only because that is the main thing that I am doing with my life right now—homeschooling my older two boys.  However, as I explained in my last post we are on a one-month hiatus from formal ‘lessons’, so even though I probably should be planning lessons for next month or searching for new materials to use when we get back to it, instead I’m ‘obsessively obsessing’ about my latest craft crush, the Lovey Blanket project from Deborah Moebes’ Stitch Savvy.  I first encountered this project while searching ‘Lovey Blanket’ on Pinterest (because lovies in general are my favorite thing for babies).  I was thrilled that her book was available from the interlibrary loan system, and when it arrived at my local library I happily dove right in.

Well.  It’s a beautiful project but the written instructions, the step-by-step photos and the pattern all leave much to be desired.  I love the final result so much, though, that I’m determined to make do and push through, and figure it out on my own with the hints I can manage to glean from her instructions.  So far I cut out the fabric and made the ears.  As it turns out, when I cut the fabric according to the pattern and sewed the ears using a 3/8” seam as the instructions told me to, I got ugly little skinny ears with no voluptuous ‘flop’ to them.  I’m going to try again, and now I wonder if I should cut all the pieces for the head bigger so that he doesn’t come out with a skinny, ugly little head. 

Here are the ears, my first attempt: