Owie Doll Kits Back In Stock!

I am excited to announce that the Owie Doll kits are back in stock at Take&Make!

A huge thank you to everyone who took the color surveys, left comments, and wrote to me with your stories and ideas for diversifying these dolls based on the medical experiences of your own kids or grandkids. We took your suggestions and feedback very seriously and the final colors are the direct result of your responses.

Thank you, too, to those who swept the first round of kits off the shelves and who contacted Take&Make with requests for more when they sold out. I appreciate your support and patience!

Quick recap: each kit contains enough material to make TWO dolls, with enough leftover of some of the fabrics and notions to make more than that. The skin fabric, for instance, is sufficient to make four dolls, if you follow the suggested cutting layout. 

Also, you still have the option to buy just the Kit, or to buy the Kit+Pattern Bundle, in which the sewing pattern is heavily discounted from its original retial price of $18. 

You can read more about what are inside the kits, in this post. Everything else is the same as the original kit, 

except that now you can pick skin and hair colors to personalize your dolls!

Here's how:

Go here to the Take&Make shop page and decide if you want to buy just the Kit alone, or the Kit+Pattern bundle.

Either option has two drop-down menus that give you choices of hair and skin colors, which you MUST select, or else you'll get that default first combination in the menu. 

For example, this is what the Kit-Only page looks like:

First, pick your skin color from among three (see later photos for examples).

Next, choose your hair colors. Remember that the kit makes two dolls, and you can choose to have them both of the same hair color, or one of each. After choosing your colors, indicate how many kits of that combination you want and click "Add to Cart". Simple!

The Kit+Pattern page takes you through the same process to choose your colors.

To help you visualize what those skin tones and hair colors look like on finished dolls, here are some photos:

Fair skin, Gold hair and Light Brown hair 

Honey skin and Dark Brown hair

Cocoa skin and Black hair

You can also contact Take&Make directly to request Brick colored hair like the doll on the right, below. This is a custom substitution and Take&Make will have more details on how it works.

Since we're on the topic of hair, let me show you a couple more photos:

Same doll; with and without hair!

I wanted to share that so you'll know you can make your doll's hair removable, if you need it to be. Later tonight, I'll post the mini-tutorial! 

And finally, a special message to those of you planning to head over to Take&Make for your kits: get 'em while they last (the first round sold out in less than a week) and save your receipts for a surprise! More info tomorrow!

Felt Insects

Today, I am going to talk about wool felt.

But first,  let's talk about hand-stitching.

Some late-night hand-stitching happened this past month.

There's something cathartic about hand-stitching, isn't there?

It's deliberate and exact and pure and wonderful, especially compared to the efficient, floor-the-pedal, bam! Bam! Bam! of machine-sewing, which conjures images of mass-producing and imprecise seamlines and winging-it-ness. 

And the bother of details that slow down that process.

Oh, the details.

Whenever I'm machine-sewing a bag, for instance, I often roll my eyes when it takes me twice as long as it should, simply because I've added in superfluous pockets and topstitching and fiddly bits that aren't the actual bag. But when I'm hand-stitching, I expect the details; they're factored into the design itself, and I love how it slows me down, embellishing even as I am making.

So, last month, when I consulted my mental calendar and realized that, once again, the summer was over and the kids were returning to school, I gleefully began planning the girls' back-to-school lunchbox gifts and looking forward to the promise of more hand-stitching. This was a deadline-heavy project in that each Sunday night, one little softie per girl needed to be completed and wrapped for her lunch box the next morning. However, it was also spread across four Sundays in the month of September, allowing me to slowly stitch throughout the week, sitting on the couch in the evenings with the husband, which I can never do with my machine-sewn projects. 

When I dug into my wool felt stash - the one I'd inherited from grandma - and began cutting and adapting and choosing colors, I discovered I was lacking in some of the shades I needed.

Enter etsy. 

Many readers have asked where I get my wool felt and I thought I'd do a post or two to answer. First, most of my wool felt was, as I said, inherited from grandma. Sometimes when JoAnn has a sale on their wool-blend felt, I'll pick up a yard or two. But their colors are extremely limited, and they aren't 100% wool. So whenever I need particular shades of 100% wool felt, I buy 8" x 12" sheets on etsy, from Felt on the Fly. 

Now, today's post is a product review. I've been known to do those from time to time on ikatbag, if the product is something I really like, and something my readers would find relevant to the sort of projects that define this blog. I don't do product reviews of things I have never used myself, or simply in exchange for a freebie that, up till that point, I'd never heard about or been interested in.

Vendors have, and will, write to me, offering their stuff, to review. In such cases, I tell them that I cannot guarantee I will even try their product, let alone write a post about it, let alone have it be a positive post. If they are still interested, they are welcome to send me their product, understanding that I may do anything (or nothing) with it, from ignoring, throwing away, giving away, or liking/hating it enough to give it airtime on my blog. This is how I try to be transparent to my readers. You can read about it here (but it's pretty much what I've already just said in this paragraph).

Occasionally, I will come across a product (or a book) that so grabs me that I actually contact the vendor to ask if they'd be interested in a review. Cinnamon Miles' beginning sewing book was one of those, and resulted in a fun collaboration and a chance for you guys to win her book for yourself. But it rarely happens, because it means being pretty sure I'll already love a product I haven't actually yet used myself, and those are more exceptions than the norm. 

Most of my reviews are of products I am already using and want to gush about - products I like so much that I'd use even in secret without telling you about.

So, Felt on the Fly.

I've been buying my wool felt sheets from Felt on the Fly for years. Janet, its proprietor, is wonderful to work with, and prompt and helpful in her correspondence. Whenever my own felt stash falls short in certain colors, this is where I buy what I need. They come in different sizes - 6" x 8", 8" x 12" and larger 18" x 18" sheets.  The quality is excellent. There are ready-matched combinations to pick from, or you can choose your own shades from among the 112 colors. 

Some months back, Janet emailed to ask if I'd be interested in reviewing her felt if she sent me some free sheets for my projects. I was already familiar - and happy - with her felt, so it was easy to say yes. However, I hadn't a felt project in mind then, so I waited till I began planning the kids' back-to-school lunch gifts to write her back and start things in motion. 

She sent me these lovely colors to work with.

 So gorgeous.

Want to see what they became?

First: Emily's gifts. For the past few years, hers were of a fish/sea creature theme, which you can read about here. 

This year, I found I'd run out of sea creatures to make from my go-to book:

and switched, instead, to insects: 

butterfly, water-beetle, ladybug and caterpillar. 

Their legs are bendy wire, so they can be posed in er... more natural surroundings.

The ladybug is Emily's favorite critter - "so forlorn!" she says.

Here's a shot that shows how well 100% wool felt holds up under edge-stitching (blanket stitch, in this case) - no pilling or tearing or any of the other tragedies that befall craft felt (aka eco felt aka acrylic felt).

Next up are Jenna's and Kate's back-to-school gifts - 

and more on the different kinds of felt there are on the market.

Disembodied

I have bicultural kids. 

Have I ever mentioned that before?

It's very interesting, this idea of biculturalism. 

Random strangers have come up to me and commented on my kids. 

"They're mixed!" They say.

Or, "Is their dad White?"

Or, "Can they speak Korean?"

Sometimes -particularly if they themselves have bi- (or tri- or quadra -) cultural kids - they even engage me in lengthy discussions on dominant vs. recessive genes or whether they emerged at birth with hair that color.

Or - and not just once - I was even encouraged to "have more children because they're so beautiful!" 

Total strangers.

In Target. 

Or the parking lot.

On in line for snacks at the pool.

I accept their compliments and get on with my errands. In a place like Minnesota, where folks are - frustratingly - vague, a break from phatic communion is sometimes refreshing. I do not get offended - these people might have been overly effusive and a tad TMI but they had not meant any harm. Besides, if you have bicultural kids, you will understand that there are far more pertinent issues in their lives than hair color and at what age their features began to morph towards one direction of their ethnic heritage over the other. 

Like how rich their lives may be because they have influences from two (or more) countries of origin, languages, cuisines, climates, faiths, political worlds.

And how these multiple viewpoints can also bring conflict when they're trying to define their concept of home and identity. Everyone, irrespective of their cultural heritage, is going to have to figure themselves out someday, but multicultural kids have that extra layer of drama to add to the mix - those invisible threads woven into their very psyche, which make their individual lives as global and national and other as they are personal.

Like how similar they are to their friends whose parents grew up in the same small town in northern Minnesota, and also how similar they are to their other friends who've moved here from India, or Russia, or New York, or Virginia. And how, at the same time, how different they are from the neighbors next door, simply because their parents are unique individuals with unique parenting styles and personalities.

Do I love having bicultural kids?

Over having non-bicultural kids? 

No. I don't know; I've never had any other kind.

Do I feel obliged to teach them the language of my country of origin (not Korea, by the way)? 

Uh, we speak English in Singapore. Quite well, in fact, when we feel like it (other times we use a horrendous mix of English and our three other national languages that often and immediately -albeit unintentionally - makes visitors feel acutely left out of entire conversations). That particular pidgin form of English I don't care to teach my children, thank you very much.

Do I feel obliged to enroll them in a Chinese-immersion school so they can communicate with their maternal grandparents in Singapore?

Let's see. . . do you mean the grandparents who speak English (and at least two other languages), watch MLB on cable, bake apple pies and pastries and roasts and boast a formidable collection of music LPs from the days of Bob Dylan, Elvis, Abba, Loretta Lynn and Mitch Miller? I don't believe that might be necessary.

My children may be bicultural by birth, but they're going to have to grow into that mantle their own way and in their own time, and find out what it means to have feet planted in two worlds. It will be a fantastic journey. And they might be surprised to discover there are more of them - kindred spirits - out there than they might have initially thought.

Kate has been watching me make my new line of multicultural Owie Dolls this week. She's asked if she could request a custom order, as her sisters have Owie Dolls and she doesn't.

"I want mine to have fair skin, green eyes and tan hair," she'd dictated. 

"So she'll look just like you?" I'd wondered aloud, half in jest.

"Yup," she'd replied, utterly sincere.

Oh, to be seven again.

Some years back, before any of my kids were in school, I'd wondered if I might one day have The Conversation with them - you know, the one about how they look different from the other kids at school. 

It hasn't happened yet. 

Their classrooms are filled with children from so many different cultures that everyone is different from everyone else. How fabulous. And I especially love that, with many of those kids, I can't even tell by looking at them, what their ethnicity is, or if their parents were from the same village in China, or Norway, or both, or if their skin tone is that way because they were blessed with it from birth, of if they are merely holding on to the lingering effects of the summer sun. 

In a world without borders, it seems even our classrooms - microcosms of the larger community - are changing. 

Yesterday, I stuffed sixteen doll arms. Kate saw them, held her own arm against the disembodied limbs and commented, "I don't match any of these."

Maybe not, but somewhere on the planet - or down the street - someone has a skin tone that might. And, unlike these dolls, whose culturalism is literally only skin-deep, those folks have just-as-colorful lives to accompany it.

P.S. Almost forgot to mention the purpose for all these disembodied arms: rumor has it that the new Owie Doll kits will be available in early October. And possibly seven new dolls in the shop. I'll keep you posted!

This is not it

It appears I am back online.

Whatever.

So, I finished a new bag yesterday.

This is not the Time Warp Tutorial Series, by the way.

This is the Time Warp Tutorial series (see? It's still happening):

Which is infinitely more technical and professional-looking and proper and wonderful to behold than the bag I made yesterday.

Not that the bag in question is hideous, no - not by any definition, I don't think.

It's just that I've been doing a disproportionate amount of Not-For-Me sewing lately, and I decided I needed a pity party. And then Kate had me babysit her slouch bag last Sunday while she was in Sunday School and I realized

• hey, this is actually a pretty neat bag
• I don't actually own a floppy shoppingbagish tote like this and, therefore
• I wanted a bag like this, but in grown-up fabric

So I printed out my own pattern from my own blog (because, of course, I apparently didn't save my paper templates after making all those slouch bags last Christmas) and followed my own instructions and made myself a bag. 

And I carried it around all day yesterday and today, like it was an extension of the clothes I was wearing.

And it already has battle scars stains from chucking it onto all kinds of surfaces, which I would never have done with my real bags - the kind with vinyl and interfacing and good topstitching and proper machine tension and hardware and which didn't take only hours to make.

Like the Time Warp ones.

Which are going to make imminent appearances here.

Soon.

I promise.

Almost a month

since we last met here. I thought it would be fun to ignore the blog for a whole month to see if the world ended.

It didn't.

Which proves that there is life outside of social media.

Which I secretly suspected, but daren't say in case all my friends ostracized me.

School is in full swing and I'm sorta off sewing. At least, I'm off machine-sewing. It seems like too much work when one feels more like moping around the house, missing outdoor swimming and all the other happy things of summer.

I have, however, been hand-stitching. So cathartic. I always feel like I'm 9 years old again, making my little felt stuffed toys for my classmates, whenever I do this. These are the kids' back-to-school lunchbox gifts, a tradition I shot myself in the foot by starting. 

Two themes this year: critters and Shopkins. 

You're familiar with Shopkins, yes? They're those addictive, overpriced pencil toppers that are, unfortunately, somewhat cute. See here:

More photos later!