Reminder: Giveaway Closes Tonight

This is just a reminder that the giveaway for the "Idiot's Guide: Sewing" books closes at midnight tonight. I'll pick the winners on Saturday and email them for postal addresses, so watch this space as well as your email inboxes, okay?

2014 Lunch Buckets (and more) in the shop!

I just want to say that these babies are ready for new homes.

Before I show you more photos and invite you to go shopping, I want to introduce to you the three buckets you won't get to adopt (sorry).

They're for the girls' teachers -

the one who loves MnMs so much that everyone knows it,

the one who loves red and gets ikat because that's the highest honor I can bestow upon any teacher (or human being in general),

and the one who gets my (possibly) favorite bucket of the whole baker's dozen.

Who says spots don't go with checks and mustaches?

Okay, that's enough of the 3 buckets you can't have.

Here are the 10 buckets you can have.

All those buttons!

And bases!

The lunch buckets have removable button-on straps 

and drawstring covers to keep contents secure. 

The drawstring covers also fold inwards 

or outwards for different looks.

These buckets are 7" across, about 7.5" high with the strap down and about 13" with the strap up. They are canvas on the outside, accented with cotton and home-dec fabric, and lined with various wipe-clean materials on the inside - oilcloth, laminated cotton or Therma-flec (that silver ironing board fabric). You can read the individual listings for the exact lining for particular buckets. 

Don't like the fabric combinations? Sew your own with the pattern:

On the shelves are also some other ikatbag goods from the hoard. 

Some of them I made a while back when the shop was brand new and not many people knew about it. I'd sewed a bunch of varied merchandise to test the market and whatever didn't get sold in three months got put into storage.

I'd always planned to re-list them someday, but the nursing infant became a toddler and the other toddler finished potty-training and became a preschooler and the other kid started grade school and one thing led to another and - suddenly - it's 2014.

Other items I made more recently, for the purpose of tutorial and pattern photoshoots i.e. they were samples and therefore they never even got listed in the shop. So that's the story - everything on the shelves is new and -unintentionally- very limited-edition; it's just that I never got around to listing (or re-listing) them. Procrastination at its finest! In fact, if I wait another couple of decades, I can probably list them as "vintage".

One more thing to say before you go shopping: I can't believe the cost of international shipping these days. It's ridiculous. I don't even send much stuff back to Singapore to my folks now if I can help it. Anyway, if you do buy multiple items from the shop, I always combine the shipping and do paypal refunds of the difference. This goes for domestic orders as well.

So lots of colorful things to browse and buy - in time for teacher gifts, summer treats and I-Don't-Really-Need-A-Reason presents, really.

And not just in ikat.

(Although ikat is still the best).



Go to the shop here!

Giveaway Reminder and Deadline Extension

Happy Monday, everyone!

I've been reading all your comments to Cinnamon's book review/giveaway post -thank you for sharing your sewing ambitions for the year! I, too, have a to-do list that's miles long, on which many of the items are already obsolete (e.g. baby toys) because my girls outgrew them while I was so successfully procrastinating. I'm so glad you are all sewing and that some of you are teaching and planning to teach the next generation to sew. Brava!

I'm extending the giveaway deadline to Friday the 16th, so that I can link it to the Sew Mama Sew Giveaway Day. The more people get introduced to Cinnamon's book through the review, the better, is what I'm thinking. The conditions are still the same - two winners randomly drawn, US mailing addresses, leave a comment and register on the rafflecopter widget. No hoops to jump through.

If you are here from Sew Mama Sew, welcome! We are giving away two copies of Cinnamon Miles' new book "Idiot's Guide: Sewing", and in a minute I'll link you to the post where you can read my review of the book and register for the giveaway.

A quick summary of the conditions:

• Two winners.
• US mailing addresses only.
• Deadline is now midnight of Friday 16th May.
• Just leave a comment to that Book Review Post and add your name to the rafflecopter widget there. 
• If you entered the giveaway already when my review post first went live last week, there's no need to enter it again now. Your info is saved in the rafflecopter widget.

And now, CLICK HERE to go read the book review and enter the giveaway! Good luck!

Softies 101

Continuing with the Start To Sew theme, here is a post on a little workshop with my three girls earlier this year. This was when I was making those baby bunnies and the sewing room was overrun with stuffing and soft fabric. And kids can only take so much temptation before they go nuts, so they asked me if they could make something, too (which actually happens on a regular basis, and not just when they see me making anything). I'd been wanting to work with them on a new sewing project for a while but I'd also wanted it to be a proper lesson rather than an ad-hoc Mad Crafting Session. I'm all for kid-centered, kid-initiated crafting, but let's be honest: sometimes, it's pandemonium, especially if more than one kid is involved. 

Hence my plan to run a workshop. This way, there'd be some order, everyone would know what they were doing and why, and there'd be time enough to give different people the attention and help they needed. This was never planned as a "Hey! Who Wants to Make A Fish?" kind of crafternoon activity - this was a Workshop, where Workshop = Systematic Theory, Principles, Concepts, Frameworks and everything else that makes the repressed teacher in me come frothing violently out. Because that repressed teacher believes (and not just regarding softies) that if the principles are explained first, even 5-year-olds can make and design softies with very little interference by adults. 

So... welcome to Softies 101!

This was the framework: two shapes without straight sides or corners,

and a couple of idea diagrams.

along with other cardboard templates around which to trace.

The girls were given full access to my fleece stash and invited to pick softie designs (or create their own).

I started with Kate first, because she gets home from school a half day before her sisters and we had a good 3 hours to be just by ourselves. She picked the sun, and we were onto our first learning point:

Learning Point 1: 

For a flat softie, you need two body pieces.

Q: Why two?

A: One for the front and one for the back, so you can stuff between them!

Kate wanted to get right to the sewing, so she cut lengths of ribbon for the sun rays, instead of carving them out of fabric.

Learning Point 2: 
If we want things to stick out of the edges of a softie, we make them point towards the inside. 
Q: Why the inside?
A: Because we're sewing it wrong-side out. And when we turn it right side out, the things flip out the right way!

Learning Point 3: Sew a bit away from the edge so the stitches have somewhere to stay put. That bubble outline is called a seam allowance. 

Learning Point 4: 
We leave a little hole for turning the whole thing right side out. And we sew backwards when we start and stop.
Q: What for?
A: To help the stitches stay closed and tight where they end.

I thought she did an excellent job sewing a curved seam on the line. There's a lot to be said for straight seams being easy for beginners, but when you are sewing around an outline, nothing beats a continuous round without corners at which you'd have to stop and turn the fabric. 

Then she turned her sun right side out, gasped in delight at how the rays popped outwards, and started stuffing.

Learning Point 5: 
Whip-stitch the opening shut by poking the needle in always on the same side of the opening.

I didn't get a photo of her whip-stitching the opening shut but she did it all by herself. All I did was put dots on one side of the opening to remind her to poke the needle in only one direction. And help with the knotting off.

Finished sun.

Kate's second project was more ambitious - she made a mouse.

She laid all the extremities out to see how they would fit around the oval body.

And then she pinned everything inwards as before. 

It was a little trickier to sew around an oval than a circle, but she did. Her favorite part was gluing on the face.

Jenna and Emily returned from school to find us surrounded by fleece shrapnel, and immediately wanted to join in. Jenna picked a flower and painstakingly cut out alternating-color petals.

By this time, it was impossible to concurrently direct the proceedings and wield the camera, so there are fewer photos. Here is one of Jenna's whipstitched softie opening - you can see the blue dots drawn to guide her needle direction.

Jenna's finished flower.

Emily chose a ladybug.

Learning Point 6: 

We layer on bigger pieces of fabric by sewing around their edges to attach them.

Here is Emily's ladybug, with all its legs tucked in.

And here it is, finished, with its spots and eyes glued on.

We didn't have time to try the fish, but I whipped up the turtle while the girls were working on their softies. The turtle is interesting because its head is sewn as a filled pouch rather than a single flat piece. The effect of this will be evident in a later photo.

To make the claws, I pinked the edge of the rounded feet.

The opening was ladder-stitched shut. Not whip-stitched. Because the teacher gets to sew in fancy ways if she wants.

The ladder stitch is a much better finishing/closing stitch than the whipstitch, so the girls will learn that in Softies 102, should we ever find the time for a sequel. 

Everyone helped me glue on the shell design.

See how much more structure a stuffed head has - it actually tips up like a real turtle's head.

Our workshop takeaways.

The girls really enjoyed this afternoon of sewing and begged me to do this again. I think I will, once I decide what the next stage will be in their softie sewing curriculum. Maybe something a little more 3D. I'm thinking a ball (spherical and ovoid), constructed from identical panels, with sticky-out things inserted in the seams. I see dinosaurs. Yes.