2017 Lunch Buckets Now in Stock!

I am excited to announce that this year's Lunch Buckets are now in the shop!

Lots of pretty fabrics to choose from.

One dozen buckets - two with zippered straps and ten with the classic removable buttoned-on straps.

All come with drawstring covers to keep contents secure.

Here are some solo shots of this year's designs: - Scandinavian-inspired florals,

Marimekko prints,

(excluding this one, which the girls picked out to give away to their teacher at the end of this school year, but which I had to show you because I love the chrome-and-turquoise combo),

Jessica Jones' gorgeous barkcloth,

and ikat. Of course ikat.

All those pretty buttons!  

Oilcloth (or Thermaflec) lines the interior for easy cleanup. Check the individual listings for each bucket for exact material and colors.

The Lunch Buckets are about 7" x 7" (13" tall including the strap) - a good size for a packed lunch, carrying around craft supplies for a summer project, or a stash of snacks for the pool or beach. They usually sell out fast, so go here to to pick your favorites before they're all gone!

Lunch Buckets With Zippered Straps

In a few days I will have a dozen lunch buckets for you to buy - they just need buttons sewn on, and then they’ll be in the shop. Until then, I thought I’d share some photos of a strap variation I’m trying out with this year's batch.

I usually make my lunch buckets with buttons and buttonholes, but I'd made a trapezoidal bucket with a zippered strap in my 2016 Zip A Bag series and thought I’d add that to a few of this year’s lunch buckets as well. 

With no buttons, the strap isn’t detachable but it unzips, 

splits apart and folds down on either side, out of the way of the top drawstring opening. 

The construction sequence is the same, except that the zippered strap must be constructed (separately) first, and attached to the outer body of the bucket while it is still “in the flat”. For those of you who have the Lunch Bucket pattern and would like to try this variation, here are a few in-progress shots to help you visualize this process. This is the outer body of the bucket “in the flat”, and this sequence takes the place of Step 6 in the pattern. 

Here are the dimensions of my zippered strap: 

• length: a total of 21” including the seam allowances at both ends; 
• width of the fabric portion on either side of the zipper coils: 5/8” to 3/4”. 

Attach and topstitch the accent band to the RS of the outer body (if you are using a lightweight fabric for the outer band for this zippered strap variation, I recommend stabilizing the entire band with a medium sew-in interfacing on its WS for added strength at the attachment points). Attach the lower edge of the band first, as shown. 

Attach the ends of the zippered strap to the outer body so that

1. their final positions will be on opposite sides of the finished bucket (i.e. 11” apart) and 
2. their ends lie below the upper stitching line of the band. 

Here is a close up of the stitching pattern I used (a simple rectangle) but use whatever pattern you prefer to ensure it is securely attached to the outer body. Remember to ensure that the zipper pull faces out! 

Flip the band RS up into its final position, tuck its upper seam allowance (SA) to its WS, and topstitch along this upper edge, securing the ends of the zippered strap between the layers in the process. 

Now continue assembling the layers of the bucket as usual. In the later stages when all the individual layers of the bucket come together to be bound, the strap might require some maneuvering to work around, but otherwise, it's an easy variation to the classic bucket pattern, especially if you'd rather install a zipper than a buttonhole!

Look out for the 2017 Lunch Buckets in the shop in the coming week. I'll make an announcement here on the blog when they're ready!

This is how tired I am

I've just made 17 buttonholes with a regular presser foot. Apparently, after more than three decades of sewing, I seem to have forgotten that

1. you need a buttonhole foot to make buttonholes
2. I own a buttonhole foot
3. engaging a forward-walking foot in the reverse-stitch direction of the four-step buttonhole process isn't exactly brilliant.

I know, right?

Now, those 17 buttonholes aren't hideous, which is a miracle in itself, but they do look slightly suspicious. And you'd think that after a couple of funky-looking outcomes, I'd realize something was slightly off, but. . . no, let's just pretend we know what we're doing, why don't we? 

I suppose this is only slightly less stupid than that time when I used a zipper foot to do a zig zag stitch. 

Anyway, I just looked at my followers widget thingy and whoa, there are almost 5000 of you. Hello, guys! In the spirit of transparency, you have a right to know that the person you're following sometimes does really dumb things.

Off to find the buttonhole foot now. 

Slightly Ridiculous

 . . . and yet oddly satisfying.

Each Lunch Bucket is actually two separate buckets, so it always feels like I'm doubly maniacal during Mass Production Season. 

Do you see the zippered straps? That's a variation I'm trying, the method for which is in this earlier post.

Goal: for these cuties to be in the shop by next week. 

Lunch Buckets soon cometh!

Hello, friends!

I am astounded at how quickly this school year has flown by. Remodeling the house surely contributed to the general sense of having lost sizable unaccounted-for chunks of time, but I suspect it's also because the kids are older, and their days fuller. And the more I quantify where their energy goes, the less I am able to wrap my mind around the time that has elapsed while trying to observe it all. 

Voila.  It's quantum physics applied to parenthood. Very loosely applied, I'd better disclaim*. 

But let me translate that into parentspeak:

Manic children's activities = not enough mental space to even feel time being siphoned off into the nether.  

or

"My minivan is a black hole. I get in and drive some kid somewhere and buy two things at Target and when I get out again, fifty thousand hours have passed."


*Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle: energy-time variation.


But I digress. In the tradition of random updates, I have three things to share:

1 Lunch Buckets
Are being made! Some for the kids' teachers, as we do every end-of-the-school-year, and some for the shop. Thought you might like some in-progress shots. Here's a nice, posed picture:

And here's one that's more like what goes on in real life:

Thank you for writing and convo-ing me to ask about the buckets throughout the year. I am excited to say that they will be available soon! Hopefully by the first couple weeks of June. Watch the shop (and this blog for announcements)!

2 Newfangled Sewing Light
I cannot remember where I saw this, but I've had Sewing Machine Darkness for years and I'd secretly coveted this as a possible cure. But it wasn't until we had under-cabinet lighting installed during our kitchen remodel (which was exactly the same as this sewing machine lighting system) that I was convinced something like this would actually work.

Voila!

A strip of LEDs that you stick under the arm of your machine to light up that area of the machine bed that no table lamp, no matter how cunningly angled, would ever satisfactorily illuminate. That black wire leads to a switch, and the switch connects via more wire to a wall outlet. In other words, you're using socket power, not batteries, but you can control it via a switch that's stuck to your machine with adhesive tape so you don't have to walk over to the outlet each time you want to turn it on or off.

I love it so much. I can see now! Whoo!

3 Most Rewarding 8 Hours of Sewing In A Long Time
True story: so last week, I spent a day altering a neighbor's daughter's prom dress. Let me say right at the start that the outcome was utterly worth it. Even though I don't, as a principle, perform alteration (and for good reason, because look: it took eight hours; also see my previous alteration ranting here).  But this was a lovely neighbor, and it'd taken them forever to find a dress, and then they'd brought it to a professional alteration seamstress to be taken in, and it had come back tight in all the wrong places, and the poor girl was three days to her prom and unable to breathe or move her arms.

I couldn't bear it - both as a fellow mother and a sewing person. Drafting people have a calling in life: to rid the world of unfittingness, one poorly-drafted garment at a time. This was not a hem job, people. This was creating ease where there was no fabric to let out and no seams to shift; I ended up putting in new bound armholes and an invisible zipper fabric extension in a prom dress with beaded and appliqued detail overlying the seams. Did I know if I could do it? Yes (or I would've been bonkers to have volunteered to try, right?), until about half-way through, when the original zipper was unpicked and lying two feet away from the original dress, and I thought, "Ulp. Good intentions or no, if I mess this up, the girl will have no dress, which is arguably worse than an unfitting dress."

But now we come to the happy ending: the dress fit (better) and there were much embracing and tears of joy. And I was soooooooooo happy to have given my neighbor those hours of my time because there is nothing more rewarding, more gladdening, more Yes! than knowing I helped someone with the work of my hands. I was also reminded and  - because I do this so infrequently - surprised that something as tedious as altering a garment could require so much creativity and lateral thinking. I know of people who claim there are particular "fixes" for certain fit issues and while that's a helpful starting point, it can be dangerous (and disastrous) if we stop there, and thereafter indiscriminately apply these 'standard' fixes to all garments with apparently similar symptoms.

For instance, let's suppose that we have an over-plungy neckline. Taking in the shoulder seams, which is a very common go-to alteration fix, is not necessarily the best course of action. There are a myriad of other causes - and corresponding corrections - for such an unsatisfactory neckline, including but not limited to:

• its excessive width
• its excessive scoop
• overstretching of the neckline during original sewing process
• the wearer's incorrect bust cup size for that neckline, 
• wrong position of bust darts, 
• insufficient (or absent) upper bust darts or equivalent seaming/contouring, 
• incorrect shoulder slope, 
• incorrect shoulder width, 
• an overly-forward or overly-backward shoulder seam for the wearer's particular shoulder issues,  

and combinations thereof, none of which would be anywhere near 'fixed' by "taking up the shoulder seams by x inches". Further, not only would taking up the shoulder seam not fix the neckline, it could also shrink otherwise-okay armholes practically to sphincters, lift your waistline to your ribcage, your hipline to your waist, and your bust line into your armpits. There is no universe, friends, in which that kind of alteration would pass for an "improvement". Nada. Zilch.

In my universe, at least, there are, in fact, only two rules in alteration:

1. Do no harm (no more harm than already had been done by the presenting ill-fitting garment, I mean).
2. There are no formulae; the garment must fit better after the alteration than before, and we do what is necessary to that end.

Of course, if you can avoid alteration altogether by custom-drafting from scratch instead, choose that - garments always fit better if, from the start, they are made specifically for a particular wearer. But if you can't, then open your mind, think outside the box, and be prepared to try new ways to fix old fit issues. It's hard work, but it's good work, and worth it.

And here I must leave you for now, and return to Bucketmaking. I will be back soon with photos!!!

Collapsible Tote Update

The collapsible totes are sold. Thank you for buying them! And thank you to The Dreamer, the commenter who was kind enough to let me know I'd forgotten to actually link to my shop in that original post. Duh.  

Let me respond to the comments to my last post about the collapsible totes. People wanted to know all about the metal frame within the totes - what it looked like, where I got it, and so on. I am happy to share how I made my totes, of course. Unfortunately, I have nowhere to point you guys to as far as frame hardware goes. I essentially took apart a ready-made collapsible tote and used the frame. Not very exciting.

Apparently, these totes are everywhere, but I found mine in a local hardware store and took it home to use in the car. Then, because I didn't care for the boring-looking material it was made with, I thought I'd pretty it up with fabric on the outside. I hesitated initially because it was a LOT of work to unpick everything just to re-cover it, but it was the middle of winter and my house was a construction wreck and it wasn't as if there was a whole lot to do while waiting, so I figured . . . well.

Sorry I couldn't be of more help. Shoulda just mentioned all this in that original post but I didn't know if you guys might be as insane as I was to take apart a not-very-cheap store-bought tote just because you didn't like the fabric it was made of. But maybe we all are a little nuts, we DIY folks, huh? And clearly my own insanity knows no bounds because - looky - I made three of them. And not for the first time, too - some years back I did the same thing with the Reisenthel baskets with which I was so obsessed.

Anyway, here's one source I found online for you guys. And while searching online, I found evidence that they might have been available in stores like Costco and Sam's Club at some point (I haven't seen any there in the last 6 months). Also, it seems the totes come in multiple sizes, so check the dimensions to be sure you're getting the one you want. After that, it's just careful, careful seam-ripping to liberate the frame. While you're taking it apart, you'll probably be able to figure out the construction sequence, too. Good luck!

Collapsible Tote in Grey and White

It is sooooooo good to be making again!

Here is my latest project:

It is a tote.

For which I cut up my precious grey Orla Kiely stem fabric.

I've wanted to make this tote since I saw something similar in a hardware store earlier in the year. I sat on it, as I do with all my projects, and not only because the kitchen/house was a beast that had dominion over our lives till just recently. It was the fabric, see. It took some visualizing and strategic piecing, particularly with the large repeat print, and I wanted to put it off until I felt my brain could reliably handle the fabric layout with minimal wastage. You know how that is, right? Limited yardage, but the motif has to be dead-center and completely symmetrical and . . . well. Let's just say that you'd want all your wits about you when you tackle something like that.

Finished it at last, though. Very happy. Just in time for summer, too, when I can load it up with swimming things and head to the pool.

Let me walk you through it.

First, it's roomy. Like half-a-yard-long roomy. I put 8 bath towels in it without overflow.

See.

The inside is ripstop nylon so that it's lightweight and wipe-clean.

And it has pockets. 

Here's one - a zippered pouch for keys and money and such.

The other pocket is divided,

for phones and tall sticky-out-things like pens and grocery pads.

See.

And there is a wire frame in there, that locks in place to hold the bag standing up by itself,

and its mouth open so you can get stuff easily from inside.

But then the sides unlock and fold,

and the whole tote goes flat.

and is held in place with an elastic strap connected to the base.

Well of course I had to make more than one. 

All those totes, folded down to this:

Perfect for stowing in the trunk of the car, for when you make trips to farmer's markets and Costco.

Here's a shot of the base: blue ripstop nylon for a pop of color. The base has a rigid insert (some kind of particleboard) so it's really sturdy. And there are plastic feet to keep the ripstop nylon from contact with the ground. You can also see the elastic strap emerging from the short sides - when the tote is in use, the strap remains along the base, pulled taut between the plastic feet. When it's collapsed, that strap wraps around the top of the tote, as shown.

There's no particular reason for why I made these - sometimes it's just to see if I can make something (in this case, apparently, yes). I really only want to keep one tote, so I'm putting the remaining two in the shop for you to buy if you'd like to. The tote measures 19" x 12" x 13" (L X W X H) at the top, and you can find more detailed dimensions (base, pockets, etc.) in the item description in the listing.

Go here for the shop!