Monday, December 14, 2009

Giveaway!

Izzy & Ivy is having a fabulous giveaway!  Head over there to check it out. :)

They also have some cute ornament ideas. Great for last minute gifts!

Monday, December 7, 2009

Black and white and yellow all over!

We are all moved in, and now I'm in home dec mode!  I should be doing some Christmas sewing, but working on the house is just more fun.  My bathroom was the first room on my list to work on, probably because it needed the least amount of work!

Here's what I used:
1 twin bedsheet, $4 at WalMart
2 yards of a main print
1/2 yard of a coordinating print

Standard shower curtains are 72" x 72".  The bedsheet was about 66" x 90", or something like that.  I cut off 3 edges of the sheet, leaving the bottom edge intact (less to hem!).  I cut the sheet to about 60" tall and 72" wide.

Next I cut my 2 yards of fabric into 2 pieces 20" tall x WOF.  Piece these together along the 20" side and trim down to 72" long.

Lay the sheet down, lay the print fabric down, RST, with raw edges facing.  Pin.

Flip over the pinned piece and roll the bedsheet fabric up from the hemmed edge to the pinned edge.  Once it's rolled up, take the printed fabric and wrap it around the roll so that the other 72" long raw edge of the print is aligned with the pinned raw edges.  Repin.

Sew along the pinned edge.  Be sure to backstitch at the ends.

Here's where there's a little sewing magic ;)  Pull the bedsheet piece out of the tube that you just sewed.  Turn the tube right side out.  As my two year old would say, Ta-Da!

I pressed the seam and also topstitched, but the topstitching isn't necessary.

To finish the edges, I serged them and then turned them twice to enclose the stitching.  Sttich down to secure.

To create the holes at the top so that the curtain can be hung, I made buttonholes evenly across the top.  I did place the button holes so that the shower curtain entirely covered the plastic curtain, plus a little bit of extra along the top and sides.

I added a bow on the one side of the shower curtain, because I just love that coordinating print!  I think the bow was made from a 6.5" x WOF piece.



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For the curtain, I measured exactly how long and deep I needed to cover the entire rod.

I backed it with some broadcloth and added a ruffle along the bottom edge.  Because of the prints that I used, I felt that I needed a bit of separation between the main print and the ruffle, so I stitched down a black ribbon after the valance was complete.




I'm not quite done in this room.  I'm hoping to buy a cute vinyl cutout for the wall above the towel rack.  Probably something like this: http://www.vinylwallart.com/images/birdcage.jpg  But I'm still enjoying it, even in it's "not quite done" state. :)


Thursday, December 3, 2009

Twin quilts!

Some good friends of ours were blessed with twins!  They didn't want to know the babies' sexes until the birth, so that gave me a good reason to procrastinate on the quilts that I wanted to make for them.  Initially I had some gender neutral fabric picked out, but never got the motivation to start on them.  The babies arrived a few weeks early, a boy and a girl!  At that point, I tossed aside the idea of gender neutral.

I took a day trip to this shop and found some cute fabric for the quilts.  I used the same fabric line for both quilts-Vivian's quilt included mostly chocolate brown, pinks, and oranges, and Carson's quilts included mostly chocolate brown, greens, and blues.




I did some simple strip piecing, cut the strips to form square blocks, and twisted and turned the blocks until I found a layout that I liked.  I didn't want to go overboard on the twin theme, so I used a different layout for each quilt.  I intended for the quilts to be 36" by 42", but my half yard cuts were a little bit short.  They turned out to be 36" square, which I think is a just fine size for itty bitty babies to snuggle in!