Mending

Crafting and blogging don't pay the bills, so I have a job as an educator for a local school district.  Unfortunately, this coming year will be a challenging one.  I won't bore you with the politics going on in Wisconsin, but the end result is that my take-home pay has been sliced.  Badly.  And as the sole breadwinner in this family (my husband is a stay-at-home dad, another great occupation that doesn't pay bills) it's been causing me a lot of stress.  So I've been looking at ways to save money.

Unfortunately, over the past several months my son has developed the habit of chewing on the collars of his shirts.  His pediatrician and his dentist both have no idea why this is.  It seems to be an absent-minded habit at this point.  I started putting spray on his collars to deter him with a bad taste, but it was too late.  The necklines of several of his t-shirts had holes.  After taking a good hard look at his shirts, and a good hard look at my bank account, I decided to mend them instead of replacing half of his summer wardrobe.

I don't know how to mend...I actually had to look it up on YouTube.  It wasn't too tough, and now I'm pretty decent at it.  I worked my way through a small stack of his t-shirts this afternoon.  This was one of my first attempts.

Not perfect, but not too bad.  I think it'll be pretty inconspicuous on a moving five-year-old.  I also mended a dress of my daughter's...she got a hold of a pair of scissors and decided to "make a pocket." 

I also shortened the sleeves on one of my son's long sleeved t-shirts...his kindergarten class was painting one day and he got paint all over his sleeves.  It absolutely wouldn't wash off.  Why on earth would you give four and five-year-olds non-washable paint?  Anyway, my Singer 27 did a great job, as always.  I'm always a little surprised when I find it can sew a type of fabric that didn't exist in 1901 when it was manufactured.  But it actually did a better job than my modern machine did the last time I tried to sew knit.

I need to finish my mom's Carpenters Wheel quilt, but I'm itching to start a paper-pieced Mariner's Compass...I want a Mariner's Compass mini-quilt, and I already know just where I'll hang it.  I hope I can finish both soon!

Finished block

My finished bee block...I kind of love it. I may need to make a great granny square quilt!

Bee blocks, Mom's quilt, and oh yeah, I had a baby

I'm finally back on my sewing machine after a hiatus of over a month.  I had my baby!  She's beautiful and wonderful, and everything went great.  But the adjustment of going from a family of four to a family of five has been a challenging one and not much time was left for sewing.  Fortunately she's started taking longer naps, which means I can sneak downstairs with the other kids and get some sewing in.

My August bee block is underway!

I think this is the first block in the bee that I'm actually sad to mail off...I wouldn't mind keeping it!  I'm still working on piecing it together (and I actually made more progress since this photo was taken this afternoon) but I already really like it.  The colors are really pretty to me.  I hope the recipient likes it too.

I also got some work in on my mom's quilt.  I'm over a third of the way done quilting, and I'm going to show it to her this weekend.  Hopefully she'll like the direction it's going, since I don't want to rip out all of that quilting.

I also got an urge to start another mini-quilt...a paper pieced Mariner's Compass.  We'll see if I actually get around to doing it...I feel like I have too many WIPs, and I want to finish some before I start some more.

It feels so good to have my hands back in fabric and my feet back on my treadle.