Sherlock Wallpaper Skirt

Hello, there! I've been tremendously absent, haven't I? Well, I finally made a thing.

I started watching BBC's Sherlock last fall, and we finished up season 2 a couple weeks (I guess?) before the new season premiered on January 1. And uh, then I got on Tumblr, and then I watched season 3, and uh... let's just say almost all my free time in the last 6 months has been taken up by watching, reading about, or thinking about BBC Sherlock .

Oh, and also occasionally crafting about it. Fandom crafting has always been my favorite. I get very inspired, and it helps me deal with my overwhelming feelings of love and devotion. I've got 1960s Batman-themed jewelry that you've never seen. It can get quite serious.

So I saw a photo of a lady at a Sherlock fan con wearing a skirt that looks vaguely like the one I'm about to show you, and I was like, "OMG this is what I need. I must have it. And oh yeah, Spoonflower exists, and I can get fabric printed with pretty much any pattern I can imagine, BLESS."

Ta da!

It's lined. The waistband is made of part of an old t-shirt I had.

I didn't use a pattern (I hate patterns). I measured based off another skirt I have, and then did some very sketchy geometry that I then had to amend once I had the fabric all laid out because I'd done some of it wrong. That's pretty much how I roll when crafting, you may have noticed.

It's got yellow graffiti, like the wall in 221B.

[Except I did SH+JW instead of a smiley face because those two idiots are in love and they're going to grow old together and be happy forever. ::cough::]

I'm quite proud of myself.

When Hoarding Pays Off

Before we moved across country, I got rid of a lot of fabric.  Most of my collections of denim and felt went, as did a bunch of my cotton fabric, fleece, and flannel.  But I refused to get rid of a single swatch of my corduroy.  I kept all of it.  There is a lot.  Right now it's all stuffed into three under-the-bed containers.

A good deal of the more interesting stuff came from a garage sale in Minnesota (I lived there for a summer once -- long story).  I've got some really awesome vintage prints.  I used them to make this and this and this. 

And now these!

I bought Lucy a bunch of pants at a school rummage sale, but I didn't realize that the knees of the khaki corduroys were nearly worn through! 

So now they're girly but not too girly, which is my favorite way for girls' clothes to be!

And that's why we keep even the tiniest scraps of awesome vintage printed corduroy.

(PS - If you want to patch pants without iron-on stickiness, you're gonna want to use a stitch like #1 here.  It's super sturdy!)

Is There a Doctor in the House??

Why yes, yes there is!

Last Tuesday, the man of the house defended his dissertation, which, aside from some paperwork, makes him officially a Doctor of Philosophy in the area of Economics. Woohoo! It's been a semi-long 5 years. I'm so proud of him. He's worked hard, and he's the first in his extended family to hold any kind of advanced degree (as far as anyone can remember).

So of course this occasion called for crafting! I had a vague idea that I needed to make him a t-shirt (my go-to gift of choice for him) that had something to do with the current incarnation of the Doctor from Doctor Who. In my head, it had a bow tie, suspenders, and the words "Trust me, I'm a Doctor" on the front (all stenciled on).

Well then I went to Hobby Lobby to find a tan/khaki t-shirt (which is approximately the color of the 11th Doctor's shirt). They don't carry them! Frustration. So then I had to drive to WalMart. They didn't have any tan or khaki ones loose, so I settled for like a dark heather tan in a package with 3 other shirts. In my frustration and haste, I failed to notice that they all had pockets until I got home. That threw a major kink in the suspenders part of the plan. But I quickly recovered when I realized I could make do by stenciling a sonic screwdriver into the pocket! I also decided to move the lettering to the back.

But that necessitated another trip to Hobby Lobby to buy metallic fabric paint for the screwdriver, and it required me to somehow come up with a decent, tri-color sonic screwdriver stencil. And I'm really not artistic like that. I have no sense of perspective in 2-D. It's really bad. I eventually did the best I could by trying to keep it as simple as possible.

Photos!

[You can't really see the sonic screwdriver very well. That's just as well, really. But it does glow in the dark!]

[The back!]

Halloween 2010 (aka Year of the Internet Meme)

Lucy loves music. Lucy loves music so much. She's always asking to listen to music or watch her Nick Jr. shows that are full of music or watch her playlist of YouTube videos. Or she's playing our full-size guitar and singing.

That's part of why I decided that for her second Halloween on the outside of me, she should be a Double Rainbow. (If you don't know about the Double Rainbow video, you probably spent the summer in a foreign country.) Cheap and easy to make, easy to wear, easy to store. Perfect.

Here's how I did it:

I bought a plain white, long-sleeve shirt in her size at WalMart ($3.50 plus tax).

I took my ridiculous collection of Sharpies (I own about 50 different Sharpies) and picked out 7 rainbow-y colors.


I put cardboard inside the middle of the shirt and the sleeves. Then I drew two rainbows -- one along both sleeves and across the front, one just on the torso. Then, just for good measure, I also wrote "So Intense!" underneath. [I realized later that I'd actually done it wrong -- the top part of a double rainbow is a mirror image of the bottom part. Oops. Science FAIL!]


The idea was for the shirt to look kind of like one of those gosh-awful airbrushed t-shirts that you bought when you were 9 on your family summer vacation to Florida in 1993. In order to achieve that, I took some rubbing alcohol and some cotton balls and dabbed rubbing alcohol all along the rainbows and wording. This made the Sharpie run a little and gave it that airbrushed looked.


I let it dry, then ran it through the dryer. Then I tested it with a little water to see if the colors were going to run. They were, so I ironed the shirt on high heat. Then I threw it in the laundry and hoped for the best. The Sharpie didn't really bleed onto the other laundry, but by the time the shirt came out of the laundry again, it had faded a little.

But then it turned out like this! Pretty much exactly what I was going for.

[Double Rainbow with her aunt.]

After I decided Lucy would be a Double Rainbow, I started wondering if Norman and I could dress up as internet memes as well. A short trip to Hobby Lobby and some duct tape later, and:

[Antoine Dodson, Double Rainbow, and Cigar Guy]

We're pretty proud of ourselves.

Baby Legs!

OK, so I think technically "Babylegs" is a brand name. Oops. They're just baby leg warmers. But since I hate most everything about the 1980's as a decade, I refuse to call them leg warmers. See, that was the last time.

I made some for Lucy using this tutorial. So easy. So easy.

I bought three pairs of ladies' socks at Michaels for $1 each. Such a steal.

I had made her a pair of argyle ones out of one of my gazillion pairs,

but they're a little long.

They're really great for keeping Babby's legs warm (duh), and for keeping her socks on, since she doesn't wear shoes yet.

(I'm kind of opposed on principle to non-walking babies wearing shoes. But there's not a sharp non-walking/walking line. She's definitely walking, she just has to be holding on to furniture to do it, and she doesn't do it outside. Hmm... Time to hit up the thrift stores!)

This kid just doesn't sit still.

Ah, there we go. Asleep.

My Mike Hat

Today is October 15, 2008. And it's finally cold. Mmmm... Cold weather is my favorite. A friend offered to bring me food for dinner, but I told her that I wanted to go out so I could get all bundled up. She thought that was weird.


I made this hat going on 3 years ago. Even though I don't like knitting, I really wanted a hat just like this, so I suffered through it and got it done.

The hat makes me so happy. Today I got it out of its drawer, put it on my head, and sighed. My head just feels better when the hat is on it. Perfect.


And now, some history.

Mike Hat Retrospective:

Engagement -- Dec 15, 2005


Christmas in Minnesota -- 2005


Pizza -- March 12, 2006


Silly married people -- Jan 21, 2008

First Dress Ever

Some of you may find this hard to believe, but before last week, I had never sewn a dress before, let alone from a pattern. So some may wonder, "Jessie, why did you agree to make a dress for another person for money?" Well... I'd made skirts from patterns before. And boxer shorts. I know how patterns work (frustratingly, sometimes). And there are instructions, so how bad could it be?

Well, the truth is, not that bad. It took me just over 11 hours to make a dress, bonnet, and pinafore for a young Prairie Girl Halloween costume. Not too shabby, really.

There was only one real snafu, but it was easily remedied. I ignored the instructions on how to cut out some of the pieces for the dress, thinking, "That's really complicated, and I have plenty of fabric left!" I forgot that I still needed to cut out the pieces for the bonnet out of the same fabric. So I didn't have enough fabric for the bonnet ties. So I substituted some ribbon I had, which I think is cuter anyway. :-)

Photos!




Oh yeah, and I'd never made a button hole before either. It's amazingly easy to do on my beautiful Bernina 830.


Bonnet (modeled by my broken clothesline).


That's the bottom of the bonnet -- it has a bow on the back, and you can see the makeshift ribbon ties.

There's no photo of the pinafore because I made the whole thing in one 3 hour stretch late Saturday night. It's a lovely shade of light blue.

Then I had a dream about pinning fabric in my sleeping. It was weird.

So there you have it. On the job training -- the best kind!

Costumes

And now, I give you Halloween 2007:




Pam Beesly as a Cat (I had a tail, you just can't see it...)


Three Hole Punch Jim Halpert

One for me, one for you...

Two tablecloths from eBay, now two skirts. This one turned out soooo much better than I expected it would. I inherited this really wide stretchy lace stuff from my great-grandma, so I deciced I would try to use it as a waistband, ala the t-shirt material people use for the same purpose on Craftster. Oh did it ever work. The skirt can be worn high or low, and since it was a square tablecloth, it's all gypsy and pointy at the bottom. This one is for you. It's for sale at my Etsy shop.



This, however, is the reason I bought the lot of tablecloths in the first place. This tablecloth was destined to be a skirt from its creation. I mean, look at it. I decided to put a zipper in it instead of an elastic waistband so it would be longer. The trim on the bottom used to be major fringe, but I sort of cut it off. Which left some other trim. I can't really describe the process, but that extra trim is also for sale at my Etsy shop. But this skirt isn't. To quote Dr. House, "It's mine. You can't have any."

"We named the monkey Pants..."

I free-handed the guitar logo. :-)



Finished the Monkee pants. :-D