You will need:
- a scrap of fabric
- a wooden cut out
- glue gun
- pin back
- scissors
- Modge Podge or white glue

Trace your wood shape on the wrong side of your fabric. If you have a special part of the pattern you want to capture make sure you’ve placed it in the right place.

Spread Modge Podge on the wooden piece. Cut out the fabric and place it on.

Plug in your glue gun and add your pin back with a little blob of hot glue. You may need to trim excess fabric from places with small scissors or an exacto knife.

Next have someone around to take a finished photo for you because propping a camera up on items and hoping for a good shot is very hit and miss.

You get the idea.

Sometimes we all need a little nap and this sleep mask will help you have a restful slumber.  All while looking pretty stinking cute!

My husband and I take turns having a ‘sleep in day’ on the weekends.  I have to tell you I count down to that day every week.  I started to use a sleep mask to maximize my sleeping in experience.  It was just a silly freebie one from one of our airplane trips and I’ve already had to repair it a few times so I decided to just make a much lovelier one.

Here’s what you’ll need for this DIY project:

- SleepMask

- batting or fleece

- fabric for the backing (something you won’t mind against your skin while sleeping)

- fabric scraps at least 4 inches in height

- 16 inch piece of elastic

- usual sewing items, thread, machine, scissors

- embroidery floss and needle (optional)

I manged to find some Goldilocks and Three Bears fabric in my stash so I was a bit fussy with the placement of the pattern.

We’re going to use quilting techniques to piece the scraps together.  Think about how you’ll want your pieces positioned if you have a particular pattern you want to highlight and place the next print at the edge of the first print with right sides together.  Sew down the edge, seam allowance isn’t really that important just make sure you have a straight stitch.  My Goldilocks print was uneven so I lined up the brown swirly print to create a straight edge.

Add the next fabric print just like you did before.  Right sides together and sew down in a straight line.  Continue attaching pieces of fabric until you have a piece that measures at least 8 x 5.  My last piece is lower because I was lining up the print in a certain way.  Plus this way I’ll still have some usable scraps left over!

Now take your printed template and trace the mask outline onto your little quilted bits.

Cut along the outline.  Lay your cutout right side up on top of your batting.  It’s not important to trim it down just yet, we’ll do that in a few steps.  Add some stitches just to the right and left of your seams.  This is a fun little decorative detail and will help hold the inner batting in place.  I stuck with my cream coloured thread but you could use matching thread, or something crazy and contrasting.

I decided to get even more creative and stitched ‘Shh!’ onto my mask.  If you’d like to add any embroidery stitches to your mask do it now.  Draw on the design with a water soluble or disappearing fabric marker.  Stitch through the 2 layers.

Now trace the template onto your backing fabric.  Cut it out.  Place your quilted fabric with the batting side on your work surface.  Next put the elastic piece down with about 1/2 inch sticking out over the edge of the mask cutouts.  Place the backing piece on top right side down.  The elastic will be sandwiched between the 2 pieces of fabric.  Pin the elastic ends in place.  Make sure the pin is going through all the layers.

With the wrong side of the backing facing you sew around the entire mask outline with a 1/4 inch seam allowance.  Backstitch over the elastic bits for some extra stability.  Leave an opening about 1 inch in length for turning.  Trim the excess batting away.  I usually make sure to leave a little bit at the opening just to make sure it will close when topstitching.  You should be left with something like this.  Make sure the elastic wasn’t caught up in any of the stitching.

Turn the mask right side out.  Use something pokey to make sure it’s pushed out all along the edges, I use a chopstick.

Once it’s all turned out you can give it a quick press to get the edges all nice and flat.  Then topstitch all around the entire mask fairyly close to the edge with an even border.  Again, make sure you aren’t catching the elastic while stitching.

And you’re done!  Enjoy the many extra hours of sleep protected from the sun’s evil “I’m here to wake you up!” rays.

It’s really hard to take a picture of yourself pretend sleeping, but that’s authentic bedhead and sleepiness.  Sadly, the sleep mask won’t stop your children from jumping on you and waking you up.

So I finished my lovely little sewing kit thingie, thanks to Rashida’s tutorial.

Some things were confirmed with this little project.
1. I deviate from patterns, constantly
2. Taking photos in natural light is getting impossible this time of year.
3. Now that my work days have shifted, working all day Thursday is really cutting into this feature.
4. Me and snaps don’t get along.

I cheated and used my machine to sew up the sides, I was too tired and short on time to hand stitch it.
I also wish I’d used my cute Japanese fabric where the pink fabric is instead. That too tired thing got in the way of thinking clearly I think.

For my next trick I’m going to make this camera strap from lgb. Not only does it use up scraps and make your camera look fun it’s got a little pocket for your lens cap which I sooo need.

Join me if you like, your assignement is due next Friday. If you’re too busy, lazy, uncrafty, or tired to whip one up you can just click and order one here.

Sharing links if you’ve played along, or sewn on in the past, on Fridays is always welcome! Or you can add to the currently pretty empty Flickr group I created.

Now that it’s back to school time things are a little busier in our house. I’m a teacher and with 1 in SK and having to get the kids out the door and over to the sitter I can use some help. This year I work in the mornings and not being a morning person doesn’t help when I have to get 3 people ready and out the door.

I usually lay out all of our clothes the night before and now I’ve come up with a handy little DIY that can help us all do it for the whole school week!

You will need:
Fabric for the tote bodies (you will be cutting 10 8×8 pieces)
Contrasting fabric for cutting the letters (I used a charm pack I had lying around)
Ribbon for the handles
Heat and Bond (really helpful but not necessary)

The first step is to cut your letters. I was planning on getting all fancy and cutting mine with my Cricut but I decided to just give it a go and do it by hand. Once I saw the size of my letters I decided that 8×8 would be a good size for the tote bags. I have 2 little boys so I’m only tossing some socks and underwear in there. If you have girls and might be including hair accessories or tights you may want to make your totes a tad bigger.

Cut your 8×8 tote pieces, set aside. Cut Heat and Bond as backing for your letters. This product saves a lot of time and allows you to just iron on your letters rather than having to sew them all around. If you like the look of stitching on top you can still do that of course, the Heat and Bond just makes extra sure those letters aren’t fraying or budging!
Iron the letters onto the bag tote front pieces. So 5 will get letters, 5 will stay blank.

Now you’ve got 10 squares of tote worthy fabric. We need to hem the top edge. So turn the fabric down to make a little hem, I did about 1/2 inch, press and sew.

At this point you could make yourself handles using coordinating fabric but I looked up and my ribbon collection was staring back at me so I choose to go to the easy route. Attach the ribbon slightly off center on the tote pieces. So sew it left of the center line on one piece and right of the center line on the other. If you lay it all out it will look like mine.

So you’ve created a loop to hang over the hanger.

Place the tote pieces right sides together and stitch around the 3 raw edges. And you are done!
If you happen to have some of those hangers from the store lying around you can use those to hang a top and bottom and then slip a handy little tote with the right day of the week on it over the hanger, fill with needed accessories, in my case socks, underwear and a diaper.

Hang in a handy spot (like on my linen closet door) and you’re ready to go!

Oh and keep the empty ones in a safe place. This picture is moments after Nate saying ‘Thanks Mom’ and wandering off with the Tuesday-Friday totes.

I figured it was time to say so long to my ‘hello’ door decoration and break out some pretty fall stuff. Here’s the problem with being craft, I’ve already got a fall wreath I made a while ago (my first post!), but an idea was sparked when I saw Elsie’s garland tutorial a little while ago. If you’d like to make one of these here’s what you’ll need.

I fully intended to make Elsie’s garland and just wrap it around a yarn covered wreath. But then I wanted to be a little different and thought that the leaves looked like bunting this way and I liked that better.

I was hard to get a shot without falling off my porch or having my reflection in the glass, so I chose the lesser evil and there I am in the window.

The best part is I used pins to hold the yarn on and the leaf bunting, so it’s super easy to move things around, reuse the yarn covered wreath or pull everything off and start all over.

I’m thinking of posting sewalong items on Fridays. So I’m here to announce what I’ll be working on this week and I’ll be back Friday to do a reveal. If I happen to be bad and have an incomplete project I’ll just write about it anyway!

So that said I’m going to cheat a bit and share something I’ve already tackled recently and then propose the next item. I’ll also have to work on a cute little button, and a Flickr group I suppose . . . oh so many things to do.

Ok so I loved this fun clutch from I Think Sew. I also own this, this and this so I’m sure those will pop up in this challenge. There are also a bunch of free patterns, I think you get once you sign up, it’s been a while.

I had this great nautical fabric with little blue anchors and red hearts that I was dying to sew into something.

This pattern was great and easy to use. I’m not a pleat expert and it did a good job of explaining how to fold and lay them and I’m happy with the results. It offers options to have a wrist strap or handles which is neat too. I love the finished look with the top panel and then the pleates bottom underneath. It also comes with the patterns for a large and small clutch.

I had one surprise this with pattern, which I suppose would have been avoided if I had stopped to really, really think about it. I made the small clutch because I didn’t want what looked like a giant bag in the photo. But, turns out the ‘small’ is also gigantic! I made it with a wrist strap and there’s no way you could ever walk around with this dangling from your wrist it’s nearly the length of my entire thigh! It would make a great large makeup case, or for your brushes and hair things while travelling.

Since I love the fabric I plan on turning it back wrong side out and sewing around a tad smaller to try to scale it down.

So onto my first *real* selection in this fun sewalong game. Let’s be crazy and go for the wallet. Available here in NapKitten’s store (I made another purchase just going to get the right links)

Some tips before you start: she recommends ‘duck canvas’ to make the wallet sturdy and heavy. At my local fabric store the sales lady suggested just some denim. She said she had tried to make a wallet before and it gets really thick once you’re sewing all the layers together. Since this one is all held with bias tape she suggested a strong needle because we’ll be sewing through so many layers. I picked up some remnant/end of bolt denim for super cheap.
I’ve never made bias tape so this will be new for me. There’s also A LOT of cutting involved in this pattern. There is no pattern as all the shapes are rectangles so she just tells you the sizes. She also suggests you cut as you go so as not to get confused by all the pieces. I would say this pattern, just from glancing at it, seems to be for someone pretty familiar with sewing or comfortable taking on a challenge.

Ok, I hope someone joins me! Let me know in the comments if you are.

In more funner news, later this month, the 20th to be exact I’ll be posting a great keeping organized for school tip over at Meremade. Starting tomorrow Jennifer is going to be featuring a load of ideas for back to school crafty fun.

Mine will be awesome, just a heads up. It also posts on my birthday which makes it super-duper cool.

Well I’m off to prepost some more . . . posts. Not only do me and my son go back to school today but we’ve flipped our schedule from last year and we go in the mornings this year, something we’re not used to. AND my hubby is going away tomorrow and will be back Sunday night! I’m going to be one sleepy mommy this week. So I’m cheating on my posts. It’s for the best really, otherwise who knows what I’d be writing about!

No clue what they’re for but they were really cute, and $18. Of course I did one of those, “We can totally make that” things and took a sneaky photo of them. We went and bought some felt that night and then we got crafty while we were away at the cottage. Using some felt, embroidery floss and 2 buttons, here’s what we came up with.

We cut all the shapes by hand, it probably would have been easier with some sort of Cricut type thing, but whatever. We stitched it by hand, almost entirely. I used my machine to sew the green bits on the belly so they’d be stuck on well. We were going to get ambitious and knit or crochet the legs but didn’t have the right supplies at the cottage. My friend decided not to put legs on her owl at all, just attach the feet, and I used some fabric and made some little legs instead of the HUGE ones on the Pier One owls.

Here’s a sketch, because I have yet to learn how to do pattern pieces all fancy like, of all the bits you need if you want to give this a try yourself. I’m all about putting your own spin on crafts so it’s measurement free, my owl is about 10 inches tall (legs not included.

1. Eye flower cut 2 (shape can be different)
2. Outside eye circle cut 2 (should be a circle, I used pinking shears to give it a fun edge)
3. Beak cut 1
4. Owl body cut 2
5. Face, base this on the size of your body piece. Cut 1.
6. Wings (optional, my friend didn’t make any) Cut 4.
7. Belly piece, this is hidden once the owl is all done but it’s there under the ‘feathers’. Cut 1
8. Feathers cut enough to cover piece #7, my owl has 12.
9. Feet cut 4.

Assembly

1. Sew the buttons on the eye flower pieces with the white circles behind
2. Sew the white circles to the face piece with a contrasting thread and some fun stitches.
3. Sew the face piece to the owl body, sew the beak on as well.
4. Attach the belly piece to the owl and cover it with the feathers, staggering them a bit.
5. Stitch the 2 body pieces together, leaving the bottom open. Mind are stitched with embroidery floss showing on the outside. You can stitch it right sides together on a sewing machine and turn it if you’d like. I was going for a more rustic look.
6. Stuff your owl.
7. Stitch the wings together, leaving a small opening and stuff them. Attach to the body.
8. Cut 2 pieces of fabric, mine were about 3 x 8 and fold and stitch down the long edge, turn the tube rightside out and stuff.
9. Stitch the feet together, leaving a small opening, stuff and stitch closed. Attach to the legs.
10. Tuck the legs into the opening at the bottom of the body and stitch it up!

I cut off all the icky wire bits and filled all the holes that were left behind. There were still some rough parts, thanks to all the holes and the ugly curly design that I tried to fill. I took it to the cottage with me hoping for some quiet time to finish it. And lo and behold!

I hammered some nails into the front, I wanted a rustic sort of look. I used my pinking shears to cut out some triangles from fabric scraps and put some batting on the back for stability. I stitched letters to spell out ‘hello’. I was going to go with ‘welcome’ but ‘hello’ is more me. I folded the top of the triangles over a string of baker’s twine and stitched closed. Then I wrapped the twine around the nails and trimmed the ends. Voila!

I added picture hanger loopy things on the back and used some more twine to hang it on my front door. Like a wreath, but square and waaaay more cute. The weather has been sort of silly here so I’ve given up on a good action shot of that and went ahead and shared.

We’ve been making the switch to glass and stainless steel lunch containers. Both my school and my son’s school push for the whole literless/boomerang lunch thing. Bomerang lunch basically means if you send it in packaging or it creates some sort of garbage they’re going to send it back home to you. Strangely we teacher folk are free to load up the garbages at school with our lunch litter but I’m trying desperatly to avoid that. Hence my binge to create some snack pouches!

Now I created a few for my son and I’m going to show you how to make some yourself. I was really hardcore with his and used parts from one of my hubby’s practically new shirts. Somehow he got a weird big circle stain on it right in the front and tossed it into the donate pile. I rescued it.  Oh, lookie a Mabel’s Label.

I also tried to use fabrics I had on hand and chose some of the bright colourful kid prints I have to jazz the pouches up a bit. There some debate online about materials to use for the inside and what is and isn’t food safe. To just avoid having to buy something or find out later what I chose was wrong I’m sticking with cotton fabrics. If you plan on carrying something that could get things wet I suggest adding a layer between the inner and outer cotton pieces to help prevent everything else in your bag getting soaked. Cutting up a freezer bag would work great for this and you could probably get a few out of just one.

You will need:

- lining fabric 4 1/2 x 6ish

- printed fabric for outside about 4 1/2 x 3 1/2

- plain fabric for outside 4 1/2 x 3 1/2

- 4 inch length of velcro, hook & loop piece

- strip of fabric to make tabs

Pin the 2 outside fabric pieces right side together and sew together. I use 1/4 inch seam, or slightly less.

Unfold the pieces and press the seams flat.

Stich on the rightside of the fabric to each side of the seam.  This will help reinforce where the fabrics are joined and adds a nice little decorative stitch.

Because I repurposed an existing garment I didn’t have to make my own little tabs but if you do it’s really simple.  Take 2 pieces of fabric shaped like rectangles and fold it in half so it’s a long piece and then sew down the edge. Turn it right-side out and you should have a nice long thin rectangle.  If you want the little decorative top stitch mine has you can just do a straight stitch down one side.  Trim one tab so it’s slightly shorter than the other.  I’ve found it’s easier to separate them when opening the pouch.

Fold your tab piece in half and sandwich it between your lining and outside piece, placed right sides together.  Sew through all 3 pieces.

You should now have this sort of looking thing, with your tab sticking up.  Now position the velcro about 1/4 – 1/2 inch from what will be the top of your pouch.  Stitch along at least the top and bottom of the velcro, you can do the sides too if you like.  Secure the velcro on the opposite side of the pouch, measuring them against each other to get the positioning correct.

Fold the pouch over completely so the outside is outside and you’re looking at the lining.  Press to get a nice clean edge and then topstitch along near the edge of the pouch.  This will create a nice finish stitch on the inside and outside and reinforce the tab.

Once you’ve completed all these steps for both sides you should be left with something that looks like this.

Place the 2 pieces with the outsides together and stitch all the way around 3 unfinished sides.  This would be a great place to use a serger if you have one.  I don’t so I just went back and did a zig zag stitch just beside the straight stitch and then trimmed the fabric really close to the stitching.

These are really fun and easy to make.  It’s a great way to use up some scraps.  I’m thinking of making them to use as loot bags for my son’s birthday party this year, then the kids leave with some goodies and a fun little reusable snack pouch.  Since things will only be in there a few hours I’m not worried about them getting stale but if you were, or plan to put wet-ish snacks in there, then you can put a water resistant lining between the fabrics.

Also, I’m going to tease you with a little fun embellishment you could add to these.  You’ll have to come back tomorrow for the full explanation.  All I can say now is it involves a guest post and it will kill you with cuteness.