Wednesday, July 27, 2011

Boy Side or Girl Side?

I just finished my first quilt.

Insert happy dance here.

This was a project three years in the making. I first thought about doing it when I gave birth to Little Brother six years ago and started pulling out all the clothes that Big Brother had worn four years previously. I thought it would be neat to someday make a quilt out of my favorite outfits that they'd both worn.

And then, for the last three years I held out hope that I would have another child. Well, about eight months ago, I finally got to the point where I wasn't hoping for that anymore (hoping instead, dear God, puh-lease don't let me get pregnant again), and decided it was time to start cutting up the clothes. After I bought some new "tools," of course.


Now, I'm not going to give you any sort of tutorial, because I am NOT a seamstress. I made this quilt just like I make a lot of things: Decide what I want to do, jump in with both feet, eyeball things along the way, and hope they turn out. Instead, I'll just share the general gist of what I did.

Here are my squares.

I laid them all out...

Quite a few times...

Until I ran across this pattern, and decided I wanted to do something similar.

Here's my finished product (the boy side)

Then, on the other side (the girl side) I just pieced together a few really large pieces of material, most of which I already had on hand. I decided to do it completely different from the boy side, so that it would be more versatile.

Here's a close-up of some of the cut up shirts:

And the boys in some of those clothes (way back when).

Big Brother:

Little Brother:

Little Brother:

Big Brother:

So I kicked my old comforter - that used to be on the end of my bed - to the curb and replaced it with the new one. It's not perfect (FAR from it), but I made it, and it's got some great sentimental value to it. Can't beat that with a stick.

Tuesday, July 26, 2011

Sara's Medicine Cabinet

A couple months ago my friend Sara asked me to help her make a medicine cabinet for her bathroom. So I borrowed another friend's table saw (looove me some strong power tools - woot!) and we got to work.

She had this lovely mirror she found that she wanted to use as the front.


And we went to work crafting a box for the cabinet part. (Please ignore the fact that I'm not wearing protective eye gear. I never do. But you should. You definitely should. You can't tell, but I'm also barefoot. Is that a safety issue, too? I don't know, but I hate shoes. I only wear them when I absolutely have to. Sorry, rabbit trail).



Here's the final result hanging on her bathroom wall. Isn't it pretty? I love how it turned out!Once she got it home she attached the box to the wall, painted it silver, and hinged the mirror to the box.
Nice job, Sara! Thanks for letting me be part of the process!