A “before” photo: fabric washed and pressed for several different projects…some that are done, and some that are not yet.

I finally finished the project that I started at the class I took at the quilt show in Florida way back in November. Here’s a close up so that you can see just how small I learned to stitch:

This is why it took me so long to finish it. That’s the excuse I’m using, anyway.

Looking ahead, I’ve got some craft projects all lined up to take with me to Kabul. And because I like to keep things super-organized, I decided that I needed some way to keep all the supplies for each project together. So I started thinking about buying project bags, then decided why not just make them? And I happened to have some vinyl left over from the diaper bag, which made perfect windows to allow me to see what’s in each one!

Oh, how I love organizing…

I actually have a few other projects finished (or half-finished I should say, since they are just finished quilt tops), but no photos yet. It’s a rainy, dreary day here today, which does not make for good photos. You’ll just have to check back later!

Back when I was making bags professionally, I had many requests for diaper bags. Since I know nothing about babies, and therefore, nothing about diaper bags, I always told myself that was a specialty that I did not want to get into. So I turned down several special requests from friends. Saying no to friends is one thing, but when your little brother comes to you and says that the one thing he wants you to make is a diaper bag for his first baby…well, there’s no way I could say no to that.

His issue was that all the bags he and his wife were finding were either “too girly” or “too plain.” He really wanted something that he wouldn’t be embarrassed carrying, but was still a little fun. So when they came to visit over Christmas, I had him look through my fabrics and show me what he liked. My sister-in-law drew up a little sketch of the exterior for me (yes, she’s an arts-and-crafts type, too!) and requested a matching pacifier pod. (That one definitely required some research at the local Babies ‘R’ Us because I had no idea what she was talking about.) And I took their ideas and ran with it.

You can see the little pacifier pod sitting in front of the bag here – it has a strap so that it can be attached to the bag, or anything else, for that matter.

Originally, I hoped to find oilcloth to line the bag, but I couldn’t find anything that looked good. I ended up just making a base that I covered with clear vinyl, and also made the pockets out of vinyl. The rest is just lined with fabric – not so good for clean up. Later on in the process, I found a press on vinyl that you can put on any fabric to essentially make your own oilcloth. So I lined the bottle pocket on the exterior and the pacifier pod with that. I was kind of annoyed that I didn’t find this until I was already done with the bag’s interior…

I decided to go the extra mile and make a matching changing pad as well. It has its own pocket on the back of the bag.

Overall, I think it came out pretty well. Not bad for something that I said I would “never” make!

First of all, my brother and his wife have a baby on the way. The two of them are runners — they met on their college cross country team. So I knew the baby would need appropriate attire to attend the local high school’s track and cross country meets. Bleach pen plus onesie makes a quick and easy gift:

Then, I had seen this tutorial a while back for a tea wallet. Since my mom is a tea lover, I put together a matching tea wallet/mug rug set for her. (The embroidery designs are from Wild Olive.)

Finally, since I’d put all this work into making gifts, why not just make the packaging as well? This tutorial for drawstring bags is great, and super easy. I’m planning on making up a bunch in wine bottle size. Not only will it use up some of my fabric stash, but we often take bottles of wine as hostess gifts. Score!

This one is unrelated to Christmas, but I finally finished hand quilting a lap quilt I’d been working on for myself. The pattern is called “Kitchen Window” from this book by Elizabeth Hartman and I used up some scraps on the back, rather than buying more fabric.

Up next is a custom-made diaper bag for my brother to carry once their baby gets here. He requested “not too girly,” so he looked through my stash of bag fabric while he was here visiting for Christmas. I also got a knitting kit for a bag from my mom, so that will be something to work on soon. And of course, I’ve got several half-finished projects laying around!

Seeing a doctor in a foreign country is always interesting. I have a general distrust of US doctors, so that puts foreign doctors about one step above letting my Doberman give me medical advice. But the pain was so bad I just had to suck it up and go. I know plenty of people that have experienced mild problems with carpal tunnel, so I really already knew what the treatment should be: splint the wrist and rest. However, in my initial visit to the doctor here, I was given the name of a hand surgeon to take care of the problem. Yikes. (Take one look at that photo of surgery on the link above and you’ll understand why I’m going to go ahead and consider that a last resort — thanks, doc.)

So, taking my own advice, my wrist is showing improvement with splinting it at night and trying to use it less. The splint doesn’t bother me as much as not using it. I have not done any sewing in two weeks. That’s like a lifetime for me. Alterations (my job “on the side”) are piling up. Quilts are going un-quilted.  I find myself sitting and staring at the wall because I really don’t know what to do with myself if I can’t sew. I’ve never been a “sit and just watch tv” kind of gal.

I’ve promised myself that if I can make it through this weekend resting my hand, then start some basic hand/wrist/arm exercises next week, that I can sew to my heart’s content the following weekend. But can I really make it that long?

I scoured my pattern collection and came up with one pattern that I thought would work. (Unfortunately, I realized that my pattern collection is starting to look a little dated.) It’s New Look 6407 and I did a mix of views D and E:

It’s hard to tell, but it’s white with a light blue stripe woven into the fabric. And, yes, it still needs buttons.

So since my pattern collection offered nothing else suitable, I had to look elsewhere. I started online at Burda’s website. I’ve browsed there before, so I knew they had some good looking patterns. And a lot of them are free. But I was curious about this whole print a pattern at home thing. I decided to give it a try with their JJ blouse pattern. In order to print at home, you need a lot of paper (this one was 27 pages) and it’s meant to print on A4 paper, so you either need that, or legal size that you can then cut down to the correct size. I went with the latter option and then there was about an hour of trimming and gluing, until I got to this:

Look! A pattern! I didn’t bother to print out the instructions. A blouse is a blouse, right? And I can look them up online any time if I do need them. So I went ahead and put together a blue shirt in this pattern. The original called for a total of 6 ruffles, which I felt was a little excessive and might end up looking like a 1970′s prom tux shirt, so I just stuck with two.

So I didn’t get quite as far on this one. The good news is that this picture was taken Sunday evening, and I can report that the shirt now has sleeves and the ruffles are a little less out of control thanks to some hidden tacking stitches. Still no buttons, though.

And finally, I apparently decided I needed a real challenge. So I pulled out my Burda magazines from Ukraine to see what blouse patterns I could find. I found a cute one in the June 2007 issue and got to work. My Russian skills are a little rusty, so it took some translation assistance from Shawn. Here’s what I started with:

You can’t tell, but this sheet of paper is the size of my dining room table. And those are all the pattern pieces for something like 8 different patterns. There’s a complex system for figuring out which pieces go with which pattern. Well, probably not so complex if you’re doing this in your native language, but I did not have that luxury. Anyway, I finally figured it out, then realized that my instructions also told me to cut out 5 rectangular pieces in 3 different sizes. I almost had to call for translation reinforcement, but my sewing brain figured out that those must be the pieces for the sleeve bands, facing for the slit in the sleeves, and the ruffle around the collar. So after all this brainwork, this is as far as I got on this one:

Oh well, that will give me something to do next weekend.

When we arrived, we were pleasantly surprised by the furniture in our house. Most of it is relatively new, and it’s all stuff that we like. However, the curtains are horrible. Every single room has floor-length triple-pleated curtains covered in large flowers. Red flowers in the living and dining room, yellow flowers in the bedrooms, and brown flowers in the office. Yuck. I knew right away that they had to go. But it turns out that curtains are expensive, which probably explains why they haven’t been replaced before now. However, I scored a bargain find during a trip to the fabric store last week – fabric in the perfect color for the living room and on sale for $7.50 a yard. After a weekend of hard work, our living room looks much better.

I didn’t get a “before” picture (I think I was just too excited to get the new curtains up), but here’s the dining room. These are the same curtains that used to be in the living room. In fact, you can see the old curtains piled on the chair in the foreground.

And here’s the final product.

See? Much better. I measured the windows in the dining room this morning – there may be another trip to the fabric store in my near future.

Wow. I really digressed there. Anywho…the point of this little entry was supposed to be to show you what crafty goodness I’ve been working on. So let’s go.

I finally finished the quilt that I feel like I’ve been working on forever! It’s currently covering the bed in our guest room. I have a matching quilt top pieced, but my fingers need a break before I start quilting that one. Sometimes I wish I had a machine that could do the quilting for me, but that just doesn’t seem as special as hand quilted ones.

While trying to get this house organized, I also put together a set of bedside organizers from this book. They’re pretty spiffy – a set of pockets for each side of the bed. They’re connected with a piece of fabric that runs across the bed, under the mattress. Ingenious!

Shawn had requested a new bag for work that didn’t “look as girly” as my other bags. So after many discussions about color/style/features, I came up with this design for a Man Bag. He claims to like it so far. And it goes to work with him every day.

No photo, but a few days ago I made a pair of yoga pants using this pattern. I didn’t really check the measurements on the pattern to my body before I started, which was a little bit of a problem. I know it says it’s an “adult” size, but I would call it an “adult small.” So I ended up adding some gussets in the center front and center back seam after the fact. However, it is also important to remember that the fabric will stretch while you wear it. Which I learned when I wore the pants yesterday and they were practically falling off me by the end of the day. So I think there’s going to be a little more fidgeting with them – perhaps removing the gusset in the front (it looked a little weird anyway). Since I’m using my serger to do all this, it’s not really a big deal to make these adjustments. Overall, I really like the pattern and it’s a good way to use an old (extra large) t-shirt.

That’s all I’ve accomplished for now. As you can see, I was pretty excited to get my sewing machines back (in one piece!) after packing them up in April. But don’t you worry – there are more projects in the works.

(And Laika loves to help.)

Now that I am back in the US, I am happy to say that I’m able to sell my products online! Please visit my Etsy shop and see what I have available. Even better – everything’s on sale for the summer! I hope to be able to keep my shop open and offer shipping from Nassau, but that’s still not definite, so if you see something you like, now’s the time to get it.

These are all cottons imported from Japan. I din’t really have a project in mind when I bought them, but now I do and I’m thinking that I may need to go back and get the middle one in the pink/orange colorway as well. Hmm.

On Sunday, we headed out to Petrivka market. It’s basically an open air market where you can get anything from DVDs (bootlegged and legal) to stuffed animals to coffee grinders.  (Yes, we’ve purchased all of these things there.) There’s one fairly large corner that’s a used book market. After finding the sewing/knitting section, I picked up this beauty:

“100 Women’s Dress Styles” – printed in Minsk in 1960. The first 50 pages or so seem to be all about the crazy mathematics involved in making your own dress patterns. It seems pretty complicated, but I’m not sure if that’s because it is, or because it’s in Russian. But after that, it’s full of drawings of great dresses and what the corresponding pattern pieces would look like.

I love vintage dresses and this book’s got some great ones in it. So far I’ve enjoyed just sitting and looking at the pictures. Six bucks well-spent!

The fabric store I ended up at was a rather large one that a friend of mine pointed out to me soon after we moved here. However, I remember thinking that all the fabric there was overpriced and had not made a trip back. Apparently after living here for almost a year and a half, my perception of “overpriced” has changed. I found quite a few things that I liked that weren’t terribly expensive. Granted, not JoAnn’s bargain section priced, but not too bad. But I was on a mission. And fabric/notion shopping here isn’t exactly a one-stop sort of experience, so here’s how it went down.

First I find the fabric. I haven’t a clue what it actually is, but it’s a little shiny, a good color, has good drape, and comes from Japan (that much I could read on the label). Then I figure out how to get the attention of the guy behind the counter. There’s no moving the sample piece from the wall, so I point frantically and say “this” repeatedly until he figures out exactly what I want. He asks me how much and I tell him 4 meters. (I think I bought way too much, but I forgot to take into account that I’m using a pattern from the 1940′s and apparently fabric wasn’t as wide back then? Oh well, maybe I can make a camisole out of the leftovers.) Then I pay him and head upstairs – which actually involves going outside – to look for notions.

I take my bag of fabric to the woman behind the thread counter. She takes it from me and picks out thread that matches. That’s right, there’s no touching of the thread. I have to say, she did an awesome job, though. I suppose if that’s what you do all day, you get pretty good at it. So I pay her for the thread.

Then I take my fabric and thread and head to the zipper counter. I again hand my fabric over and manage to say “I want a zipper, but I don’t want to see it.” (This was the closest I could come to saying “invisible zipper” with my limited Russian. She seemed to get what I meant.) She pulls out the closest colors they have and shows me that they don’t have an exact match. But she’s nice enough to explain that there is another store across the street that sells a wider variety of zippers. So I take my fabric back and head to where she’s directed me.

Turns out it’s another “All for Sewing.” And this one’s the size of a closet. So I figure out what zipper I need and then stand back to see what the procedure is here. Unfortunately, there doesn’t seem to be one. So I push my way to the front and shout out what I need at the first available opportunity. My tactics work and my shopping is complete!

All of that took about an hour and a half. I’m so glad it went well, but I’m not sure if my nerves can handle another fabric shopping trip here any time soon. But that will give me a good excuse to “catch up” on buying new fabric when I get back to the US.