Undercover

I've finished the baby blanket. An order came in for some small change purses due next month meaning I needed to finish up my current projects so the quilt was done yesterday. I just cut out the back fabric (hot pink really soft cotton flannel) and the quilt batting. Layer it with the right side out and the batting sandwiched in between and tacked all that together. Then I sewed a border around all four sides and quilted the whole thing and it was finished! The quilting was very simply done just quilted along the borders of each square so in all it took just a day. Yay!

Sling thing

I bought a length of fancy printed cloth to make this sling since I was in Tokyo. It was a designer's print, I can't seem to recall here name... Amy something... but the print is REALLY cute and I finally dragged out the fabric and made up this baby sling. Here's some pictures of my dog Taka test driving the sling. He's around 6 kilos and he didn't feel heavy at all. But then he would only stay in the sling for maybe 5 minutes at a time so I'm not sure if I'll be saying the same thing after half a day of lugging baby Red around...

balls of string

I was in the stationary store the other day and they had some strings with really cute wrappings.

I really love these Thai/Chinese packagings. They're usually printed on really primitive printing machines using these LOUD colours. They have a style all their own. They were about 15 baht a ball so I bought 2. I didn't really know what to make with them but thought I'd figure something out.

I knitted up a small sample and it knitted up pretty well creating a sort of candy cane stripey pattern. The fabric was firm and not scratchy. So I decided to try a hat pattern I'd been waiting to knit from Erica Knight's Baby Bloom book.

The little earflap hat. I added some scrap yarn I had left over from my natural dyeing class, and a wee bit of blue washi yarn, and it was quite pretty. The reddish pink is cochineal at 50%, the brown is walnut hull, yellow is jackfruit bark at 50% or 100% and mordanted with alum (I'm not sure, need to check my dye log to be sure.) Green is... I think some kind of fresh leaf, but extracted using the alkaline method so it's really really bright green. I didn't dye this green, a classmate gave it to me as a sample.

Yeah, when there's not a yarn shop in sight you just have to make do. I'll see what other things I can find to knit with.

Layout

Something was begging to be started yesterday. I didn't feel like making more diapers, I'll admit it: I'm a project juggler. I have to have at least two big projects up in the air or I loose steam. I can't go on pounding out diapers, I needed something a bit different for a few days and then I'll go back to making those lil poopers.

So I dug around in my drawer of scraps and pulled out some black silk I had left over from making a jacket and a bunch of scrap kimono cloth I squirreled away. Actually, I'm a huge kimono scrap hoarder. I buy little bits of 100 yen scraps and use them for crafting, they're cheap and you wind up with so many cute little patterns. But these were the ones I loved the most. These were the pieces I hid away and dreamt up projects I would someday use them in, the ones I pulled out to drool over when I had time. They aren't expensive or anything but something about the patterns on each one had a special appeal for me. I've finally found a project for them.

I arranged and re-arranged them on a tabletop, this took like half a day. And this is the result:

A baby quilt.

I pinned them down,ironed and hand stitched them in place with a plain ol' running stitch and right now I'm going to applique them in place with black thread. After that the quilting.

Here's another pic that isn't so blurry. But the layout isn't the one I ended up using.

Diaper update

Here are some finished pics of the cloth diapers.



This is a diaper folded up and ready to go.



Pic of leg detail, the elastic creates a sort of border that helps the poop or pee stay in.



These are the ones I've finished.

Up to my ears...

in diapers. I need to make at least 12 diapers in sizes newborn, small, and large. That's the least I need, if I wanted to be more realistic I'd make 24 in each size, but I'd rather fool myself and remain sane. I've cut out all the tiny little newborn size diapers and their lining, and their soakers.


I got these patterns from mama bird's free diaper pattern at http://www.geocities.com/rew4birth/Diapers.html I think they work pretty well. I'm using the Mr.'s old t-shirt for material so it's almost all organic cotton and is soo soft. I managed to sew up and finish a few yesterday, pics of that coming soon.

(Come to think about it, I'm glad I started writing this blog again, it keeps me from shoving these tiny lil' monsters in people's faces and going 'LOOK LOOK aren't they CUUUUTE?! and they're so TEEENY!!!' yeah, they're cute, they're a lot of work, but I don't want my family to kick me out yet.)

As for unpacking and moving in, here is how the shelf looks now. My room is almost rid of the damn paper boxes. Yay!

Well, so much for good intentions...

I gotta say, I've been meaning to add to this blog for a long long while but I kept putting it off. Why? Because I was moving, and pregnant. Yep. I've recently moved back to Bangkok from Tokyo. The first few months of the pregnancy were very, um sleepy? I don't know how to explain it, but those of you who have been pregnant will probably understand. I just was really unmotivated and felt like sleeping all. the. time. Top that off with the class exhibition I was having at Tokyo Textile and I just fell right off the blog wagon.

Fast forward to today. I'm seven months along with a whole room of stuff I can't find places for. But we're about halfway settled in and I'm finding I have more time so I figured I'd give this blog thing another shot. I still want this to be a kind of log book for all my crafting endeavors. so to start off I'm going to put up a pic of how my crafting stuff look like now:



I'm having a hard time just looking at it. The other half of the room is a mess as well. I'm thinking about sewing up some big bin-like bags to store all the yarn in and take it from there. Let's see if posting it up here keeps me motivated.