Upcycled denim laptop sleeve: Want one?

When I first started using a laptop, we were living in Hawaii.  I bought a yard and some of denim to wrap around the laptop to keep it safe, figuring someday I’d make a proper case.  “Someday” arrived 5 years later when Caitlyn started attending preschool, and I started carrying the laptop to the local coffee shop 3 days a week. It became clear pretty quickly that a length of fabric wasn’t going to really do the job.  The quilted sleeve I designed and sewed up is still my laptop sleeve.  It’s a little weathered around the corners, but I …

May’s report

It’s official: individual detailed reports of what I’ve been doing are completely beyond my capacity at the moment. So, here’s the overview of what we did in May: We joined some friends at LUCO‘s Chamber Music Cabaret. There was a piccolo trio, and Caitlyn got pulled from the audience to read raffle ticket winning numbers. Caitlyn and I joined some of our homeschool friends for another field trip to a farm. This time we drove across the mountains to Little Wing Farm where we spent the day touring the orchards and generally traipsing around. Caitlyn has been having a digression …

Marching By

Things that happened in March: Caitlyn played two roles, Mellifleur and Maudlin, in Robin Hood, her latest theatre production at Youth Theatre Northwest. She’s looking forward to Alice@Wonderland in the summer. I finally managed to meet one of our homeschool goals, getting Caitlyn and I to SAM for Free First Thursday. This time we saw the Miró exhibit. Now, I just have to do it again! The peas came up. We saw a presentation of National Geographic Live: The Secret Life of Wolves. Caitlyn cried at the end. I joined the Seattle Modern Quilt Guild, my first quilt guild membership …

Sew Grateful Giveaway: Thai silk

Hooray! It’s Sew Grateful Week, the annual event launched by Debi of My Happy Sewing Place, and today is Giveaway Day. I’m grateful that I have time to sew, even if I sometimes don’t think I do. I’m grateful for all the people out there who post tutorials, patterns, reviews, and inspiration. I’m grateful for the people who taught me to sew (that’s you, Mom!) and the people who enable me to keep at it (that’s you, Ian!). And I’m grateful for these giveaways. See, a couple decades ago my grandparents did some world travel. My grandfather took an enormous …

Miscellaneous Little Things

Sometime the makes are small things. Fortunately, I’m not always working on things that are 10 feet long. I’ve extended the stashbusting theme to the box of yarn. Thus far, yarn hasn’t been as much of a weakness as fabric, and I’ve been pretty good about keeping the yarn contained. The box is full, though, so most of my crochet projects have been about finding uses for the things I already have. Thank goodness for Ravelry’s search features that let you look for things based on the amount and kind of yarn you have! These are “Tula’s Mitts” and I …

Trying not to lose my scissors

My sewing space is in our bedroom. There’s a table with my two machines which doubles as my cutting table (hooray for Ikea and height adjustable tables!), and there’s the ironing board on the other side of the room. While this leaves me some open space for pin basting quilts or playing with colors and fabrics while planning a project, it means I bounce back and forth between the machines and the ironing board a lot. I have one pair of fabric scissors. They are forever not where I am. There are lots of solutions to the problem: buy more …