Non-Flattering Suit Fat Baby Boy

My wife always says, "Babies are so fat, they should wear more black."  TOTALLY TRUE, HONEY.  Well, two of our three babies have gone through an adorable pudgy phase.  In both cases I have, of course, chosen to accentuate thier portly proportions.  As in this one-piece I just made for Griffin from an old sweater.  I'm trying these new plastic snaps that I got from JoAnns.  (I really hate saying or typing "JoAnn's".) They are cute, and they come in a good sized pack for cheap, but they are too hard to snap and unsnap so I'm always afraid they'll pop off, which they certainly will at some point. At least they are destined to tear the knit.

I will post a picture of portly in this outfit soon, hopefully.

 

Here, I resected the old collar onto the raw edge of the new jumper.  Not bad, huh! I used a blind hem stitch, but not a blind hem foot.  For some reason, my foot is designed such that the needle slams into it and breaks and almost pokes out my eyeballs with flying shards of evil.  I guess the obvious explanation would be that it's the wrong foot for the machine, but I swear I've used it before with no trouble, and I can't remember what was different.

Lee Bontecoute

You pronounce today's blog post title in a Michigan accent, so it sounds like this:  "Lee Bon-tuh-CUOTE".  Get it?!  An art/ quilting play on words, yall. To what other mom blog can you go for such linguistic tom-foolery?

You see, once I got way far into this color scheme, I realized I didn't have green pieces big enough to complete the spokes, so I had to piece it together.  I decided I was okay with the fractured glass pattern thing and then when the center of the quilt turned all vortexy and swollen, all I could think of was Bontecou sculptures.  It makes me want to do a whole series of them. 

Anyway, yeah, the whole thing is a wobble now, owing to the design of thin strips of bulky fabric conjoining at the center.  I mean, I sort of knew that might happen, but you know- me and physics, we have an adversarial relationship.  So I'm trying to figure out what to do about it.  I have this two projects rule going so I can't just move on from it.   

Oops, how did that picture get in here?  Bonus cute.  Annika Hedy.  What a pleasure is this baby.

Show Me Crabs!

I have found it.  Something I truly hate about being a mom.  I mean, it makes me want to hurl myself headlong into the nearest wall repeatedly until I black out.  Putting on kids GLOB BAM FORKLING mittens!  I can probably count on Phinny being an 8th grade drop-out and working the pole by fifteen with the number of times I've laid out a string of terrible cuss words while trying to get her to put her tiny, floppy starfish hands into a pair of mittens.  (Which she won't wear unless they "work".)

"Thumbs, honey!  THUMBS THESE ARE YOUR THUMBS!  The short, fat one, c'mon, baby, just get your thumb into that ONE SEPARATE PART.  There's only one seperate part, and you have only one thumb.  That's it, just your thumb, NO NOT YOUR THUMB AND FIRST FINGER!  Just the thumb, honey- YES YES, there it is, show Mama Crab Hands, show me crabs!  Yes, pinch!  It's on!  See, your mittens are working!  NO NO NO, don't pull that off, NO NO!  Ohhhh.  GLOBBAMMIT!!  Okay, do over, ladybug."...

Aaaaand Repeat.

Girl needs mittens when it's cold, girl don't want to wear mittens nohow.

I thought if I made a pair of soft flexible mittens with an articulated thumb- you know, where the contoured thumb is attached from the palm, instead of a flat thumb-shaped appendage sticking flat out the side of the mitten, that she would be more likely to wear them.  I thought, given the expert and natural fit, combined with a tight, but soft, ribbed cuff, the mittens would be comfortable and would stay on.  Uh huh. 

So while those world-class scientists in Geneva are waiting for the Hadron Collider to clue us into the deepest mysteries of physics, I challenge them to design a pair of usable toddler mittens.  (Oh, and while they're at it, a sippy cup that doesn't leak.)

But let's talk about sewing.  It is not easy to make a pattern for gloves with an articulated thumb! 

Four attempts later...

And then there's the whole lining issue. 

Nonetheless, I will concede that they look really good.  In the end, I conclude that it's the toddler, not the mitten that maka me crazy.

God Gave Me a Red-Haired Child To Dress in Chartreuse

To be fair, the leg warmers are a little more lime than the AMAZING chartreuse cords, but I think they count.  It's pretty much a medicatable condition I have, my newfound compulsion toward chartreuse clothing.  I'ma go with it though.

Evanston: freezing.  "Hey, before you go out, let me whip up some leg warmers for Phinny."  My wife, shifting impatiently from one foot to another while I craft these cableknit quickies.  Well, guess what, one slice with the rotary cutter, two zips through the serger, WAH-LAH!  She barely had time to get annoyed.  It was really less than like 60 seconds.  And now look how attractive and useful:

Beanbag Cover; 2011's Coiled Snake of Bitchery

Say that you are looking at a beanbag covered in black canvas.  And you think to yourself: "Self, how hard could it be to just look at that shape pattern and replicate it by sight? Not too hard."  Say you, with pluck and abandon, reach for that amazing canvas linen blend vintage curtain you have and start cutting the pieces for a new cover for aforementioned beanbag.

STOP!!  For here be dragons. 

It is WAY harder to do, fitting these pieces together than you will imagine.

Given my new rule to not get more than two things going in the sewing room at a time, I was stalled for like a week on this blasted thing.  Finally, I was basically jamming bunched fabric and velcro sections through the machine willing it all to go away and stop draining my lifeblood.  (That side of the beanbag faces the floor.  But it still looks pretty cute.  Okay, it looks pretty cute when a cute baby is perched in it:

Breaking Out of Baby Jail

Baby Hobo is not dead.  In fact, at this oddest of times, I am feeling a renaissance of affection for it, even as my Baby Griffin and Baby Annika threaten to pull me into a vortex of neediness and cute.  I was all sorts of ready to shelve my creative aspirations and my entrepreneurial impulses for several years following the birth of these babies.  "There won't be a moment to adequately shave my legs for the next five years, let alone sew," is what I rightly thought. 

Howeverly, I was able to control my impulses for all of three weeks.  Once my head stopped spinning- the moment it stopped spinning, I trained my weary eyeballs on the stack of imploring sweatshirt scraps in my sewing room, and decided that if I am making things for the kids, then it is A-OKAY to ignore them as people for a little while each day and instead sew myself to sanity.  So there.  And I have been making a sort of remarkable number of things, some of which I will show you here right now!  Yay. 

Introducing the most cozy and useful baby quilts I ever made.  (Okay, they are are two of only three baby quilts I have ever made, but still!)  They are basically like saddle blankets for babies, in that they are so heavy and sturdy (though crazy soft) you can practically mold them into an armchair recliner and leave your twins propped upright just about anywhere.  NOT THAT I WOULD DO THAT. 

 

And here are some details for you stitch-o-philes:

You'll have to ignore that t-shirt binding of course, since it is BALLS.  I need to design a good way to make a proper binding, obviously.  But I can't do everything, you guys, I have like two-hundred children.