Laundry

Have I ever mentioned how much I HATE doing laundry!! I really thought once we moved I wouldn't mind it so much since we would have an actual laundry room instead of a laundry closet, but I was wrong. I dread laundry day every week and some weeks I just pass. I caught laundry up (at least the washing part) before my husband went on a business trip last week, but never got around to folding it all or putting it all away. Well, yesterday I decided it was time to do laundry again, so finished up folding and putting away the laundry from a week and a half or two weeks ago and started all over again. I started yesterday and continue today. One basket has been folded and put away, but there are three more clean baskets ready to be folded and put away. The fun never ends!!

Baby Burps...

I've been spending many hours working on making products for the craft show in October. Tonight I've been cutting out lots of sets (bibs, burps and tag blankets). The other night I tried out some new burps. I usually make contoured burp cloths, which I've gotten good feedback on. I've seen a lot of diaper burps and know many people like them, so thought I would make a few up for the craft show. I also wanted to make another version of burps, similar to the diaper burps, but made with all flannel. Here are a couple burps I finished the other night. What do you think?

Hubby's coming home...

My husband has been gone since Sunday afternoon on a business trip in Las Vegas. I wasn't looking forward to this week, but I have to say it hasn't been bad at all. Tonight was probably the worst with the kids acting up a little after naps and continuing until they went to bed, but I definitely have had worse days. We had a nice routine this week.... get up, grab some breakfast on the go (cheerios and raisins are a great on the go breakfast!!), go for a walk, let the kids play outside, have lunch, naps and then play more or run errands, have dinner and off to bed. Not a bad schedule and it worked great and kept me from getting stressed with the kids. Hubby flew out of Las Vegas about 9:15 this evening (Thursday) and should be home very soon. Missed him a lot and glad he is coming home, but sometimes it's nice to have my evenings to sew and do whatever I want without any distractions!! Friday will be nice with him home and giving me some relief from the kids!! Woohoo!!

Sunday's project

A while back I bought some chalkboard embroidery designs from Sewing For Sarah Embroidery (http://www.sewingforsarahembroidery.com/), but never got around to buying the chalkboard fabric. It's not an easy fabric to find around town and I could buy it online, but it costs at least $10 a yard online plus shipping. That was not an option for me, so I called Hancock's Fabric yesterday to find out if they had any in stock. Hancock's is about 25 minutes from our house, so it's not someplace I go often. It turns out, the fabric was $6.99 a yard minus 30%. Lucky me got two yards for less than it would cost me online for one yard. It is going to be discontinued at Hancock's, but I'm not too worried since it was listed as discontinued since 2007 and they still have a bunch left.

Sunday afternoon I started playing around with ideas and came up with a coloring/chalk tote for each of my kids. Only my daughter's is done, but will finish up my son's tonight, hopefully. After I got it together I realized it needs some stabilizer. So, need to open up the ends, add a piece of stabilizer and sew it back up, add handles and some Velcro to keep it closed.

The tote has two pockets on the inside for coloring books, paper, etc. and 28 crayon/colored pencils/etc. spots. The outside has a 6 slots for chalk/crayons, two chalkboards to draw on and a tic-tac-toe chalkboard. The font is Dunno. What do you think?

Walking update

So, last week the front wheel on my stroller/bike trailer broke off. I got frustrated and did nothing with it the rest of the week. I'm really determined to get back to walking and exercising, so this morning I took the kids outside to play and spent some time looking for the instructions and figuring out what I needed to do to fix it. There is a plastic piece screwed into the metal bar coming out from the trailer. The plastic piece is broker at each of the screws, but I was able to get it back on tight enough to keep it in place. While figuring this out I called the company who made it and I have a new plastic piece being shipped to me. They were very nice on the phone and didn't give me a hard time at all. Should have the piece in the mail within 3 to 5 business days. I plan on keeping the broken one on until it comes off again, but at least I will have a brand new piece to replace it. We went for a nice long walk and the weather was awesome, perfect for walking.... about 65 degrees!!

Indianapolis Colts Dress

A couple nights ago I started a Indianapolis Colts dress for my daughter. I didn't finish it that night because I wanted to figure out how to use my serger and serge the seams. Yesterday I figured out my serger and today I finished the dress. It turned out bigger than anticipated, so now the decision is do I keep it or sell it at the craft fair I am participating in in October. Please ignore the awful look on my daughter's face (she won't stand still for a picture) and the mess behind her. I only included the picture of her wearing the dress to show how big it is on her.

Serging....

I've had a serger for several years, but never had any success sewing with it. Pulled it out once a couple years ago and no matter what I did, the stitching never worked. Lately I've been thinking that it would be nice if I could figure out how the darn thing works so I could use it to finish off the insides of clothing. Well, today was a success!! YIPPEE!! I haven't gotten much done today except for figuring out how the serger works, but I'm OK with that. I started a Colts dress for my little 17 month old last night, but wanted to finish it off right. Thanks to a kind person on SewForum who told me where to find the manual (I lost mine and without it I was clueless what each dial adjusted). Once I found the manual and read through a bunch of it, it all made sense. I'm guessing a couple years ago when I tried to get it to work I didn't have the manual either (or maybe my brain just wasn't working that day). Take a look at my nice seams!! They aren't perfect and may need a little more adjusting, but I'm excited!!

Play Oven Mitt & Potholder

Yesterday's project was to get some play oven mitts and potholders made up. Well, I got some done, but not nearly as many as I hoped. Hopefully today I will get a lot more sewing done! Soon to be added to http://www.littledarlingdesigns.com/.

Walking...

A few weeks ago I decided it was time to get out walking each morning. My goal was to walk every morning during the week (Monday through Friday). The first week went great and I made it out 4 mornings (started on a Tuesday). Last week was not so great, only made it out 2 days. So, this morning I was determined to start the week off right and we went out for a walk at 10:30 this morning. I love when the weather starts off cool in the morning (it was in the low 70s this morning). The walk went great and we were almost home and the front wheel broke off my stroller! Talk about frustration. Had the push the kids the rest of the way home with them tilted back. Tried to figure out how to get the wheel back on, but no luck so far. Hopefully we can come up with a good fix until I can get a replacement part from the company. Only had the bike trailer/stroller for a couple months, so I'm very disappointed!!

Crayon rolls..

I decided last week that I am going to participate in a craft fair in October. I did the same fair a couple years ago when I was pregnant with my daughter and passed on it last year. Trying to find some ways to bring in some extra money to help out with the bills since we currently have two house payments! This weekend I started making products to sell at the craft fair and also to put some more things on my website, http://www.littledarlingdesigns.com/. Yesterday I made a bunch of crayon rolls. These are a medium size crayon roll, holds 9 crayons. I also have a larger crayon roll that holds 12 or 13 crayons, which I will get made up sometime soon. I also plan on making some more of the 9 crayon rolls in some Colts material. These are done, except for a small hole I need to stitch on the bottom. Today I think I will start making some apron/play mitt sets and some purses.

We have grass...

Actually, we have some grass. It's not perfect and will need some reseeding, but it actually looks like a lawn now. This was the first weekend my hubby had to mow the entire lawn! The first picture is the backyard (both taken through the screen) and the second is the front yard. Definitely need to reseed this fall. Hoping for some really nice grass in the spring!!

Finally....

The other day I attempted to embroider a shirt for my friend. The first attempt was not successful (at least I wasn't happy with it). I searched for a new shirt, but no luck! So, I spent a bunch of time tearing out all the stitches so I could attempt to embroider the shirt again. It you haven't done this before, it is very time consuming, but I was trying to save the shirt. Second attempt was much better, but the embroidery was not exactly over the first embroidery area. I wanted to make sure it would wash up well and wouldn't leave a bunch of holes in the shirt, so this morning I threw it in the washer. Before washing it, though, I notice a piece of thread on the shirt had been cut, so I put a little FrayBlock on the areas where the previous stitches showed. Little did I know, FrayBlock discolors a red shirt. UGGHHHH!! Luckily my friend was ok with me using on of the long sleeve shirts I had in stock to try again. Thankfully, this attempt was a success and the shirt is ready to be delivered or picked up!! WOOHOO!! Now, to begin sewing for the craft fair October 18th!

My 3 year old love his Grammy!

My son, who is 3, loves talking on the phone to his grandparents! Almost every day he asks to talk to either my husband's parents or mine. Today it was Grammy's turn. We were heading downstairs to fix lunch and my son says he wants to talk to Grammy and Poppy. Poppy is working, so he can't talk to him, but Grammy is retired and is home during the day now. I tell him he can talk to Grammy while I fix lunch. He talks and talks and talks, and then he hits his mouth on the kitchen chair and his lip starts bleeding and he has to get off (plus it was time to eat). Later he says he needed to talk to Grammy more, he wasn't done talking to her. I called later when I actually had time to talk and he talked to her some more. At some point he put the phone down, so I picked it back up and finished my conversation, then quickly finished up the conversation after hubby called to tell me he was almost home and needed help getting stuff out of the car in the rain. A few minutes later my son said he needed to talk to Grammy again because he was finished talking to her. I guess we are lucky we all have AT&T cell plans and can talk for free!! Gotta love free mobile to mobile calls!!

Embroidery...

About a week ago my friend asked me to embroider a t-shirt for a birthday present. No problem, except even with the help of people on SewForum I couldn't find the exact font she wanted. She said to find the best match and go with it. Great! So, I get some letters digitized from somebody on the forum, but I decided none of the letters were close enough to the one she wanted. Did I mention she was fine with one of them! :-) Anyway, today I decide I'm going to do some more looking and find a font that is probably as close as I'm going to find without going through thousands of fonts or knowing the font name (http://www.webpagepublicity.com/free-fonts-d.html#Free%20Fonts). She and I were chatting through Skype while I was working on this and she agreed some of the ones I found were good matches. I ended up using blueberry foxhound. Did a test stitch out, which stitches out great. Send her a photo of the stitch out and she agrees it looks good. So, tonight I stitch it out on the shirt and what do you know, I'm not happy with the stitch out!! I sat there the entire time, but the thread shredded a couple or three times and I stopped, rethreaded, backed up a few stitches and started up again. One of the problems was at one point one strand of the thread snapped, but I didn't realize it until many, many stitches later and it just didn't look right compared to the rest. Tried to fix it, but still not happy! All I can say is knit is tricky to stitch on and I probably should have used a different stabilizer (although I did use the ones I always use!). Now I just hope I can find a new red t-shirt to try it again!!

Computer....

I've started to type up a new blog several times in the last few days and end up quitting when my computer freezes up. When I'm on the internet these days my computer likes to freeze, more like my internet freezes and I can't do anything until I can get it to close out. This often times takes forever, the reason for not posting the past few days!! Gotta LOVE computers!!