Sewing for my boys...

...makes me happy!

WARNING - you are about to enter a very long post about my recent sewing projects with lots of photos and boring details. Partly this is because I am too lazy to repeat myself over in my flickr sewing groups where I share my creations with other sewing enthusiasts. If you have arrived from flickr - welcome to my blog! For those family members more interested in your grandson's latest tricks - you may return again in a few days.

So earlier this year I set myself the challenge of trying not to buy new clothes for the kids when I could make them myself instead. (In case you are wondering this is less about taking the moral high ground in terms of consuming less and more about indulging my passion for sewing/creating and trying to improve my sewing skills. But it DOES feel good on the inside too I must admit...)


In terms of pants, for their winter wardrobe at least, I have just about got it covered. Making 4 pair in a row of the same pattern is certainly good for honing those sewing skills. If you look closely you'll see they aren't perfect, but I'm doing much less unpicking and making way fewer irreversible boo boos than I used to. Practise really does make (almost) perfect. It's the Oliver+ S Sandbox Pants pattern by the way. Size 18 to 24 months for H and size 4 for D.

So what have we here? Below you can see the pants I made for Little H. He's been wearing the beige cords for a few weeks now without any shoddy workmanship showing up! The stripy ones are new this week and being lined (and toasty warm) I think will get a lot of wear. It was my first attempt at fully lining an item of clothing and not anywhere near as tricky as anticipated.

Here's the lining, on the left -soft green fleecy fabric from the pile mum gave me the other day. Thanks mum. H stomped through puddles wearing these the other day and when I took them off before getting into the car they were still dry on the inside. Me thinks I may be lining more pants with fleece in the future. On the right is a back view, obviously. A quick run down of fabrics - Beige cord from Spotlight. Drawstring and pocket lining is stripy beige and white fabric from a fat quarter, also Spotlight. The other pair are made from stripey brown cotton from the Salvo's and fleece from my mum. The brown canvas for the pockets is from kelanifabric.com.au


Below are the ones I made for Little D.


The pair on the left are made with the same beige coduroy as H's. These have been seeing plenty of action and again, they're holding up fine! (I don't know why it is such a surprise that homemade clothing should actually function as well as store bought clothing...but it gives me a buzz to see them surviving!)




These were even snazzy enough for D to wear to a double Christening we had last weekend. Thanks to Granny Kim's collared dress shirts which she gave the kids last year - we pulled off our perfect Sunday Best! A task not to be scoffed at by this daggy family whose mummy dresses her boy in socks and sandals...


Notice they're a bit baggy on my slim little guy? Well...I am so pleased with myself. For the blue pair I adjusted the pattern to make them slimmer. I've never made an adjustment to a pattern before and I didn't know if simply reducing the width of the front and back leg pieces would work. But it did! How cool is that? Made from more corduroy from spotlight but this time a very thick cord which feels really velvety and warm.


The pockets are the reverse side of the corduroy. Lined with an aqua-ish coloured thin corduroy. There's a lot of corduroy around these parts it seems.


D wore these today and loved them. He told me so when we had our morning coffee/iced Chocolate fix. I think the skinny jeans look is good on D - finally the kid has a pair of pants that are tailor fitted. By me! Whoo hoo.



Phew. There you have it. 4 pairs of pants for 4 busy legs to get around in this winter. I'm not the worlds fastest sewer - it's taken me about 3 weeks to complete them - but damn it was satisfying!

Bridges and peanut butter

Little D has been very interested in bridges lately. How do you build one? Do you need a boat or a crane? Those sort of questions. Well, at the library earlier this week we of course had to find a book about bridges. That we did. And we've been looking at it all week. How fortuitous then that today we had a birthday party to attend over the bridge. If you live in Sydney, you'll know that when someone refers to The Bridge, they mean none other than the Sydney Harbour Bridge. Well, there we were driving along and D nearly jumped out of his seat. 'Mum! It's the bridge from my book!' He then went on to tell me all about it - it took 9 years to built, it's painted constantly to prevent rust, it originally had 2 railway tracks and 2 tram tracks....and so on. Isn't it cool he actually retained all those facts and understood they were indeed about this very bridge we found ourselves driving over?


Not much to report about Little H. He likes peanut butter. He eats it by the dessert spoonful. Today was no different. Couldn't you just eat that little peanuty grin?!

Did you notice by the way that the sky is blue? How good is the sun when you haven't seen it for 3 weeks? It was gone again by mid afternoon but we really enjoyed it while it was here.

I promise the sewing post is coming soon. I actually managed to photograph some clothes in natural light today. Stay tuned. Or not, if you couldn't care less about my sewing projects!

Mmm, the smell of apples cooking

Lest you think I am exaggerating about the weather here's how it looked outside the window ALL DAY today! Our deck has an awning over it and in normal rain this keeps things relatively dry. Not so today, as you can see. Water was actually coming in under the door and flooding the inside of our house, that's how much water was pouring from the skies.


Nothing else to do but cook apples. I ordered extra this week from our fruit and veg home delivery peeps because they are just so nice this time of year. (Why did I ever go shopping? For 2 years now we've been getting our groceries delivered right to our door and I am not looking back. And it's so nice to know exactly where our food is coming from. Graeme and Fiona from Forest Range grew these beautiful organic pink ladies. I wouldn't know that if I shopped in Coles now would I?).


Made a stack, in fact the pot was literally bubbling over with apples. (And a couple of pears and handful of plums too). They simmered down though. Pureed and into jars. Iceblocks with the juice - not that I can imagine wanting a nice cold iceblock anytime soon. But couldn't waste that delicious thick juice. Plus Little D and H loooove them. They love their pureed apple too. We ate bowls of the stuff for dessert tonight. We added yoghurt but mine was really icecream, mwahahaha!

I'm done now

Alright. It's gone on a little too long, this wet wet wet weather. I know I said a week or two ago that I didnt mind the wet wintry weather. But I'm done now. Almost 3 full weeks of it is starting to get under my skin. We've seen the sun for, I dunno, 1 hour a few days ago, maybe 2 hours yesterday and well, for the 5 mins that I was snapping photos of the boys splashing in puddles today. That's it. I swear.

It's been this...

and this...

for days and days and days.

I AM getting some sewing done so that's something and I'll post about it as soon as the sun comes out and I can get some decent photos of the clothes I have been making. But boy, I'll be glad when we can hit the park for longer than the few scraps of outdoors time we've been getting lately.


While the rain has made achieving park time extremely tricky, we did however (after about 4 unsuccessful attempts) finally get some winter shoes for the kids today. Poor Little D has been wearing socks with sandals (cruel mother I am) or gum boots for months now. Little H actually chooses to wear his gum boots no matter what the weather so it's possible I could have stretched him out until spring before getting a new pair but the poor kid has only ever had hand me downs from D as it is. (I know, tut tut, podiatrists will be shaking their heads at me). Anyway, I'm fussy. We could only find ugly branded horrid ones until today due mostly to me not wanting to leave the local neighbourhood in our search. When our trip to the park was once again cut short by torrential rain today I finally pulled my finger out and made the trip to the giant shopping centre. Success. And Little D even got BLUE ones, his colour of choice lately. Now if the sun will just come out he might get to wear them.

Thelonious Highway

On the weekend Daddy and the boys built a highway through the house. Complete with speed signs, no parking zones, zebra crossing, and even a button to press for the green man. Gavin Grasshopper (a book with a button which when pressed apparently sounds like a grasshopper) is masquerading as a Green Man button here. There must be a proper name for those crossings, not Green Man Crossing I'm sure. Anyway. It's still here of course, but I have removed the string which was stuck to the floorboards marking the sides of the road - I can tell you from personal experience that sticky tape on floorboards is not fun to remove after a few days.


Yesterday I completed a sewing project that I actually only started a week or so ago. That's a miracle, finishing something I started within a week. My sister gave me this retro curtain weight fabric last year (which I think is from her husband's childhood) and I decided to try my hand at cushion covers and a little rug of sorts. I then made a long red 'bus' pillow from some jersey cotton I found in the Salvos a few weeks ago.


We're calling it our quiet reading area. Which is funny if you know how little our house is and how open plan it is- but anyhow, the boys like it. Being mobile it has been moved around a lot - by the back doors to catch some late afternoon sun yesterday. Back next to the craft table today. We made a trip to the library yesterday to have some fresh books around and encourage use of the space. With all this wet weather we've been having (it's the 3rd week in a row), encouraging little moments of quiet reading is necessary for my sanity.


Here are the boys in their backyard bakery earlier today. Flour and water and a few containers. (Two of everything of course). So simple. So MESSY. Their 'work' is taken very seriously. Little D to Little H - Now H, you need to do it like this. I know it feels funny. But this is just what has to be done. It's the WAY you have to do it.

Saturday morning

Little H and daddy were off to the fish markets at their usual ungodly hour this morning before the sun had barely risen. So after our sleep in Little D and I set off for our local farmers markets. Just the two of us.

We go every second week or so to buy flowers and organic meat direct from the farmers who grow it and whatever looks particularly yummy that day. (Like the strawberries a few weeks back which led to our Great Jam Experiment). Fortunately it's under cover so the rain wasn't a problem.


Little D enjoys choosing flowers for his bedroom. Always blue if blue is available. He'll go for purple or mauve if not. (He has a special vase he decorated himself, a large jar covered in coloured paper and glitter. It must be a year since we started this little flowers in his bedroom thing and he shows no sign of letting the ritual slide). Onto the cupcake stall next for a special treat.


On our the way back to the car we stopped for this. Just being plain silly really. The photos were pretty poor to start with, being murky reflections in a dirty window and all - so I played around a bit with them on picnik.com. These windows belong to the Tafe and are incredibly tinted so you can't see inside. Fingers crossed there weren't people on the other side watching us!


Have a lovely weekend!

Pear shaped

I'm a big fan of The Quiet Day at Home. We usually have one at least every 3rd or 4th day. Not that it's necessarily quiet as such - but skipping the whole business of getting out of the house (getting dressed, packing snacks, being oh so patient while the 2 year old does everything all by himself, no helping allowed even for the tricky stuff like zippers...) means we can each settle into a day of moving at our own individual pace. For a whoooole day. Lovely. Well today, against my inner clock telling me to slow down, we had our 4th busy out and about day in a row. It went pear shaped of course. The boys hit a wall at the same time - right about when our food arrived at a cafe we were in with mates. Little H needed to poo but wanted his potty. I was hungry (grumpy) and distracted with attempting to have a conversation with my adult companion. Little D wasn't coping with other children's interest in his toys cars. Total meltdown by D and H SIMULTANEOUSLY, in an otherwise seriously serene cafe adjoining a yoga studio. Yay!

Oh well, not to worry. I managed to wolf down some food before things amped up TOO much and we high tailed it home for a much needed afternoon of not much. Kids crashed exhausted into bed early, Will's delicious homemade chicken soup for dinner. Peace restored!

While our day morphed into something less than happy happy joy joy around 2.30pm, it wasn't a total right off.

Little D was uncharacteristically quiet in the car this morning. When we pulled up at our destination, he said "there are soooo many people in the world. I can't even COUNT them. I was trying to count them all the way here but there were too many. There must be TWO HUNDRED PEOPLE in the world." Eyes wide. Totally gobsmacked expression on his face.

There were droplets of water on the car window, just suspended there as there was a pause in the rain for a few minutes. Little D pointed out the constellation Orion the Hunter in the droplets! See mum? The 3 stars (drops) in a row - that's his belt. Classic. It DID look like it too. Love my space obsessed boy. He wore his astronaut suit to the powerhouse museum again yesterday -it never fails to grab the attention of the staff and volunteers there. If ever you want the star treatment at the museum, take a 4 year old dressed in a NASA suit. The guy at the desk said - Ohh, you look cute. Who are you? Buzz Lightyear? D was horrified and said 'no I'm Buzz ALDRIN, you know, he was on the Apollo 11 mission with Neil Armstrong and Micheal Collins?' Puh - an animated character, what an insult!!

We're getting actual sentences from Little H today. He said 'more egg please mum'. And it was actually clear and understandable. Yeah! I mean, we generally know what he's saying and he chatters away like there's no tomorrow - it's just that to anyone else he pretty much sounds like a cave man. So a truely clear sentence excites me.

Here's a couple of snapshot from our day, pre-meltdowns!




And finally, from yesterday's visit to daddy at the warehouse. A once a week or so occurrence and it's here, at the espresso machine, that you can really see these two peas in a pod shining! It's almost creepy how alike these 2 are at times...