pendleton wool blanket bunny

 I worked up a prototype bunny for a little friend's birthday, and I was pretty happy that my tinkering had such sweet results.

This is made with mill scraps from the Pendleton woolen mill here in Oregon.

After a couple of small changes, I hope to have a few of these cuties ready for my Etsy shop; I'll update here when that happens, so stay tuned or send me a little message if you'd like to be notified.

Have you been putting bits and pieces together to make anything cool lately? Leave me a link. I'd love to see it!

Thanks for reading.


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My Repurposed Life

a simple baby shower favor for nesting mamas

I'm going to keep this one short and sweet: bird's nest baby shower favors! Stock up on a couple of things after Easter, and you'll be able to make a whole grouping of nests for guests.

You'll need:

• edible Easter grass (made from potato starch; it doesn't taste very good. I found mine at Target.)
• speckled candy eggs
• parchment paper
• cellophane bags
• cardstock
• vintage-style labels (I like these)
• stapler + staples
• scissors
• pen

How to:

Take each bag of edible Easter grass and separate it carefully into five sections, one for each nest. Shape a round nest on a square of parchment that will fit inside a cellophane bag. After slipping your nest + parchment into the bag, pile six or seven candy eggs into the nest. Cut and staple cardstock tags over the folded bag tops, then cover front staples with a vintage label. I put the word "nesting" on the front, and on the back, "candy eggs * edible nest" as a little fyi.

These turned out so cute, I know I'll be using them for future showers as well! Thanks for stopping by to check out this sweet little project.

subway tile baby quilt

A friend of ours from the preschool had a baby shower for her second kiddo, a girl, a couple of weeks back, and in celebration I made this quick little subway tile-style baby quilt.

The top is made of vintage textiles I've collected at thrift stores and estate sales (poppies + stripes), stuff from my stash (including a pair of Heather Ross prints and some cute owls), and a couple of my own prints from Spoonflower (the measuring tape and cupcake prints are both mine). The kicker is that I also used a crib sheet from the recipient's registry for some of the blocks as well as the quilt backing, which ties it in nicely to the nursery bedding.

 

The subway tile pattern is a pretty simple one to replicate. Just cut 48 rectangular blocks (mine are 4 inches x 10 inches) and stitch into rows of four, pressing seams flat when done.

Every other row, cut a 5-inch section off of one end, and attach it to another end. Then sew the rows together to make your quilt top twelve rows high. Press all seams down.

Instead of quilt batting, I used some organic cotton + organic bamboo sweatshirt fleece in between the layers. I had it on hand and it gives the quilt a nice weight and a sturdiness that will help it last a nice long time.

I stacked and pinned the layers just like I did for my sister's wedding quilt, only on a smaller (and quicker) scale. When quilting the layers together, I stitched along both sides of each horizontal seam and called it good, except for the corners. There, I stitched some simple designs: a fish, a bird, a leaf.

I used the quilt binding technique introduced to me by the Smile and Wave blog; it's taken all the mystery out of quilt binding for me, and lets me coordinate binding to my project, which I love. I'll link to it once her site's back up. Updated 6/7/13: Here's the link.

Basically, cut 3-inch strips, sew together at an angle to avoid bulky seams, then press flat. Fold almost in half along the length (favoring one side by about 1/4 inch), press, then fold edges to the center and press again. The wider side goes on the back of your quilt, so that when you run the quilt through your sewing machine the top and bottom are certain to both get caught in the stitches.

After that, the hand finishing is a cinch.

It was a big hit with the mama-to-be, and I was pretty happy with it, too! A couple of people asked if I sell my quilts; I don't at present, but I really like to give them as gifts.

Thanks for reading! If you make your own subway tile quilt, I'd love to see!

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golden book baby shower invitations

I recently offered to throw a baby shower for a good friend of mine, and because this will be her second child and she already has a house full of hand-me-downs, she requested that the gift giving be kept to a minimum. Partially because of that request (and partially because she's a book lover like me) I settled on a "vintage / classic kids' books" shower theme.

The invitations went through an extensive brainstorming and planning phase, after which I finally decided to use vintage Golden Books as the base.

This may not be a new idea entirely; since landing on the concept I've seen a few different versions of Golden Book baby shower invitations. A few use just the covers, discarding the pages.

Yikes. As a book lover throwing a party for a book lover, that idea makes me throw up in my mouth a little. Admittedly, I have that response to pretty much any project I see people blogging about when it involves chopping up vintage books, even having worked in bookstores and witnessed what happens to mass market paperbacks. Or maybe because of it.

Anyway, I trolled St. Vincent dePaul's section of kids' books to find some classic titles in older editions with a bit of age to them. Because the guest list was small, I didn't mind that each of the books was different, but this project might be a little extreme for a guest list of more than a dozen.

Of course, Baby Animals was pretty perfect for this project, but really, nearly any Golden Book can be altered to make the perfect invitation (as shown above).

Using my YA Library Book Slips fabric design as a base in Adobe Illustrator, I designed and printed out some library check-out slips on manila card stock using the family's last name (Geisel, in this case, is a pseudonym) in place of the author and "The New Baby" as the title.  These were the "registry" info cards, except in this case they included language inviting people to forego traditional registry gifts in favor of vintage kids' books or small handmade items.

The little envelopes to hold the cards inside the books are made of the same card stock trimmed, folded, and held in place with GlueDots. (If you can't find manila card stock, do what I did and cut some manilla file folders down to 8.5 x 11" sheets using a paper cutter.)

I scanned the front cover (inside and outside) to alter slightly in Photoshop.

For the fronts, I added on each book the words "& Baby Geisel" to the title, matching the the title font and wear pattern as closely as possible.

For printing on the reverse, I moved up the bookplate and made the endpaper pattern fully repeat, before layering on the text in a font similar to the Little Golden Books font. (Click to zoom for detail.)

Printed and trimmed . . .

. . . then scored along the spine and ready to attach . . .

. . . with three glue dots.

I used washi tape tabs to indicate where to open the books . . .

. . . and used more washi tape (white and yellow, so the golden spines still showed through a bit) to cover the spines. Then I tied them up with baker's twine and put them in some shipping envelopes to ready them for mailing (complete with logo for the Geisel Family Library Foundation).

Repeat for all titles.

This project is, admittedly, a bit labor intensive and requires some knowledge of Adobe Photoshop and Adobe Illustrator. Like the look but want to skip the work? I can put some together for you, too! Contact me for pricing and scheduling by leaving a comment below, or by e-mailing (whoamillie (at) thenightgarden.com).

Thanks for reading!

p.s. you can make these photos larger simply by clicking on them, but you probably already knew that.