We need another blanket.

Huzzah!  A simple, large, square swaddling blanket from soft, soft cotton flannel in a sweet pink print.

To jazz things up a bit, I added a scalloped edge.  I’m a sucker for a scallop.

These scallops are made using the specialty stitch on my sewing machine, around the very edge of the fabric.  Now, true confession: it took a minute to do the stitching.  Or two.  It took a minute or two.  But how sweet does it look?  So sweet.  To make the edge look store-bought, go back with small, very sharp scissors and trim super close to the outer edge of the stitches–as close as you can get without going through the threads.  This creates a clean, professional scalloped edge that makes you look like a rock star, and makes a truly lovely (very easy) shower gift.

Baby looks like she’s ready for her nap.  Swaddle, baby, swaddle.

Project details:  Made with 1.25 yds Urban Blooms flannel. Could use any 45″ flannel (1.25 yds=45″ x 45″ wide is a big, square blanket perfect for swaddling).  Scallop stitch is set to machine defaults, but any satin stitch would do the trick.

When I was finished writing the book and sitting down to add the little extras, I thought long and hard to search my gut and create a dedication that was fitting of the word: a brief note that gave credit to the individual(s) most responsible for the book coming into the world, and who I wanted most to see the book as a gift to them–not just a copy, but the content.  I wanted to dedicate the book as a way of thanking someone for giving me the inspiration and the support and the incentive to go through the long nights and the deadlines and the ripping out seams and the totally trashing entire patterns and starting again from scratch.

My husband was the obvious choice.  He put up with night after night of me coming to bed long after he had dozed off.  He made sympathetic faces when I complained about the tension settings on my machine or hunted for the perfect needle or asked his opinion on fabric combinations for the thousandth time–very convincing sympathetic faces, so well-done that I nearly believed he knew what I was talking about, which made me love him even more deeply.

There was one other name, though, that I couldn’t shake, someone who I truly felt deserved some of the credit for putting me in a place where I was able to even be offered the opportunity to write a book (one of my childhood dreams): Sandra.

What, you heard it, too?  Angels, singing?  Harp music?  Yeah, I know.  Happens every time I say her name.  Sandra (harp music, angels sing).

I never actually met Sandra (Sandraaaaa).  I only know her through my sewing.  When I was pregnant with our second child, my husband and I were driving around together, as we liked to do before we were outnumbered by our children.  We would look at neighborhoods and houses and the sky and talk about random things, which would lead to talking about serious things, which would lead to making jokes, which would invariably make me feel closer to my husband than almost anything else I can imagine.  On this particular drive, I announced out of pretty much nowhere: “Um, honey, the thing is: I’m not going back to work.”

Pause.

My husband, bless him, was very supportive and understanding and accepting–this wasn’t a spur-of-the-moment decision, and we’d discussed it previously, so he kinda knew it was coming.  But this was the Decision, and I think he took it exceedingly well, considering.  He did say, though, “Ahem.  OK, well, y’know if you ever thought about, y’know, like, starting a business, or whatever, now would be a good time since there’s no, y’know, opportunity cost. Or whatever.”  He’s usually much more articulate than that, so I could tell that he was feeling some anxiety about the idea of a new baby and only one paycheck coming in each month.

My reply:  “Honey, if I were to work for myself, the only thing I can really be trusted to do, unsupervised, for eight hours a day, is sew.  Anything else and I’m likely to end up watching Oprah or something.”  My mother designed children’s clothing for fifteen years, so it was easy for me to picture myself sewing away in our basement and starting up a little cottage industry.  In order to do that, though, I knew I’d need new equipment.

My 1969 Singer sewing machine, which weighs about a gazillion pounds, makes two stitches: straight and zigzag.  No buttonhole function, no specialty stitches.  It is still the most reliable and consistent machine I’ve ever owned, but when left to my own devices, my buttonholes are decidedly mediocre.  Add to that the expectation of the shopping public that seams be serged on the inside, and I knew I needed both a new sewing machine and a serger.  I had a life insurance policy my mother had purchased when I was little, and which she’d given me to cash in as seed money for the business–not a ton of money, but enough to invest in good equipment.  So I did my research, found the machine I most wanted in all the world, and did what any frugal-minded girl on a budget does: I went to eBay.

I searched and compared and watched and finally found just what I wanted: a Viking sewing machine with embroidery attachment plus a Huskylock serger, all in one listing.  It was being sold by a man in South Carolina on behalf of his mother, and it was just what I was looking for.  I started to play the eBay game of bid-a-little, wait-a-little, but it was late at night and I knew I only had so much cash, so I set my top bid and went on to bed.  When I woke up in the morning, I was the winner, with only one other bidder.  Fools didn’t know what they missed out on, cause I picked a cherry of an auction.

Or so I thought, until I saw the shipping costs.  $188 to ship from the next state??  What?!?!  This was back when gas was cheap, so I did a little math: to drive over and pick it up would cost me roughly $14.50.  Ahem.

I contacted the seller, asked him if he’d be willing to let me drive over and collect my purchase, and he jumped at the chance–turns out he wasn’t all that enthusiastic about packing up electronic equipment and shipping it on to me, anyway.  He told me he’d “throw in some other stuff” as a thank-you.  I don’t think I’d hung up the phone before I’d thrown the kids in the car and burned rubber out of the driveway to go find out what “other stuff” might be coming my way.

I arrived in South Carolina in my station wagon and met the seller at his storage unit.  His mother, Sandra (Sandraaaaa), was either no longer with us or was in assisted living–I didn’t think it was polite to ask which.  He had moved all her belongings up from where she used to live in Central Florida and put them in storage, and was gradually going through them.  So he had not only the machines and their attachments, but a couple dozen embroidery programs, a dozen cardboard boxes filled–FILLED–with notions and books and patterns and thread and trims and whatnot, and a folding cutting table on casters that we strapped to the roof of my car with twine before I peeled out of the parking lot, hoping to high-tail it home before he changed his mind.  I’d struck the mother lode.

I got home and began gleefully going through my prizes.  It was like Christmas morning for a sewing nerd.  I got out the machines, plugged them in and verified they both worked (score!), and began to dig through the boxes.  I noticed something wrong pretty quickly, though.  Not only did I only have one foot pedal and two machines–and both of them certainly came with their own foot pedal–but I had 400 (seriously, FOUR HUNDRED) spools of thread in clear acrylic boxes organized by color family, and only one bobbin.  Since the one bobbin I did have had the color number written on the side in Sharpie, I was fairly sure that there were more–and I knew there was another foot pedal.  So I got back in touch with the seller.

“No problem!” he assured me.  “Must be another box in there that I missed.  Gimme a few days, I’ll find it and be in touch.”

I chewed my nails for over a week.

“Good news!  I found a couple more boxes. If you want to drive over and pick ‘em up, I got this electronic lift sewing table that I’ll throw in for $100.”

[Tires squeal as I race out of driveway, telephone dangling from that curly cord out my driver's side window.]

I get back home, with my wagon loaded down with more boxes–nearly another dozen, this time.  We were forced to disassemble the sewing table to fit it in the car (it was ONE centimeter too large to fit, I kid you not), so I dragged it out and put it all back together.  I opened the small storage drawers, and lo and behold there are the foot pedal AND the bobbins.  So WHAT was in all these boxes?

Sandra was.  [Sandraaaaa!]  Those boxes contained bits of her life and her passion and her personality, and I got to know her by going through them and “reading” the pieces, like an archaeologist.  I learned three things about her by doing that:

1. Sandra did not have a day job.  No one who has this much sewing paraphernalia, and this many finished sewing projects (as evidenced by the patterns she’d made for herself, then tucked into 5×7 envelopes and labelled with the pattern type plus a swatch of the fabric she used to stitch it up) has time to work a full-time job.  She was clearly passionate–her son had told me she “really loved it,” and the evidence sure supported that.
2. Sandra’s husband realllly loved her.  No one who doesn’t work outside the home has this much stuff unless they have a patron who adores them.  That electronic lift sewing table?  Original price tag was still on it.  When Sandra got it, she paid $1098.00.  Whoo-boy. She had every sewing tool under the sun–some of which I’d never seen before–and was a Swatch of the Month Lifetime Member.  Her husband clearly thought she was the bee’s knees.
3. Sandra LOVED to sew.  Made her own patterns and stored them lovingly? Check.  Used commercial patterns and folded them neatly to store in manila envelopes with the original art taped to the front, complete with swatch?  Check.  Dipped her toes in every sewing technique currently known to man, from clothing to quilting to smocking to hand embroidery to machine embroidery to silk ribbon embroidery to cross stitch to applique?  Check.  Read voraciously about fabric properties and sewing techniques?  Check.  She was a powerhouse.

Now, Sandra’s taste level and mine are not the same.  She was an older woman from Central Florida with a rounded waistline–I know this because she had her own size labels printed up to sew inside her clothing, along with her name.  She was inordinately fond of puce and country blue.  She made sweatshirts with 3D flower vases of silk ribbons (anyone else remember those gems of the early 90s?).  She did a lot of embroidery that featured little girls in bonnets pushing wheelbarrows.  She used a lot of polyester and fleece.  So, she and I didn’t exactly see eye-to-eye when it came to design aesthetics.

But she inspired me then, and she inspires me now.  To be so passionate, to be so bold, to care so much really takes sewing out of the realm of the utilitarian and into the realm of the artistic.  She was crafty–no fewer than three hot glue guns in various sizes–but she was also an artist and a giver (she made frequent presents for the children in her life, who I certainly hope were grateful for her efforts).  Sandra and I talked a lot in those early days, along the lines of, “Now, Sandra.  What is THIS gadget?” or, “Um, Sandra, I don’t really know what to do here–what would YOU do?”  She never judged me, she never laughed at me, and she almost always had some book or resource or gadget or supply buried in those boxes to help me move my sewing from where it was to the next level.  She was terrifically instrumental in making me the stitcher I am today, and in opening my eyes to all the many, many ways needle and thread can be used to create beauty.

Thanks, Sandra, wherever you are.  This book’s for you.

So, Sewing Buddies: let’s say there’s one month out of the year when we all set aside a little time to honor and celebrate sewing, to promote it to both stitchers and non-stitchers alike.  How’s about some suggestions of really useful, cool ways to do that?  I’m thinking if we can get some great ideas brewing here, maybe Whipstitch can set a goal in 2011 to make some of them happen.  I’m especially curious to hear some Buddy ideas that involve both of you, but let’s not limit ourselves!  No Buddy this year?  No problem!  Maybe you’ll have one in 2011, or maybe you just have a faboo idea and want to offer it up.  Awesome.

Hit me with your wackiest, funnest, coolest, most inspiring, most inspired ideas for ways that we can all promote and celebrate the practice of sewing.  My big idea is the Sew-A-Thon, because I love a challenge.  Let’s fill up the 2011 calendar with some of YOUR very cool ideas and see if we can’t make sewing something we celebrate for an entire calendar year!

On Sunday, I got together with some ladies to shower one of my dear friends with gifts for her new baby, due any minute now.  We don’t know if she’ll be having a boy or a girl, but we do know she has flawlessly good taste, so the gift had to be one that was thoughtful and beautiful and lasting–which is to say, it just had to be handmade.

Knowing that the mom-to-be is a huge fan of Anna Maria’s, it didn’t take me long to pull out my copy of Handmade Beginnings. And once I’d opened it, I almost immediately decided on the Hide and Seek Spectrum Quilt. I love all the gifts in the book, but the mommy gifts were of less use at the end of her pregnancy, and while the baby gifts are off-the-chain adorable, I really wanted this to be a gift for her.  This quilt is perfect.

Not only was it really fun and fairly quick to assemble–an excellent project for someone new to sewing or quilting–but it looks fabulous and eye-catching as it goes together.  Every step of the way I was really motivated to keep going, because I couldn’t wait to see how it turned out.

It was also a really great chance to showcase some of my favorite fabrics.  The Happy Campers fabric is the keystone of her nursery, so I knew I’d include that under the red window.  I threw in some Good Folks, some Alexander Henry out-of-prints, and a really awesome mix tape print as the center square.  The whole quilt is designed to be a play quilt with a built-in activity that grows as your child grows, so over time, he can lie and wiggle, then lift the flap, then discuss the objects he sees in the fabric, then learn the color names, then understand the color spectrum.  It can even be hung on a wall as nursery decor when it’s outgrown.

After a 10 minute photo shoot test-driving it with our own new little one, I can see I’ll be making at least one more of these in the near future.  In fact, when I showed it to my husband, he said, “Wait, you’re giving this away?  How come our kids don’t have anything as cool as this?”  Must up handmade quotient in our own home, it seems!

Happy stitching, everyone, and hooray for babies!

Plus this:

Equals this:

Just a little sneak preview until the mom-to-be gets her gift on Sunday!  Full reveal next week

Am thinking seriously of keeping this one for myself.  If you don’t hear from me, Baby and I have absconded with the gift and are living on the quilted lam somewhere.  Will write when we get work.

Happy stitching!

I went to order more copies of Stitch by Stitch for the shop from our distributor for the book signing scheduled for Friday night.  And they’re sold out.  SOLD OUT! I had to triple check the info to be sure I was getting that right.  I am so, so excited and grateful to learn that the book is getting a good reception and a little overwhelmed at the idea that it’s selling all over the world right now.  Y’all have all been so wonderful and supportive, and I am a little teary-eyed at the idea that major suppliers to independent fabric shops all over the nation have sold so many copies of my book that it is currently on back order.  That is so wild and amazing!

I was all set to do a book signing tomorrow night but I’d really rather open up the shop and sign books when we have some on hand.  Y’know, to sign.  Right now, we’re down to our last six copies!  So I’m postponing the book signing and demos until the weekend of the Sew-A-Thon to allow book sellers to get more copies in.

Please pass the word along, and mark your calendars for 7:30 pm, Friday September 24.  Come by the shop, grab a copy of Stitch by Stitch, have it signed on the spot, and stick around to see all the wild craziness that is the Sew-A-Thon!

See you then, and Happy Stitching!

P.S.  Have you bought a copy of Stitch by Stitch? I’d be so grateful to hear your feedback or read a review on Amazon!

This was a super quick project–took about 45 minutes to stitch up, and ready to wear right out the door.  Off to pick her up from school and surprise her–easy peasy AND I get to feel like a generous mom.  Love these knits!

I don’t know who this woman is, some reality show star/winner/personality.  She’s not familiar to me.  Turns out she’s a newlywed, and according to the first lines of the article, has recently had a baby.  On the facing page are the totally! unretouched! photos! the magazine has promised of her rockin’ bod in a string bikini on the beach someplace tropical.  She’s got an itty bitty waist and lean thighs.  And I do a little mental scan of my own body.  And I don’t look like that.  Not even close.

So I think, “Well, maybe her baby’s a lot older than mine!  Maybe she’s had more recovery time!”  And I find myself nearly frantically searching the article for a date or an age or some shred of fact that will back up this hope of mine, and make me feel better about the extra 20 pounds I’m carrying.

And then I see it: May 8.  The day her baby was born.  The day MY baby was born.  She’s exactly the same number of days post-partum as I, and she’s in a string bikini.  I distinctly remember our beach vacation a few weeks ago, and I was most assuredly NOT in a string bikini.

The woman at the checkout had to call out to me to get my attention, because this ridiculous article had plunged me into a reverie of self-recrimination.  I was busy feeling sorry for myself–and mad at myself–in equal measure.  I’m not fat, I’m not even especially chubby, but I’m not satisfied, and that’s bugging me right now.  And those totally! unretouched! photos! really irked me for making me wish I could sink into the floor–as long as under the floor was a liposuction surgeon and a treadmill.

I am reminded of my dissatisfaction each day when I get dressed.  And I have a whole other emotion: total gratitude for the amazing forgiveness of knit fabrics.  Praise heaven for their softness, their stretch, and the way they can mask our imperfections while making us feel pretty and confident.

Today’s project was a knit top using Cal Patch’s Design-It-Yourself Clothes.  It went together quickly and without hiccup, and I’m pleased with the result.  I’d love to have a couple more of these, but really, I love that as my body changes, I can always have a pattern in my back pocket to adapt.  I can always have clothes that fit me and flatter me at my fingertips, without spending a fortune.  I love knowing that this is suited to MY body, rather than being a tee off the shelf that may or may not cling in all the wrong places and make me feel self-conscious as my body returns to where it was pre-baby.

Sewing is a lot of things.  I like to be reminded that it’s a record of who I’ve been (someone who once had a below-the-knee romper with sailor collar that I wore proudly) and who I want to be (a fit and fashionable mom who’s satisfied with her figure).  I like that sewing keeps me honest (because the measuring tape never lies) and that by knowing what fits me I can create an illusion with fabric–or dispel one.

I still don’t know who this reality star was.  She did look fabulous, and very real.  After the horror wore off that I’ve been slacking while she and her personal trainer have been hitting the gym and counting carbs, I like that she was a little soft around the edges and that she’s content with that, even in a magazine.  I’ll take it a little more slowly–a knit tee rather than a teeny bikini–but I can see myself there.  Maybe next summer.

Next month, I’m teaching both Sewing Knits and Patternmaking over at the shop.  Click the links for details–both classes still have space!  Sewing Knits is great for those of you who love these fabrics–like the Michael Miller stripe in the top above–but have been afraid to try them.  Patternmaking is perfect if you’ve been working with sewing patterns and are having a hard time finding just the right design or style for what’s already in your head.  We’ll be using Cal Patch’s book as our main text, and we’d love to see you there!

Sign up now!  Full details here.

I hardly ever touch this bucket.

I think about it sometimes–but not hard.  It just sits in its little Ikea cubby, ready for The Day when I’ll want and have time to mend.  This is an easily procrastinated task, and I’m 98% certain I’m not telling you something you don’t know.

So I started thinking, as I was putting pockets on a skirt this morning–a quick job, an easy job, a brain-on-auto-pilot job–why did I choose to spend my time putting on pockets this morning, and not doing some mending?  Why don’t I ever feel as though I want to do mending?  Is it that it doesn’t seem like sewing?  Because mending is one of those sewing skills that seem to impress strangers (as in the conversation: “You sew?  Really?  You mean you could put buttons back on all my shirts and stuff?”).  Is it that it seems like drudgery and that it’s outdated?  Because last I checked, buttons have been falling off since buttons were invented, so I’m not really sure how it could have become outdated.

Which led me, in the meandering way of auto-pilot thoughts, to Robert Frost.  Most of us were expected to read “Mending Wall” when we were in school.  Whether we did or not is another story, but it holds up well over time.  (The work of Poets Laureate so often does.)  I wondered if his mending and my mending were the same mending.  So I Googled (God bless ‘em) and re-read the poem for the first time in a long time.  It’s a poem about two neighbors, one who thinks the wall between their tree-covered, cow-free properties is old-fashioned and needless, laughing at his neighbor for continuing to build it out of habit; and one who argues that “Good fences make good neighbors,” and values the act regardless of whether livestock are involved.  The two meet every spring to mend the breaks in their stone fence that appear at the end of a long season of ice and snow.

When I was younger, I thought this whole poem was pretty dumb.  I mean, it seemed so obvious that the guy who keeps saying, “Good fences make good neighbors!” was wrong, and that it was time to Move On.  Reading it now, though, I see that it was actually the other dude who called him to mend the wall in the first place, who complained about the big holes hunters left in it when they were going after game.  I thought I understood Frost’s point in the poem, that doing things year after year when the usefulness of the task has passed is wasteful and foolish.  It struck me this morning that in Frost’s poem, the wall is built not just out of rote tradition, but because both men enjoy the camaraderie and the community of putting the wall back together, stone by stone.  And that maybe Frost is giving us two perspectives in the poem–that the other side of the argument is not that building a fence makes good neighbors because it keeps the other guy out, but that mending makes good neighbors because it brings the two together in a shared moment, a joint and familiar task that makes for joined and familiar neighbors, the core of any community.  As I mend my family’s things, I feel the same sense of one-stitch-at-a-time satisfaction, of a return to the familiar, of placing needle and thread in a moment and pulling it more tightly about us all.  Mending may seem old-fashioned and outdated, creating walls where there need be none–why spend your time mending, when you could so easily toss and buy new?  But I think today that mending is bringing past to present, is placing value on memory and looking forward to usefulness.  Rather than drudgery, it is an excuse to sit quietly and patiently, to translate the meaning of the act to my children as a commitment to them and to the little bits of daily life that add up to a Life, add up to family.  Mending is trust that a task will be performed, it is devotion in performing it, and it is resuscitating those things that appeared lost and unused.  Like a velveteen rabbit, things that are mended are stitched with careful love and made more real.

Maybe today is The Day, after all.