I had been lazy for a while and the sewing machine sat collecting dust along with three, no wait, four partially started projects. Well I just finished one of them the other day.
V has been chewing on her crib edge and since her crib will convert to her bed soon we thought it might be better if we put up a bumper/protector of sorts. I found one on amazon.com that was designed for the larger fronts of convertible cribs and bought it. However it was still too small to wrap all the way around the front part of the crib.
So I made five cloth ties for it. I used leftover fabric from the Superman duvet cover (the white part) and sewed up some ties. It took me two days since I had to do it in between her naps, but it was nice to get the sewing machine out again. I had forgotten how much I enjoyed it.
J.E.B.'s other project was a gift for a guy he works with who is PCSing this week. For those of you who aren't up with the military lingo, PCS is Permant Change of Station, or he's moving to a different command. Anyway, this guy loves to get on his soap box and rant about things. Its a hobby of his. J.E.B. and the other guys in the shop thought it would be great if he made an actual soap box to give him at their farewell party. It was the first time he made anything with a hinge/door but it came out really well. The other guys had a plaque made with all of the favorite rants of the guy. When J.E.B. brought it out at the farewell party, it was a hit!
J.E.B.'s latest project was a shoe rack. I was a little skeptical about the whole design in the beginning since it was something I'm not familiar with but I am totally on board with it now! He wanted me to draw the letters of TEAM BOLEN so I sketched something out on a paper bag (cut to fit the length of the board) and then he transferred the stencil to the wood and used a new Dremel tool to cut the letters out.
I can't stop looking at the finished rack and I know J.E.B. is very proud of himself and of how well it came out! It does look great!
My latest project was a nap mat for V. I was a little intimidated at the project in the beginning but I think it turned out pretty well. I had to scrap the pattern and directions for the pillow though. My mom, the lady at JoAnns and I all couldn't figure out what it was trying to tell me, so the lady at JoAnns gave me her own way to make a pillow. Very simple. Worked out fine.
I ended up adding an extra layer of batting/cushioning to the mat since one layer just felt too ...ugh. But that extra layer didn't make my needle happy, or I didn't use the right needle since in the process of sewing the batting to the fabric I bent two needles in the machine. But I learned how to replace the needle, so something good did come from it all!
I see some errors in it, but overall I'm quite happy with the finished product! Now, V just has to grow big enough for it!
So this page is dedicated solely to the projects that J.E.B. and I have been working on and will start to work on. We each decided that we wanted a new hobby. While we still love to play video games (he is still into WoW, or World of Warcraft, and I split my time between WoW, the Wii and various online games), we thought that getting a hobby which entailed us actually creating something would be fun. So I started sewing and he started woodworking. Quite the little old couple, aren't we!
I like to think that we started our new hobbies recently, only within the last two months or so, but I guess that is not quite true. If you want to get specific, I started my new sewing hobby the fall of 2009 when I was pregnant with V and J.E.B. was in the middle of teaching a WTI class at work. I decided for Christmas that year I would make J.E.B. a Superman duvet cover for our bed. I love bed linens and am always trying to justify to J.E.B. why we need yet another set of sheets or duvet cover. (Side note--the down comforter and duvet cover was an ingenious idea on my part...we don't have to keep buying bulky comforters but I can still buy duvet covers and keep things varied! Perfect really!) I guess I was having some major nesting instincts or something because I didn't own a sewing machine at the time and the only thing I'd sewn previously were buttons. But damn, those buttons sure held on!
So yeah, I started making a duvet, by hand. Literally hand-sewing everything. The process took a while to get started since I had to order a bolt of the black fabric for main piece and the last time I sewed anything was in 7th grade Home Ec class where we each made a small pillow. I can still see the crappy little classroom in the basement of Vogel-Wetmore Middle School. I'm remembering a green color on the walls, but I could be making that part up for all I know!
Anyway, back to the story. So while I waited for the black fabric to come in, I bought the white and blue material which would make the Superman logo. I actually ended up buying the material twice since I cut it before I washed it and it shrunk on me. Rookie mistake! But in the end it worked out fine. I had made my own pattern from a 1 inch X 1 inch photo I was able to print off the internet. Oh, did I tell you I joined a Superman forum just so I could find that specific logo design? I still get junk mail from them periodically. So geeky...a Superman forum! HA!
I worked on this monster piece of cloth (we have a queen-size bed) while he was at work and I have to be honest here, I got a little pissy when he was home on the weekends and I wasn't able to work on it. For those of you who don't know his schedule during WTI, its simple: 8 weeks long, 6 days a week, 10-14 hours/day depending on which stage of the class you're in. So I had quite a bit of time by myself to work on this and folding it up and hiding it at night or on Sundays when he was home was aggravating. Plus I was under a December 25th deadline.
Turns out I didn't finish it by Christmas, but I still wanted him to get something from me so I laid it out on the spare bed, complete with pins and threads, etc, and put one of those gift labels on the bedroom door. He was pretty excited and speechless which is impressive for him! I ended up finishing the duvet in early February and its awesome if I do say so myself! It's lasted through multiple machine washings which is something I was afraid of with my hand-sewn stitches.
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| I found plain black buttons and bought some paint pens and made the same logo on them as well. |
So, on to J.E.B.'s new hobby. He decided a while ago that woodworking would be fun to tinker with and bought a book from Lowe's but didn't really start it until recently. I told him that I'd like a bookcase for V's room where I can put baskets of varying sizes for her to stack her toys, books, etc. We were looking at ideas in Target when he was like, "I can make something like that for her", and so it began!
His first project was a set of sawhorses, something both useful and simple to start with. I mean who cares if you screw up a bit and one is a little wobbly or cock-eyed? Its a sawhorse! He did great with those and quickly moved onto another project to keep getting himself familiar with the tools, etc. We ended up buying a compound miter saw with a work table off Craigslist and a few other smaller tools also to help facilitate the learning curve!
His next project was a shelf for V's room. He envisioned something to hold her diapers and such and to free up room on the changing table. This was something I hadn't even considered but immediately jumped on board with. Previously the diapers and liners were stacked in one of those hanging diaper bags that you get with standard baby crib sets and the poor thing was busting at the seams. Cloth diapers sure do take up a lot of room! The shelf idea was much more efficient!
He decided to do a scalloped edge on it to further play with the tools and it turned out really well. Overall the shelf took him a couple of weekends. Not a bad way to spend them...in the garage, with a breeze (it wasn't yet God-awful hot here), making something with your hands for your kiddo. The only thing we didn't consider until too late was the color of the stain. We chose a lighter stain, but all of V's furniture is a dark cherry color. So while the shelf does a great job at clearing room on the changing table and helping me be more organized, it is a little silly to look at the two different stains!
