A morning of mending

A few weeks ago I had a really productive morning mending clothes.

I re-sewed seams in 2 pairs of pants, patched a pair of jeans, sewed buttons on 2 shirts, fixed the hem in a pair of dress pants, and fixed a seam in a shirt!  I can't believe I waited so long to take care of these!

Mending clothes isn't that exciting, but I did learn how to use the blind hem feature on my sewing machine for the dress pants, so at least I learned something in the process.

Dishcloth 7 of 26

7) Snowflakes:

Iowa Koozy - Hayden Fry

Another koozy. These are some of my favorite projects - someone made a joke about wanting a koozy with Hayden Fry on one side, thinking that would not be possible. I surprised him with this koozy and he was adequately surprised and excited!

Garden

Well, this isn't exactly a craft, but I am excited about it so I'm going to share. I planted a garden in May. Here is the BEFORE:

I got home from my week long vacation today and was really worried that it would be dead...but here is the AFTER:

Everything had grown and was ready to be picked! Look at all this! I even had 2 blueberries from my blueberry bush. Check out my web album if you want to see more before and afters!

Cole's Robot Quilt

I know it has been a long time since I have posted anything, but I finally have something to show for myself! I had great intentions of posting updates on this quilt as it went, but I was sick for a couple weeks, traveled, had guests at our house, etc, etc and never got around to it. So here is the finished product. It is a baby quilt for my friend who just had a baby boy. Their theme is robots, so I thought David Walker's Robots was an obvious choice. The pattern is my own. I did applique planets and rockets in the 4 corners and a big robot in the center - all inspired by the fabric. The shapes are free-hand, so not perfect, but I was pretty happy with the result.

Chickadee purse plus clutch

I finally finished the Chickadee purse that someone ordered to give as a gift. It is the same as the prototype except that I added some iron on interfacing to the body of the purse to give it more structure. I also decided to add a matching clutch. It closes with a button and elastic loop (hair tie).

I also made some hang tags and tied one on with ribbon.

And, some new packaging!

Dishcloths 5-6 of 26

5) Vertical Weave

6) Six Stitch Cable

From these two I learned:

• I am not a huge fan of pass slipped stitch over (but maybe I just need practice)
• Cables are way easier the second time around (I made this dishcloth once before)
• As much as I like the idea of not using a cable needle, I am not willing to take that chance just yet.
• I need to work on regulating my cast on and off tension because I go between way to tight and way to loose. I need to find a happy medium.
• There must be better ways to bind off some of these patterns because sometimes it just doesn't look very good. I need to look into that too.

I recently got the book Knit Fix by Lisa Kartus, but haven't had the time to take a look yet. I am hoping I can get some good pointers there to help out with some of the issues I am having. But regardless of some of these issues, I feel like I am definitely moving towards my goal of becoming better at knitting. I am quicker and it is getting easier. I am getting better at recognizing my mistakes and fixing them. I am starting to get ideas of how to do things without a pattern. I really like cables! This is exciting. I can't wait until I am done with all 26 and I can look back and see how much I have progressed and learned.