Disaster Zone

It has officially started. My once clean office and sewing room has turned into a disaster zone. The crafting for Christmas is in fully swing, and the Etsy Store sewing has temporarily come to a close. There is too much to do to get ready for all the handmade gifts, so the pants and belts will have to wait again until after the holiday season. The shop will still be open to sell the items that are already made, but no new items for a little while. The bins of fabric are off the shelves, and piles of fabrics are being sorted through to find the perfect piece for this or that.



I am almost completely done with Jozef's toy, and I only have the hand embroidery parts left on that one. I am doing that in front of the television at night. Today I am working on cutting out some of the items for Craig's gift. I hope to have his fully cut out today. I am also working on another thing for Jozef. I am training up some new turtles to "stunt double" for his original one. I guess it has been loved almost to death, so we need some replacements to stand in since the original one can no longer do his own stunts. ;) I got all the pieces cut out:



I am working on them today as they need to be brought back to Illinois with me over the Thanksgiving holidays for stand in duties. I am going to take this opportunity to warn you all that blogging may become rather sparse now that I am starting to run on deadline for the holidays. I will again do the holiday round up at the end of the gift giving season, so that you can all see the toys and items I made for all the family this year. I hope that you come back and check in at the end to see it all. Until then, you can find out if I have a new posting by following me on Twitter or subscribing to the RSS feed for the blog. Till the next check in, I hope you all have great holidays next week and wonderful crafting times.

Moving on to Toy Making

I finally did the last stitches on those chocolate pinstripe pants. They got cast aside last week due to the birthday festivities, and now they are hanging on my door waiting for a sunny enough day to take product photos.





I really love this fabric. It is very similar to a business suit I have. In fact, these pants would be wonderful for someone with an office job that, like me, lives for comfy pants. They are a soft bottom weight polyester cotton blend, so they are easy care as well.

I have decided that it is time to cast aside the pants sewing for a little while in order to start work on the many toys and gifts for the holiday season. I have one almost cut out and marked. I hope to get it done today. I am also working on a project for Brenna's birthday. I started this one last year and abandoned it due to poor results. This time, however I am doing much better with it. I hope to have this all finished soon and waiting to be mailed out for her birthday on the 5th of December. It pays to plan ahead, especially since it has to travel across the country to the other coast. I also have quite a few patterns to copy over to interfacing. I am a solid believer in not cutting my patterns now, and I have found that interfacing makes a great transfer medium. Well I am feeling inspired, so I am off to finish cutting out all the pieces and putting this toy together. It will be fun to have so many "friends" hanging out in the sewing room as the holidays approach.

Holiday Wrap Up Day 4

One of my favorite projects this holiday season was the toy I made for my nephew Craig. He is the youngest of the set of children my sister has. I decided on a pelican project and went to work on it. I loved working on this. It had so many great little details to it. I also learned through the project how top stitching can so dynamically change the look of things. Here the pelican is right before he received his wings:



Once I got the wings and feet on the pelican, I put his eyes on. I found that the eyes on this bird really did look sly. I placed him under our tree and kept thinking that the bird must be up to something. Dan agreed that he had a sly look about him. I guess the reason he looks so sly is his secret beak. The pouch under his beak is a nice little holding area for a color and number learning set of fish. It zippers closed so the fish cannot escape and get lost when the pelican is not being played with. Here he is eating fish number ten:



I also did not sew the eyelid of the pelican in an upright position. I like to let some things be loose for kids to explore and play with. I decided that the ability to make the bird awake or asleep should be up to the person playing with him. Here he is after a large meal of fish taking a nap:



Just like this was my favorite toy to make this year, it was one of the favorite things I made this year with the adults. I have already been told by Kathy that one needs to be made for Jozef when he is old enough. Jozef's present will be tomorrow's little show and tell.

Today on the slate I have my first day back tutoring at 826 Valencia after the holiday break. It will be good to get back to working with the kids and getting to brush up on my 5th grade math further! :) I am also going to work on my knitting on the train and try to get some parts of the tutorial photographed today. We will see how much gets done before I head out. I also have this dream of making cannoli for dessert tonight. Time will be the judge of these things.

Cooler Weather

Today I woke up to glorious fog! One of my favorite things about living in the Bay Area is the fog bank. I have always loved foggy days, and there were very few when I lived in Illinois. They were a joy to me mostly because I associated them with being at the lake in Wisconsin for the annual family fishing trip we used to all go on. Most mornings would open with a fogged in lake that seemed so full of mystery; it let my over active imagination have a place to play. Along with the fog is some cooler weather. This change is letting me think more about my holiday gift making. It is hard to focus on winter events when it is 85 degrees in the apartment. Waking up this morning and having the cool ocean smelling breeze coming through the window immediately turned my thoughts to my niece's birthday gift. She is a December baby, and I try to make sure she gets her birthday gift on her birthday and not on Christmas. My sister also works on keeping her birthday "hers" by not decorating the house for the holidays until it is over. I will take some pictures of her gift in construction as I make it and post them here so you know what I am working on. I figure she is still too young to be on the computer finding this stuff since she is just in kindergarten, well at least I hope she is still too young to find it. I am also going to get another organizational tin finished up and listed today in the shop. It was fun to do the blackwork for this one as well.



This is the needlework just on the canvas, but I still need to get it all put onto the tin. It should be up for sale today for $10. Also on the slate for the shop must do's today are some finishing touches to the black roses pants. I want to model them tomorrow and get them listed up as well tomorrow. This of course can only happen if we are not fogged in all day. I also need to make some more wrapping papers for the shop. I think the overall plan is to do a half work on the shop day and half on the birthday present. If I can get a good jump on the birthday gift, which involves a ton of cutting and not so much sewing, I will be really happy. I will keep you all updated as to how things are going on my Twitter Feed. Sign up today to get the most up to date information on the shop.