Note to self:

Remember how much more pleasant it is to cut out ridiculously large quantities of fabric when you have a new blade on the rotary cutter. Swish!

A cautionary tale

Once upon a time (Tuesday) I bought one of those squishy U-shaped neck pillows for my daughter to use with her new carseat, which otherwise seemed to propel her sleeping head forward at a dangerously lolling angle that looked worrisome (and uncomfortable). But when we got the pillow home and tried it out, it was way to overstuffed to work around her little nubbin of a neck.

"Not a problem!" I thought, getting out the seam ripper. "I'll just take out some of the beads and redistribute the rest of them so it's more comfortable for her."

The seam ripper was, of course, in my sewing room, so I sat down and started working on the project. I had a plastic bag all ready to catch the beads, and the three-year-old was safely engaged in some diverting activity far, far away. I had forgotten how much fun it is to work with polystyrene beads ... and these were literally the size of pinheads, they were that small. I should know, since they're now spread all over my studio. See that stuff on my jeans? It's not dandruff. Thank you, ceiling fan.

Thank you, static electricity.

(Hee - that looks like my hand is being swarmed by albino aphids)

Thank you, Lazy Kid, for the photos, especially the action shot of me attempting to milk the little monsters out of the nipple that was obviously their entry point during the original construction process. If anyone needs any help milking nanny goats or heifers, let me know - I had an hour of practice this afternoon.

Eventually I wised up and took the project out onto the front porch, where I ended up spreading beads all over the porch, sidewalk, and flower bed. I'm going to be vacuuming the little buggers out of my house for months. Grrrrr. At least the significantly smaller pillow works - that would have been the kicker if I went through all that and it still didn't work. Now I just have to find a place to store the beads where Certain People can't find them or reach them.

Note to self: All projects involving fake fur and/or polystyrene beads must be completed outside the house, preferably outside the county.

Temporary spray adhesives

I've been playing around with a new toy, a bottle of Sulky KK 2000 temporary spray adhesive. Several quilt store owners have sung the praises of spray adhesives in place of pins when basting quilt layers together or positioning large pieces for applique. But today is the first time I've actually used it for a whole project ... I'm making a Simple Snowflakes Table Runner as a sample for a shop in Delaware. Here's how it's going ...

1. Used the spray adhesive to attach the backing to the batting, then trimmed the batting to be slightly larger than the backing. Flipped the batting over, sprayed it with adhesive, and attached the background fabric. Only problem so far is that the adhesive directions don't tell you how much to use - I think I may have erred on the side of caution on the backing, because it's a little less firmly attached than the background fabric. Still, it's holding together through light handling.

2. Used the adhesive to attach the snowflakes. Here's where it gets tricky, as I had been warned against just spraying the background fabric and sticking the snow to it - apparently the overspray can gum up the foot on the sewing machine when you're doing the quilting. So the obvious answer is to spray the snowflakes ... but that means that you'd have to handle a sticky, floppy snowflake and try to get it in just the right place on the quilt, which is challenging enough without the adhesive. So I did the following:

• Arrange the snowflakes on the background as if you were going to pin them.
• Mask off the bottom half of one snowflake (and the area around it) with an open magazine laid on top. Flip the top half of the snowflake over onto the magazine, so that now the back side of the top half of the snowflake is visible.
• Spray adhesive on the back side of the top half of the snowflake, then flip the half back up and arrange it in the proper place on the background.
• Turn a page in the magazine (so you've got an adhesive-free surface on top), slide the magazine up to cover the top half of the snowflake, and repeat the process to apply adhesive to the back side of the bottom of the snowflake.
• Repeat for the other snowflakes.

I minimized the overspray, and I think the snowflakes are anchored firmly enough to do the quilting without any pinning (other than to attach the cutting template to the folded fabric in the early steps, and I don't think there's any way around using pins there). I'm heading over to do the quilting now ... I'll let you know how it goes.

UPDATE: Oh Sulky temporary adhesive spray, where have you been all my life? My goodness, this stuff is awesome! I finished the quilting with nary a pucker, slip, or other movement. Out of all the snowflakes, only one point flipped up while I was sewing (usually it's more like 10 of them), and I only got the arm of the darning foot caught in one hole (usually it's more like 5). And everything stayed stuck down, despite numerous (gentle) rerollings to get it to fit through my machine. And the presser foot didn't get bogged down even once, so my overspray-free method must be valid. Hooray for the intersection of adhesive chemistry and quilting! Now if it only weren't $14 for a teeny tiny can ...

Quick tip - makeshift light box

What's a crafter to do when she needs to trace a pattern, but there's no lightbox nearby?

Improvise one with some scotch tape and a sunny window, that's what.

Free pointer - keeping a toddler out of your yarn

Now that my daughter is old enough to be into everything, one of her favorite games is "let's turn Mama's yarn balls into a tangled mess." Since this can happen in approximately 1/25th of a second (how does she do that?) and it usually takes me at least an hour to untangle the yarn afterward, I've had to come up with some strategies to head her off before she gets into trouble.

Most recently, I took some leftover styrofoam craft balls - you know, the ones you paint to make into planets for a science fair display - and some of my smallest balls of leftover yarn. I used a gluegun to glue the yarn to the ball, wrapping and glueing liberally at the beginning. I wrapped until the whole foam ball was covered and it looked vaguely like one of my real yarn balls, then I left the last few feet of yarn unglued so my daughter would have something to play with.

Whenever she makes a beeline for my yarn drawer, I remind her that those are MY balls, and she has her own yarn in her sewing box. As long as I don't trot them out too frequently, these keep her busy for at least 10 minutes or so. That's long enough to crochet a few inches, at least!

Free pointer - copying patterns the easy way

I decided the other day that my daughter is finally old enough that I can make her some clothes and finish them before she outgrows them. So I bought way too many kid-clothes patterns ... and she's in the smallest size of each of them. If it turns out that I like the way the clothes turn out, it would be nice to be able to make them in larger sizes as my daughter gets older. But as you probably know, if you cut out the tissue paper pattern for a small size, it's hard to readjust it for a larger size.

So before I started to make any of the patterns, I roughly cut out the pieces, then put them on top of a piece of kraft paper that was laying on the dense-pile carpet in my sewing room. While holding down the tissue paper, I used a transfer wheel (is that the right word? It's that little wheel on a handle that has pointy spikes, which you use with transfer paper to mark things on fabric when you're cutting out patterns) to trace around the size I wanted to make. Because the kraft paper was on a slightly yielding surface, the transfer wheel perforated through the tissue paper and kraft paper, but it didn't tear either one.

After I transfered all of the cutting lines and tailor's marks to the kraft paper, I was able to carefully punch out the pattern pieces, leaving the tissue paper intact for future projects. I made sure to write the pattern number, piece number, and any cutting instructions on each piece, just in case they get separated in the future and I have to sort them out again.

There are actually several benefits to using kraft paper for the pattern pieces. For example, the kraft paper patterns are much sturdier than tissue paper, so when my daughter grabs them off the cutting table, I don't freak out. And when the cat lays on them, they aren't ruined. And when I'm done cutting out the fabric pieces, I can roll the patterns up in a tube, put a rubber band around it, and slide it into the pattern envelope. Sure, it sticks out the top, but at least it's all together and ready to use if I decide to make the clothes in that size again.

Tip - getting accurate hand tracings of squirmy kids

If you've ever tried to get a toddler to hold still long enough to trace around their hand for a craft project, you know it's like trying to herd cats. Here's a pointer from my friend Sybil, who has plenty of experience overcoming this problem - each year she makes Christmas ornaments in the shape of her (3) kids' hands.

Instead of trying to hold the hand still and trace around it (which gives you sort of a bloated-looking hand, anyway), get the child's hand slightly wet and then make a handprint on dark colored construction paper. The water will leave a mark on the paper, which you can trace around while the child goes off and squirms somewhere else.

We tried this tonight while Liza was taking her bath, and I have a few extra pointers. First, less is more when it comes to the water. If the hand is too wet, it leaves a huge soggy handprint that is hard to trace around and is probably larger than the actual hand, anyway. And have several pieces of paper handy, especially if you're doing it as part of bathtime, because it takes a little practice to get the fingers positioned right before you press the hand down (and you're liable to rip the paper the first time you try to trace around the wet print).

If I have time, later this week I'll post a free pattern for making my version of the handprint Christmas ornaments, which takes considerably less time (and cursing) than Sybil's version. But I'm sure you can come up with your own variation, too. If so, why not post a link so all of us can see it?