The happy Whale

I had been working for the last few weeks on a baby quilt, and stuffed animal for my very good friend Brooke.

She is having a boy and was planning on decorating with whales.

A little illustration I did for this project.

I had to make something.

I had found this on Pinterest, and went from there:

It's an absolutely adorable tutorial on making a little whale toy from old jeans.

I had to do it. It was posted on a Chinese language website. I couldn't find the original source so I cant credit the person responsible. I just had to go from pictures, since there weren't any directions after I translated the website.

I cut up a pair of old jeans and came up with this. (Actually my second attempt after first making a rough draft)

Notice anything?

I was not trying to make an Orca.

It took me awhile to figure out why it didn't look right. And then I noticed. I switched the fabrics and  made the whale upside down.  The shapes should have been reversed, so that the belly of the whale curved upward, and the top of his head ended higher up. I tried to reconcile myself with my not quite orca (missing the correct dorsal find and spot) but failed and tried again. At this point I had no more left over denim and had to make it out of leftover navy cotton and some printed denim flannel.

Third attempt

It still didn't turn out as whale-ish looking to my eye, the nose came out too rounded. But I was drawing my own pattern and sometimes, the first pattern needs a bunch of adjustments.  Still, I'm hoping the little boy will like it, despite it's imperfections.

In-between the 1st stuffed whale and the second I worked on the baby quilt.

Working on layout on my kitchen table.

Playing around with the appliqué pattern

I was really excited to use the majority of fabrics from my stash.

And I was excited to use reverse appliqué technique.

It turned out pretty well until the reverse appliqué started to fray.....badly.

The wonky panels were intended. I was trying to evoke
waves moving. 

I disliked it so much I had to re-appliqué it with a satin stitch several times. And still it turned out messy looking. 

I thought I would just go with it anyway and began to quilt it to the batting and backing.

And hated it immediately. I tried free motion quilting on my basic Bernina and it just looked messy. So after much pulling out of stitches with my trusty old seam ripper, I gave up and decided to start over.

I had to get new fabrics since I had used all the fabrics that would work in the first one and began again.

For some reason the colors flare badly in this picture. I've color corrected
in photoshop so I'm gonna just chalk it up to my bad photography
and my bad lighting.

This was the fabric I found at the Quilt Haus.

This tag is an amazing find that I forgot I had stashed away in my sewing stuff,
I haven't used these since I found them 13 years ago. 

Hand quilted waves, and at the top white panel, clouds.
(this is the correct color of medium blue)

I had gotten so irritated by the machine quilting and the bunching and the little tucks that I decided to so something I'd never done before. Hand Quilting.

I had a lot of trouble starting the appliqué, I always forget the blanket appliqué stitch, and then beginning quilting by hand with no callous' on my fingers was pretty tough. I went thru four thimbles and still couldn't manage to quilt with any of them. I finally gave up on thimbles and went back to doubled band-aids on the pad of my middle finger.

I enjoyed the hand quilting, and it gave the quilt a softer and more fluffy appearance than machine quilting. I also managed to mitre the corners of my binding, something that has eluded me for a decade. Luckily, with Pinterest, I found an "easy" method that even working with my non-bias sashing. (Bias tape is too much of a hassle so I usually use straight grain sashing. (I know, I think bias tape is a hassle and I hand quilted this quilt, I'm a study in contrast)

Here's the little package all wrapped up.

Here are some of the links I used for the tutorials on binding with a mitred corner, hand-quilting, and reverse appliqué.

Easy mitred corners.

Hand-quilting

Reverse Appliqué

With reverse appliqué I would recommend using a knit or a felt so the edges don't fray.

sewing projects

I'm suffering from pregnancy related carpal tunnel syndrome. So off and on I use wristbraces to keep the numbness and pain away. It keeps me from doing a log of stuff I'd LIKE to do. So does my sciatic nerve pain....also pregnancy related.

So instead of sewing, and crafting, and dancing and walking. I'm doing a lot of sitting and lying down and wearing wristbraces instead of the usual things I would prefer to do.

I managed a few things in the past month in spite of my general laziness.

I finished a baby dress for my baby (still not born) and finished some pillows for her crib. Mostly for my rocking chair, since she wont need them for the first 6-12 months really.

Little Lucy's ric-rac dress. When I sewed them on the fabric, it looked
much straighter. Oh well.

Pillows, for, well me. 

There's a slew of stuff I feel that I want to do but at this point lack the energy/money to go and do them.
And that's ok. Honestly, I really really like that at this point, my son can play by himself, or watch TV and for 30 minutes I can rest on the couch in-between other stuff one must do. I know I'll have much less of that when my daughter is born.

Until then.

Ruth

changing table-Ikea hack turns Hobo

This is the no-good, stomach clenching, paint stripping mistake I made.....Ikea Hack.

I know a lot of Mom's who never used their changing table. I wasn't one of them. Until my son was 2 1/2 and way to heavy for me to lift, I used my changing table. Now, the one I had was large, too large to fit into the room, we got all new furniture to outfit my son's and my daughters nursery. But the one thing I needed was a changing table. A very small one. I liked the ones that just perched on the crib railing.

I couldn't find any to buy though,and wasn't sure it was very safe. So I went to my go to place for cheap and small....Ikea.

I thought the gulliver table would work.

The website said it was $10 cheaper that it was in the store, so I went and saved $10 and got an even cheaper one that I thought was kind've ugly....the Sundvik or something or another.

When I got it home and put it together I was dismayed at how HUGE it was. It was 3 inches taller than the crib and I KNEW I would just destroy my hips, elbows and other body parts trying to squeeze past it. Plus, the ugly black screws just don't make sense to me. So it came part with the help of my trusty Allen wrench and went back into the box.  

I didn't know what to do. I grabbed the changing pad and tried to get an idea of how the hell I was going to make this work. Would I just change the baby where-ever? Well, I could, but in the night....ugh. I like a known entity. I spied an old side table I had gotten from IKEA before my son was born. I placed the changing pad on top of it. And an IDEA was born. A bad no good, terrible idea.

I seem to labor under the delusion that I am very handy. That I can build anything. My husband doesn't seem to agree but then, he's a bit more "practical" than I am.

It was a solid idea, but my bad craftsmanship came calling and made it not so great a realization.

So we went to Home Depot and got lot's of the wood/mdf/screws and paint we would need. And since we have no circular saw we had to have the guy there cut them to my precise measurements. He cut them incorrectly again, I found out when we got home. By about 1/4" on the table legs. He's done this before, I think he hates me.

I didn't wait for my husband to help/direct/instruct me. I just went on an started building. I am woman, hear the whine of my black and decker drill!!!

Except for the badly cut wood, it was going well and I was feeling damn proud of myself.

I started sanding, priming and spray painting and you're thinking.....OHmagherd! You cannot paint/spray paint, walk outside on a misty day because you're pregnant!!! And I would go......I wore a mask buddy. Because I care. The color was very off so I went back and had an exact match made. This meant I would have to paint it with a brush (oh horror) but I persevered. Here's where this ikea Hack went from hack to hobo*. (hobo is a term my husband uses when you patch things together in a bad way that kind've works but will fall apart at any moment.)

One of the  stupid table legs fell off. IT JUST FELL OFF. I used TWO screws. How obnoxious. So I hurriedly screwed it back in and added  some wood glue for good measure. I screwed in some L braces to help them stay together. The screws were too long and pushed thru the top of the table. Oh Jeez.

I wasn't ready to give up yet, so I just went with it. I told myself it wasn't THAT noticeable and that the changing pad would be on top so no worries. (I had also told myself that when I was done using it as a changing table it would work perfectly as a child's desk. --great idea in theory. Until my son/daughter tries to draw over it and gets bumpy looking coloring.)

I started painting again. And it was OK. And then something happened. It wouldn't dry. I researched paint dry times and found out that even though it was latex, it takes a good 30 days to cure, so it would feel sticky and tacky to the skin for 30 damn days. I thought latex was supposed to dry faster. Apparently it dries from the outside in, so the top layer feels "a little" dry, while the under layer is still all gooey.

As my husband said, "Like hoover dam."

I gave up on waiting since it was going to take forever, and just put the door and the shelves back in. After much shoving and a lot of paint peeling. It was finished. And I cried. Because it was all wonky, even with the leveling I did to fix the damn table legs, the paint was never going to dry correctly since I only sanded part of the pieces, and I was a big damn failure. 

I put it back in the humid garage (it rained for a couple days----I live in Texas in a perpetual drought but when I want to paint, deluge.)

I just gave up and tried to find something else to use. Lot's of internet searching later I came up with Nada. I was at that point, glad I didn't take a hammer and go all Gallager on the changing table. 

Somehow in the middle of the night I found a glimmer of hope and decided to just paint over the messy parts, and just use the damn thing, whether it was perfect or not.  So I did. I waited a couple days to put it in the house just in case it wanted to spontaneously combust....it didn't so I carried it into the nursery. 

So now it sit's in the nursery, waiting to be used, I just put the changing pad on it for pictures, then I took it off for fear of paint peeling and am just waiting for it to dry. (for 30 freaking days) 

So here it is, my Ikea hack. I'm coming around to thinking it's going to be fine. It's just furniture, pressed particle board furniture that serves a purpose and that purpose isn't to make my eyeballs jump out of my sockets in furniture lust. 

So there. Ikea score one=Ruth score 1/2 a point, for damned effort.

Ruth

ps.

My pictures are horrible, I cannot take a good picture. Not with a small un-dslr camera, bad lighting and the propensity to never try all that hard.  So, alas, my blog will not be filled with beautiful styled pictures, it will just look, well homemade. I have not the money, nor the time to figure out how to make it look like something out of Dwell magazine. Oh well. Maybe when I have more followers.