Benefit Auction for Miss Josephine

My cousin has put together an online benefit auction for my new baby cousin Josephine. She was born with Trisomy 18. You can read more about her and the strength of her parents here.

The auction is here. It will last for about a week and all proceeds will go to help with her medical costs.

I have made two little wrist pouches for the auction.

The first one is red, blue and green. It is 5 1/2" by 6", the perfect size for your cash, credit card, keys and phone. It is made of a blue vintage reproduction quilting cotton, red fine wale corduroy, and a lime green zipper. The pouch is fully lined and has a blue wrist strap. There is a label that says "High Horse" on the red side of the pouch.

The second pouch is blue, brown and yellow. It is 5 1/2" by 6 1/2", also a perfect size for your cash, credit card, keys and phone. It is made of a quilting cotton, recycled yellow wool, and an orange green zipper. The pouch is fully lined and has a yellow wool handle.

Total Package

Total Package
Originally uploaded by The Anchovy.

I made this package as a birthday gift for our 5 year old neighbor. It is a tote bag with her initials, a pencil roll, and a small zipper pouch holding a sharpener and an eraser. Inside the tote is a nice pad of drawing paper.

The floral fabric is a nice heavy thrifted sheet. The red is a thick chunky woven fabric of some kind ( I need to learn fabric names.)

Lately I've been giving tutus and fairy wands and crowns as birthday gifts but I thought this girl in particular might have enough of that type of thing. So I made her a little art bag instead. I got the idea for Amanda Blake Soule's book, The Creative Family.

You can see the inside of the pencil roll here.

Fabric Scrap Swap

A week or so I signed up for a fabric scrap swap at Itchin 2 B Stitchin. It was fun to choose some pieces that I thought other people would like. Some of them are pieces that I've kept for a while, thinking that I'd use them SOMETIME and just haven't. But I thought they had potential, so I'm sending the challenge on to others. Some pieces are leftovers from past projects, and some of them I just cut off of really large yardage that I have (from the other people's stash thinning.) Here they are:

Cowboy Ike

The past month has been ridiculously busy but now I am glad to say that things have slowed a bit. School is over (summer break!) and I turned in a pretty major grant application. I'm happy to have it all finished. Now I can show you some of the things I've been working on (in the wee hours of the night).

I made Ike some "boy" dress ups for his birthday in April. He still prefers the tutus and fairy wands, but at least he has some options now.

Here is the cowboy suit. He already had these great boots from Santa Fe (thanks to Todd's mother.) So I just made him a little leather vest and chaps. I used an old thrifted leather coat and some other scraps I had stashed. I stitched some scroll patterns into the chaps, and just sort of made up the patterns for both. I was really happy when the actually fit him. We still need to get a little cowboy hat but I think he's pretty cute, even without it.

Tiny Film, Sort Of

This summer I'll be taking a week-long course with SpyHop. I'll be learning some digital film making projects that I can do with my (elementary school) students next year. They sent a representative down my way last week to work with one of my classes making really tiny stop motion films. She had to leave before we were finished so tomorrow I get to finish the project with the students on my own. I spent some time tonight tinkering around with iMovie to make sure I know what I'm doing. It's is really basic, and not very finessed, but here's my first try. I just happened to take a bajillion pictures of my kids playing on their new tire swing the other day. Ta-da! Tell me what you think.

Like Mother

The other day Zoë set up and executed this project all by herself. I just loved watching her dedication and amazing concentration. And mostly I tried to stay out of the way. I think she's a really cool girl. I think she's thinking up and doing projects that I didn't do until I was way older.

A Big Boy

Ike is turning three on Wednesday. It's about the busiest time of year for us and for some reason I decided I could make him a huge amount of homemade presents. What!? We'll see how much I actually accomplish.

Here's a really easy one. I was inspired by Kirsten to do this and it was so quick. The 3 shirt. It's a shirt he already had, so I didn't go out and buy anything. And I used one of the very last tiny scraps of my favorite vintage fabric ever. It'll make me happy every time he wears it.

Easter Weekend

Todd came home on Saturday afternoon which was great because that was my 30th birthday. I am now 30. Hooray! It feels like this will be a good age.

I had fun getting ready for Easter with the kids. On Friday night we dyed our eggs. I boiled a dozen but a few of them cracked so we ended up with only nine. That was funny because our egg dye kit came with nine colors. So it didn't take us long at all to dye them all.

On Saturday morning we woke up bright and early to make it down to the town Easter Egg "Hunt." You can see from the picture that it isn't much of a hunt. Instead it turns into more of a trample, as kids scramble to get the eggs. Some eggs have tickets inside that you can redeem for nice prizes and Easter baskets. I'm usually glad that we don't find those eggs (although we WOULD take one of the bikes, of course.) I didn't get a picture of the actual egg gather up because it all happened so fast, and I was pretty concerned about losing my children in the chaos.

On Sunday afternoon we had our own Easter egg hunt at home. It was nice and quite, and the kids kept stopping to open eggs, instead of trying to find them all. But that's okay. It was nice anyway, and we were glad to have Todd home with us.

More Camera Stuff

Todd's still away and I'm just chilling with the kids (and still working and all that.) We've crossed over the difficult part of him being gone. It seems like the first two or three nights are really hard. Then after that, we're on a roll. We hit a new kind of routine and that makes everything easier. I'm grateful for this. He'll be gone for several more days.


Here are a few pictures I took today when we were out and about. It is so fun to have a camera that I can take around all the time. I'm loving it. I have a lot of fear that I really don't know what I'm doing with photography, but I think these three are not too bad. On one of them (the gross taco) I was playing around with the digital macro.





I've also put a few pictures on my art ed blog that I took in the classroom today. I think it will be so much easier to post about what I do in the classroom, now that I have a camera to carry around. I can just pull it out during any quiet moment. And I love seeing kids' hands while they're drawing and working. So check it out.

New Camera

My birthday is coming up and Todd gave me my present early. Actually he just went out of town for a week and asked if I'd like to open the gift before he left. I think he regretted giving me the option, because of course I wanted it early.

It's a new camera. A really fantastic new camera. One positive thing about having a gear and gadget junkie husband is that he doesn't buy cheap stuff. He gets good stuff. So.

It's a Canon PowerShot SD 870 IS. It has a good zoom lens and I'm sure a whole bunch of other stuff that he'll help me figure out when he gets back. I also love that it's so small.

It's nice having the camera while he's gone because it's giving me something to play with. Even though I'm super busy right now, I'm finding time to play. I even made a really cool cozy for it, which I'll post about later (trying to figure out how to take a picture with the camera INSIDE the cozy.)

Here are two pictures I took of the kids on our walk yesterday. And yes, they are totally not in focus (I prefer to say "soft focus") and all that, but I like them anyway. And don't worry, Todd will give me lessons when he gets home.

Men of Tomorrow

I've been tagged..... (my sister Josie tagged me)

1. Pick up the nearest book (with at least 123 pages)
2. Turn to page 123
3. Find the 5th sentence
4. Post the next three sentences
5. Tag 5 people
"Are you ready to sign a confession? Or shall I give you a taste of how that gun felt when I applied the pressure?" She writes a confession, knowing it will mean her death.

I think everyone I know that blogs has already done this one, so I'm kind of up a creek. Let's see. . .

Todd
Kirstin
and I guess anyone else who wants to!

Patchwork Pillow

I am taking the week off from work. It's supposed to be a really nice long prep week, and I AM prepping, I guess. But I had to start out the week with a really therapeutic project. I had to sew something start to finish.

This project took me most of Monday to make, with several stops and breaks. I am happy that it was done start to finish in one day, though. And that I didn't have to buy a single thing to make it.

I made this patchwork pillow (yes, I took most of these pictures outside on the sidewalk--I needed sun!) I really practiced the technique for making wavy irregular seams. It was so fun to make this, and by the time I finished, I feel like I really have the technique down.

This pillow is intended for my living room couch. Mostly it doesn't match or coordinate with anything in my house, but I really don't care. It makes me so happy to look at it. I used so many fabrics. I didn't count but I'd say it was around 15 different ones. Each of the fabrics are my favorites. So when I see it, I get a tiny peek of 15 fabrics that I really love. I think that's one of the things I like about sewing: you get to make things for your home that will give you a little joy all the time. Anyway, it was a super fun project and it was super therapeutic. I don't have time to sew a lot anymore, and when I do, it's usually not something so creative like this. Mostly it's sewing knee patches on jeans. This was so much more fun.

Sassy Apron Swap

I signed up for my Aunt Lucy's Sassy Apron Swap (I never added the button for it--sorry!) I was a few days late sending out my apron, but I'm happy to say that it's actually on its way now, hooray!

Here's the apron that I made. My partner wanted something that was both fun and functional. You know, good for wiping your hands on.

I started with a heavy white denim (to prevent soak through of spills). Then I added panels of hand towels. These are for wiping your hands (my aprons are always stained on both legs). The blue panels are also two large pockets.

I finished the apron with two bands of decorator weight fabric. It doesn't show well in the pictures, but there are small dots and lines of blue that hopefully tie all the colors together. Blue and green are really springy colors to me. The blue is for the blue sky that finally returns and the green is for all the buds and tiny leaves on the trees. I am so looking forward to the return of these two colors in my neighborhood!

The apron turned out kind of heavy, but I hope that it will really be functional. I hope my partner likes it.