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.