15 Minute Fashions: The Radiator Springs Redo Tee

I promise, this will NOT be all I blog about from now on, but I am just so stinking proud of this t-shirt!  (Not to mention the adorable little boy wearing it!)

This was inspired by another Make it and Love it tutorial, that I found in the process of working on my Dolman top last week.  If you didn’t catch my last post, I’m basically just breaking my sewing projects down into little 15 minute chunks, and documenting my progress with snapshots.  It makes me feel like I can actually tackle some of the projects I’d usually put off due to “lack of time”.  Anybody can spare 15 minutes here and there!

This one ended up taking me about two hours worth of 15 minute timed segments.  It would have taken a lot less time had I not made a few rookie mistakes.  I’ll post my snippets of 15 minute progress, and if you want to make your own baseball tee, hit her tutorial for very detailed and clear instructions.

My son loves this shirt.  Like most 4 year olds these days, he’s a car’s fanatic.

 

But, after a while I noticed these little holes forming in one of the sleeves.  I sent him to preschool in it anyway for a while, but eventually, they were starting to get obvious.  Luckily, my hubby had a shrunken grey shirt to donate to the cause, and, like Lightning McQueen and Sally, I too set out on my own mission to save Radiator Springs!

 

15 minutes spent cutting the sleeves off the shirt and pinning them to the other t-shirt.

 

 

 

It shouldn’t have taken me a whole extra 15 minutes to cut the sleeve and cuff pieces, but I made a few miscalculations and ended up cutting both sleeves separately.

 

In another 15 minutes I had them pinned.  Had I not messed up the cutting step, this too would have gone much faster!

15 minutes switching out needles and thread in my sewing machine and sewing one sleeve on.

15 minutes sewing the other sleeve on and trimming down the seems a bit.

15 minutes getting the collar just right!  I learned a lot from the last time!  This one still wasn’t perfect, but I’m getting there!

15 minutes sewing the seams that close the arm pieces.  I’m still not sure if I did that step in the proper order…  Plus, see how I messed up  when cutting?  Had I followed the tutorial more closely I wouldn’t even have needed to hem the sleeves!

 

And 15 minutes topstitching and hemming.  Aaaand….

  

 

Notes:

• Both my husband and my friend, Stephanie, (who also sews a great deal) were totally confused when I showed them this shirt.  They both thought I had bought it this way.  *WINNING!*
• I was really going for a 3/4 sleeve length, but I didn’t measure or anything…  I might make them shorter later, but I do kind of like the cozy oversized look.
• I am so fortunate to have a son that LOVES to get his picture taken!  Like, he’ll literally ask me to take pictures of him when I don’t have my camera out!  I have a feeling he’ll be the type to go for the spotlight when he gets older!  But for now, take five, kid!  You did a great job!

 

15 Minute Fashions: The Lucky Dolman Top

Introducing a new series today!  (Yay!) It’s nothing fancy, just, as I work on my sewing projects, I’ll be taking pictures of my progress at 15 minute increments.

Here’s why:  I LOVE to sew, but it can become something of an all-consuming passion.  I’ve set up a corner of our bedroom for my sewing projects, and I’m hoping, through this exercise, to train myself to bounce in and out of a project in 15 minute increments.  There are so many cute projects I think I don’t have time for, but broken up into manageable bits throughout the week, I could probably make myself a new dress every week–and STILL keep the kids and hubby happy!

And if I can do it, you can do!

Today’s 15 minute fashion is a Dolman style top, based on THIS tutorial from Make it and Love it!  On Thursday, I realized I had nothing green to wear to Sunday’s St. Patrick’s Day events, but I DID have a few yards of green jersey knit fabric.

15 minutes of cutting

15 minutes sewing the shoulder and side seems.

15 minutes working with the bottom band

That’s just 45 minutes and it’s already taking shape!

15 minutes attaching the sleeve cuffs

15 minutes working with the collar.  I did NOT get this part right.  Should have used a smaller piece of fabric.  But I learned!

And in that total of 1 hour and 15 minutes, my St. Patties Day shirt is done!

But then I got to thinking… I’d accidentally made the shirt a LOT bigger than it needed to be, and I’d styled the sleeves to be almost a bat wing style… I kind of looked like I was wearing something from the 80′s.  I started googling pictures of other Dolman tops, and decided I needed to just embrace the 80′s with this piece and add some rad diagonal stripes.  I needed to move this project from basic garment construction to vintage inspired design.  (Yep, I know.  80′s is actually vintage, now…  Let’s all take a moment of silence to stop and feel old…)

So, I got out my masking tape and made some stripes.  (Note:  My hair gets even bigger after sunset.)

Using the tape as my guide, I used this opportunity to practice my skills with the double needle.  I had a few mistakes, but in the end, it looked like this:

!!!!!!!  I’ve been looking down at my stripes all day and every time, they make my heart swoon.

Are you impressed?  I sure am!  No one, so far, has asked me if I made it, so I’ll take that as a good sign!  It’s been a long time since I last donned a homemade garment in public.

This project taught me how NOT to do a knit collar.  (I feel pretty confident my next attempt will show a marked improvement.)  I learned how to use a double needle to make those stripes.  And, it taught me how simple it is to make a Dolman top!  I’ll be keeping my eye out for more knit fabric deals in the future… I’ve thought of several variations I’d love to try!

As for the shirt itself… It’s a little larger than I’d envisioned.  But I’ll probably wear it again, even if it isn’t my most favorite.  It’s super sassy for a St. Pattie’s get together!

All together, I think I LUCKED OUT (get it?) in finding Make it and Love it‘s easy to follow tutorial!  Make sure to head over there             and learn how to whip together your own version!

I should have known…

 

Yesterday, my kids were being just uncharacteristically difficult.  I should have known that today would be a day of fevers and vomiting!  Frankly, I’m relived.  I’m relieved to find a logical explanation for their acting out yesterday, and I’m relieved to give my oldest a day home from school.  As much as I’m making “routine” my word to focus on this year, I’m kind of ready for an early break this week.  This seems like a good excuse to just maintain, give the kids some extra screen time, and plan and daydream about a makeshift sewing studio idea I’ve had.  I’ll run an extra chaos control cycle later.  It’s all good.

Making A Calendar for my 4 Year Old

 

 

So, my oldest son doesn’t do great with “transitions”. For example, he loves school, but HATES when we tell him he has to stop what he’s doing to get up and go! Again, we were having a horrible time with potty training until a friend advised us that maybe he just needed a five minute warning before potty trips. Made ALL the difference in the world! We’ve always known him to be sensitive, so now that his little life just got twice as busy as it used to be, I wanted a way to help him through the multiple daily and weekly “transitions” he’d be experiencing in his new, more scheduled life.

I searched high and low for the perfect preschooler calendar, and the best one I found, hands down, no competition, was from Julie of Teaching the Little People. Please go check her post out. She offers some compelling info on how preschoolers relate to the concept of time. I think she’s really brilliant.

All you really need is a brad and some poster board to make your own version of her calendar. I brainstormed lots of ways I could make this some super adorable pinteresty thing, but at the end of the day, I just NEEDED this to help my kid! Some times you just got to keep it simple!

For my rotating circle, I let my son help me trace a circle from a large dinner plate.

 

The hardest part of this project was figuring out how to make seven even “slices” of my pie chart, without the help of a protractor. I eventually found some geeky math website (math! Yuck!) that would mock up a pie chart for you with given values. (It’s this one.) Then I printed the image, centered it in my circle, and just sort of traced. Do you get the idea?

My method for making slices was in no way setting me up to get it exact, so I wrote the days of the week toward the left of each slice and used arrows to generally point to “TODAY!!!”, “Tomorrow”, and “Yesterday”. (I also wrote “Coming up Later…” around the edge of the rest of the circle.)

 

I used colored pencils on the yellow part of my chart, but on the dark blue, I wrote with these, which my kids use for coloring on our windows. I was quite pleased with the result.

I liked the idea of his calendar having moveable “buttons” that could mark each day’s events. He goes to two different preschools now, so it seemed like the best way to differentiate them would be with photos of his teachers. For now, I just printed out black and white contact sheets of photos I found online. I used a quarter to trace circles around their faces, and cut my buttons out.

 

 

I decided to try this adhesive for my buttons. I can use them again and again and they leave no residue. They’re also surprisingly tacky… as much or more than a strong double stick tape would be! I think I’ve discovered something good, here!

Of course, we’ll add new buttons for holidays, birthdays, trips, or when grandparents come visit. I don’t think these low quality computer printouts will be the buttons I go with permanently, but they’re fine for now. They’re kind of hard to see. I would recommend high quality photo prints… either from a computer or from Walmart or Walgreens.

 

This morning was the moment of truth. After giving him an explanation of how his calendar works, I told him he could turn the wheel, and asked him what it said he’d do today. He smiled great big, pointed to the day’s buttons and answered, “First, we’re going to Ms. T’s class, THEN we’re going to Mrs. S’s class!” Success!!! He gets it!!! He really gets it!!!

And there were NO TEARS with transitions today, either. I just referred him to the calendar, and he was good with it! Amazing!

The Scheduled Life

February was a month of big changes in our schedule.

First of all, I joined a gym.  It was very intimidating at first, but we got a childcare package with our membership, so you can imagine how much easier that makes it to work out!  But, it also means I pack up the kids and take them with me four or five days a week.  I thought it would be good for all of us.

But then, kind of unexpectedly, we were having a meeting about our oldest’s development, and they recommended sending him to a special preschool four days a week.  I was NOT prepared to be facing that kind of milestone!  Sure, he’s been going to preschool two mornings a week already, but that school is affiliated with our church and my husband’s job.  Sending him to school has, so far, been a matter of him “going to work with dadda” twice a week.  This was our first time sending him to a public school, and, four afternoons a week is just a lot longer!  I cried for a few days.

Add to all this the fact that we’re still sending him to our church’s preschool two days, to hopefully preserve those friendships, and what you’ve got is this:  In a matter of a couple weeks, I have gone from the SAHM that leaves her apartment maybe twice a week, to a full fledged car-line mom!

Let me make one thing clear:  I have no idea how to do this.  I mean, I DO know how to cart my kids around and pick up and drop off my kid at a couple different preschools.  I know, I’m not anywhere near as busy as, say, a mom that works outside of the home.  Or even, I don’t know, anyone with children over five years old.  It’s just that I don’t know how to do THIS… new stage of motherhood.  I was getting really good at the toddlerish stuff.  I thought I had more time in this slower (albeit tiring) stage of life with two little bitty kids.  I know plenty of kids that don’t attend ANY preschool until the year before kindergarten, and we have a year and half still.  As a matter of fact, when I was little, I didn’t go to preschool at all!  What happened?!

So, no more roaming around in my pajamas with a laundry basket all day.  No more wondering what day of the week it is.  No more looking at the clock expecting it to be 1:30 and it actually being 10:30.

Things just got a lot more STRUCTURED, and, as hard as I’ve fought to deny it, it’s probably just what our family needed.  For everyone’s sanity.

I say I’ve fought hard to deny it.  I’m noticing a trend.  God tends to convince me I’ve been wrong about something, just before I need to act on the changed beliefs.  In the past month, before joining the gym or sending my kid off to the big school, I’ve felt like God had been teaching me about our need for structure, how my preconceived notions of what motherhood should look like might be a little too narrow, my heart and how it resists any lifestyle changes…  I felt a lot more at peace when I looked back and could see that, even though I didn’t know this whole preschool thing was coming, God did, and even seemed to be preparing my heart for just such a transition.

I don’t really notice God teaching me clear lessons like that very often, but this isn’t the first time it’s happened right before a major (to me) event.  Next time, I’ll be on the look out!

Just to be clear, I realize I’m being MAYBE a little over dramatic about something that, while for me is a symbolic life transition, for everyone else is just my being slightly less spoiled than I’ve been for the last four years.  Sorry about that.  It is what it is.  Hope you enjoyed it anyway!

-Mac-

Keepin’ It Tidy

So, we live in an apartment.

Now, I don’t know the exact square footage of our place off the top of my head, but to me it feels pretty stinkin’ huge for an apartment, but pretty small compared to most of our friends’ houses in this area.  I used to have house fever pretty bad, but after some sage advice from those well versed in the matter, I’ve started to see our rented home as a huge stress reducer, and honestly, a sort of luxury to be embraced during these years with small children.  Sure, long term renting is more expensive, but RIGHT NOW this place really helps us to live more comfortably on one income, and it’s SO much easy to take care of.  We’ve come around from house fever to thinking we won’t worry about buying until the kids are older and I’m employed again.

SOOO… that being said, in just the last month or so I’ve discovered two really simple tricks recently that have helped bring a lot more peace and quiet to our little space!

1.  Storage on the boys’ bedroom door.  We’ve hung a shoe organizer on the OUTSIDE of the boy’s bedroom door.  All their matchbox cars wooden train pieces, Happy Meal toys, etc… Anything that’s small enough to fit in a pocket goes there, and if the pockets are full we declutter some more!

Now, I wouldn’t have thought this was something worth blogging, but HEAR ME OUT:  That dumb little shoe organizer has changed my life.

I’ve been trying to keep all the boys toys in their room, because, I am filled with energy when our living room looks like an uncluttered adult place.  Maybe it’s just me, but when I’m here all day with the boys, the absence of toys on my floor is what separates me from “the workplace”.  It’s easy to have them pick up and at least move the larger items into their room before bedtime.  But then I tuck them in, shut the door behind me, take a deep breath, take three steps and OUCH!  Stepped on a lego.  And because I know that if I open that door again, the baby will start crying and I will have doomed bedtime for another 20 or 30 minutes, I would just pile those stragglers up in the hallway, where, the next morning, the children would swiftly scatter them again to places unknown.  Missing puzzle pieces, train tracks poking us in the couch cushions, you name it.  Enter shoe organizer and I actually have a place to PUT the lego when I’ve stepped on it without disrupting nap time!

The other way it’s changed my life is that there’s no dumping.  They HAVE to take one matchbox car at a time.  And the high pockets hold items that need supervision.  Think playdough.  Watercolors.  Toys with tiny pieces I don’t want our 16 month old to have.

Life.  Changing.

2.  Rearranging our Furniture to Prevent Rough Play.

Actually, we were just trying to figure out a way to keep our 16 month old from climbing and standing on top of our TV stand.  We ended up with an arrangement that kept most of our furniture away from the bordering walls and away from each other by at least a foot and a half.  A few days in, I realized the clomping sound that I was so sorry to our downstairs neighbors for had all but subsided.  Our new furniture arrangement had created a sort of obstacle course, that the boys love!  Lots of places to hide and chase each other and play peekaboo!  But it also decelerates their indoor play.  They can run and jump as much as they like, but my little race cars just can’t pick up as much momentum.  Less noise.  Fewer boo boos.

I had no idea what an improvement this would be, but we are LOVING this side effect!

So that’s where we’re at, right now.  It’s really the little things right?  Tell me what you’ve got going on at your house to reduce the chaos. I am ALWAYS looking for those sort of ideas!

-Mac-

This week…

…I finished my Project Life layout for January 2013, and realized I simply don’t document enough.  Summarizing a whole month of our lives as a family in one 24″ by 12″ space requires a LOT be left on the cutting room floor!  (I’d share the whole layout, but I still haven’t figured out how much privacy I should worry about.  I’m just playing things paranoid for now… You bunch of crazies!)

I’m not ready to take on much more scrapbooking, but it occurs to me that, HELLO, isn’t this kind of what “blogging” is for?  At least, the way I’m trying to approach blogging right now.  The fact is, I won’t be a SAHM forever.  If this place isn’t the most inspirational or full of new ideas, I still, at very least, want to keep it running as an open record that, during my years away from the work force, I was still DOING stuff, and LEARNING stuff, and GROWING as a person.  That’s all.

SO, this week…

After a month of sewing pretty much every night, I switched to working with paper, cutting some filler/journaling cards, and just generally getting ready to start my Project Life album.  I found a pad of printed paper that really made me swoon at Walmart for $5.  My mom sent me some more cards she cut with her Silhouette machine.  The trimmings left me with strips for a paper chain I taped up in the boys room.

I did sew a rounded bunting that said, “routine”, my “one little word” this year.  It was the next project lined up in the Home Ec E-Course I’m taking, but I was iffy about it, at best, and I can tell it’s not my husband’s favorite decoration.  I will probably declutter it soon.  Not everything I make is a winner.

And speaking of routines, when you quit them for a week or so, like we did when we had the stomach bug of the century, they’re hard to pick back up!  I was so glad we had a day nearly in the 60′s so I could head outside for a real jog!  We have an elliptical indoors, but it hardly compares to being out in the sunshine… or in this case, lukewarm drizzle.  But it felt AMAZING!  Only three more months till May, right?

My 15 Days to a Minimalist Home “finished” up (or fizzled out) the last three days of the month.  I can’t even bring myself to go back and update the Facebook page.  This was nothing like the dramatic change the first time I did it.  I just didn’t have nearly as much to get rid of this time around, and having to break up the 15 days in the middle while I took care of other commitments really took the bounce out of my step.  BUT, my home still received the maintenance it needed, so I actually SHOULD call it a success.  Just maybe not so worthy of the hype I put into it beforehand.  Before and after pictures would look nearly identical.  *insert sheepish face*

This week, we waited impatiently while some of our dearest friends were in the hospital for three days before delivering their firstborn.  While I bit my nails, refreshed my Facebook, triple checked my texts, I also had some prayerful time to reconcile with the fact that my own baby-having days are behind me.

As school years are sneaking up on us swiftly, my days staying home full time are numbered.  (See how I’m suddenly stricken by the need to document?)  It’s not that I didn’t know that we’d probably be, (as my husband calls it) “two and through”, but, you know, you think, “Well, who knows?!  We might want another in five years!  We might adopt!  I might stay home and homeschool!  Maybe I’ll come up with my own business and be a work-at-home-mom forever!”  And I guess, while those things COULD still happen, they’re not the most likely in our case.  I think God was using some of the events and conversations surrounding this week to open my heart and mind to the changes that are likely in store for us as little as three or four years down the road!

My heart REALLY NEEDED to be opened, too.  I’ve had an increasingly negative outlook about the future. ”Our kids are going to grow up and then we’ll be old and then all that’s good about life will be OVER, before we’re even 50!”  Even though it’s a while yet before anything in our lives start changing, I needed to IMMEDIATELY replace these unhealthy thoughts with the facts:  The next chapter of our lives is RIPE with possibility.

Believe me, I’m in no hurry, but fact is, in as little as 3 or 4 years, I might start taking steps to have a career!  We’ll be ready to move out of our apartment into a house.  We’ll, once again, enjoy some of the perks of the lifestyle we had before I quit my job and had kids.  There were definitely some perks.

People talk about this or that being their “dream”, and being a SAHM was mine.  I’ve been living it for four years and counting.  It might sound silly, but every sleep deprived, barefoot step over paths of stale Aldi cheerios has been everything I hoped it would be and more.  But, when it comes to dreams, why have just one?  I never want to cling so tightly to one dream, that I miss out if God calls me to a new one.

SHEW!  Okay!  That last segment was deep.  But that’s been my week!  Let’s do this again soon!  COMING UP: I got an award from a friend that compels me to plug all the blogs I love to read, and next week, I’m supposedly going back on Slim-Fast!  YIKES!

–Mac–