mary makes merry: Mobile KIP and a Nice Try

I'm even more psyched than usual about KIP tonight -- we're taking our show on the road to the Art Institute, which is free on Thursday evenings now! C'mon out -- meetcha on the steps.

Thanks for bringing it into being, Bonne Marie!

I made a hat for Ellie out of an old pair of jeans Saturday and then thought I'd try to enter it in the Whiplash August competition (deadline: today). Alas, I can't fulfill their (reasonable) requirement of getting the badge on the blog so that it is a live link back to their site, and my continued attempts have made my eyes hurt. But here's what I would have said!

My favorite jeans of the last five years went to seed, or to scrap, a couple of months ago. An artist's rendering, using their successors, of what they looked like at the time of their retirement:

When I realized last week that my daughter's summer hat was probably permanently missing, I decided to try making her the oversized (that is, enormous) bucket hat that comes with McCall's 4813, a variety of little girl summer clothes.

I used a remnant of some cotton fabric replete with garden jollies from Joann as the lining, both to have softer fabric against her head and because there isn't enough fabric in one pair of jeans for both the outside and the lining, unless maybe using the pockets in some way would have done it. I had to finagle laying out the pattern pieces on the jeans; both the crown and the brim have one more seam than called for because I couldn't lay out those pieces on a fold. Anyway, here's the result! She'll be able to wear it till she's in junior high, it's so big: