mary makes merry

Willing good weather through sewing

I thought I'd do my bit to bring on better weather by sewing some signs of summer.

I think they'll fit Ellie through the summer, but these come together so quickly it'll be all right if they don't. I put together the watermelon slices myself -- half circle of fabric, green bias tape, embroidery floss -- and was pleased with them.

Carolyn gave me one of the fabled Aranzi Aronzo pattern books to keep (happyhappyhappymememe!), and I immediately got out scissors and scraps to make a physical representation of a certain little brown bird named Foochi.  Foochi is a product of Clark's imagination from years back, and he has been making frequent appearances in bedtime stories these last few nights.

Speaking of Carolyn, go check out her great flickr set from the Chicago Quilt Show -- I learned a ton from seeing them. So many of them were truly astonishing. Amazing stuff.

Aptly named

Carolyn got me hooked on a crazy  line of cartoon characters, I guess you'd called them, by a Japanese company called Aranzi Aronzo. After temporarily kidnapping a couple of her books of patterns showing you how to make stuffed toys, I got a copy of one of the books they've recently published in English:

And here I am, wantonly disregarding the advice they give toward the end of the book against using the "mascots" as bookmarks, since it looks painful:

Finally, here's a shot from last weekend of Mad Scientist Ellie in her egg-dyeing laboratory, with helpful assistant Grandpa in the background:

Happy Spring?!?

So here's what you can do with one yard of fabric and an old dress shirt:

The pattern calls for 1 3/8 yards of fabric, but I had this random yard lying around. Easter-egg-like, no? With some finagling, and by cutting the front facing out of one of Clark's worn-out, light-blue oxfords, we've got ourselves a shell. The button is one of the collar buttons from the dress shirt, too. As my mother would say, make do what have. For example, if you don't have any pronouns lying around, verbs'll do.

I used this pattern:

I made the upper-right version, but the neckline was, like, choking me. Clark said it looked like a Roman tunic -- I guess it wasn't the lead dishes that did them in; their clothes were throttling them. I could have recut it using one of the other views, but that seemed like too much work, since the widths of the shoulders are significantly different. An oval dinner platter saved the day -- I traced part of it onto the front with a fade-out marker and restitched it. The change narrowed the shoulder slightly at the neck, so the back had to be adjusted anyway, but it turned out well and I was proud of myself for figuring that out.

I'll probably make this pattern again but plan to make both facings in contrasting fabric for a nifty look. No zipper, no buttonhole (a thread loop is used instead), with careful cutting you can do it with one meager yard o' fabric -- I'll make one for every day of the week, and two for Sundays.

And thanks very much for all your recent comments! The swamp is sort of more of a bog now, but it's all right because I'm teaching a course about Ireland this quarter and parts of that great land are all bog, all the time. So it's all good.

Can't KIP; crud. Crying.

Apparently, they've invented something called the photograph

Clark in brioche vest and Ellie-in-Trellis