Toddler’s Sunhat – It’s Not too Late!
A while back, I mentioned that I was going to make a sunhat for R. Thanks to Grosgrain’s free pattern month, I had a great tutorial by Prudent Baby I was able to use!
We have been using it a ton at the beach, which has been great!
R likes it to because it is light and has a fun pattern!
I did make a few adjustments to their pattern:
1) as you can see above, I just used my serger to serge the top of the hat and the brim together, instead of pinning the inside of the brim in.
2) Then I turned it right side out and top stitched another seam along that one to keep the inside seam allowance in place.
3) Lastly, I felt like the pattern resulted in a hat that was bumpy and stick out at the corner seams, so I sewed an extra seam on the inside to bring it in a little bit.
I probably could have done more, and will next time!
But all in all, I’m happy with the result!
Weekly photo challenge: HOT!
I haven’t done this in a while…but happy to enter again!
Here is my entry for “HOT!”
A fun family activity
Recently, we had a mini family reunion, and as one of our activities, went to a local pottery painting place with the kids. They (actually all of us) had SO much fun! It was a great chance for everyone to be creative, and have fun at the same time. The kids really got into the painting! I don’t yet have pictures of the finished products (I haven’t seen the yet either!) but thought I’d share the idea as a fum summer activity.
Here are some of the things we came up with it!
The above is my mug. I tend to get overwhelmed by having many choices, and therefore had originally decided to just paint rainbows on the cup knowing that R would like that. But then L had the idea of painting flowers – he reminded me of how much I (we) loved the red poppies all over Italy (you can see the dress this inspired here) so I decided to make a mug inspired by those images!
And some of the other beauties as well!
So find your nearest pottery painting place, grab a friend/family member, and have fun!!
Free Lightroom Presets Today!
Today I thought I would do something new and share some of my Vignetting presets for Lightroom with you.
Vignette is something that can happen on its own with very wide angle lenses on full sensor cameras as an artifact of the glass properties itself…but it is also something that you can ADD to pictures to give them a special touch!
Of course, you could manually vignette pictures whenever you would like, but the nice thing about having presents is
1) You can quickly apply the vignette effect to many pictures, very quickly
2) You can save your certain style of vignette and apply exactly that same amount each time (more in another post about how to update a preset)
3) You can preview what your different presets will look like in the navigation pane without having to apply and remove each one
I have put up a set of presets – 4 to be exact – to give you different levels of vignetting depending on the picture.
Below, you can see what the different levels look like:
To download the presets, follow these directions:
(FYI – i can not upload ZIP files to wordpress, so I have housed them in my other website where I sell Hindi and Gujarati Flashcards for Kids, called “Baby Culture Cards”)
2) Find your presets folder on your computer: Right click on any preset in lightroom, and select “Show in Finder” or the equivalent on a PC (sorry, don’t have one!)
3) Unzip the presets you downloaded
4) Move them to the presets folder
5) Restart lightroom – and you are good to go!
You can then edit them or rearrange them however you would like.
Enjoy!
Quick & Easy Kids Art Display
R has made lots of cool art lately, and I have been wondering how best to keep up with it and display it. I wrote before about how I scan or take pictures of everything so that I have a digital image (that I can reproduce later) of it, but I still want to look at the pieces day to day.
So, I bought 12×12 cork board tiles from my nearest office supply store, and stuck them up on the wall! I didn’t measure anything out first…mainly because I’m too impatient and that step makes me crazy. So I just put them up my eyeballing it. Then I just put up her art!
The fun part is that I put it up right outside of her room, so that every day when we walk by, we can see it. And she can understand how important her art is to us and how much we treasure it! Unlike the picture above, you can’t even see the cork boards now because I have so much stuff up on them. But in order to keep up with her newer pieces, I basically take one down to put one up. Works pretty well!
Thanks for stopping by!
Crazy spider webs from our hike
i posted a little bit ago about how R loved finding bugs during our hike last week. Well here are some crazy spiders/spider webs that we saw!
Hexagon baby blanket
Post updated Jan 30, 2014 with pattern instructions and link to new blog
When I was pregnant with R, I decided I wanted to make her a baby blanket. So I went to a yarn store and bought some carolina blue and white yarn (I’m not into the whole pink for girls and blue for boys thing…) and while I was there, I saw a woman knitting a beautiful hexagon blanket! I instantly fell in love! Well I was new to the knitting scene at that point, so I didn’t feel comfortable asking her where she got the pattern from. Instead I went home and did an exhaustive search online for “hexagon blanket” and finally found the pattern on a blog that is unfortunately now private (I hope I didn’t send too much traffic her way!)
However I think this is pretty easy to find now, if you do a search for “Hexgon knitting pattern” you will find plenty. Here is one pattern I found on craftlover’s blog here:
cast on 30 stitches for each needle, and place a marker for every 15 stitches in each needle (that marks the corner of the hexagon.).
1st & 2nd rnd: knit
*3rd rnd: [K2tog, knit to 2 sts before next marker, ssk ] 6 times.
Work 2 rnds even (St st)*
Repeat from * to * until there are 3 stitches left between markers.
work 2 rnds even, then*k2tog; rep from * around, now 9 sts left.
Break yarn and thread through remaining sts and pull tight and fasten off.
Anyways, way back in 2008 when I was looking for this originally, it was hard to find, so when I did, I was SO excited and got started right away.
Given I was a novice, I didn’t think about the needle gauge or yarn weight when planning my blanket…i.e. I didn’t realize I was using thin yarn and small needles…so it would take me FOREVER! Oh well, it turned out cute and R loves it. She calls it her “special star blanket.”
After finishing the knitting part, I expiermented with crochet (my first time) and crochet’d a little border around the blanket and then hand stitched “UNC” on the corner.
So check out the Dulle Griet blog and the pattern for making the blanket. You can make it for babies or adults! The only change I made was that instead of using DPNs (double pointed needles), I used circular needles to start each hexagon, with markers to mark the sides of the hexagons. This was great because I didn’t have to fiddle with the different needles getting all twisted etc (that drives me crazy!). I would definitely recommend going that way. You will however have to switch to DPNs once the hexagon gets small enough that it will no longer fit onto the circular.
ENJOY and please leave a comment with a link to a picture if you make one so we can all see!
ADS:
My first gardening experience – Lessons Learned
san marzano tomatoes
(disclaimer before I go on: I rushed outside with R after her nap and before dinner, and didn’t have a chance to grab my camera…so we are left with iPhone pictures…)
we went out of town for a week, and I came back to an out of control garden! …it was good and bad…
roma tomatos
good because, I now have some veggies ready to eat! yay!
2 cucumbers, a baby eggplant (anyone have any suggestions on what to do with one baby eggplant?) and a red pepper =)
harvested vegetables: cucumber, eggplant and pepper
japanese eggplant
there are TONS of tomatoes growing which is really exciting, several jalapenos, and a couple more peppers. the bell peppers however are not growing yet.
cherry tomato
the bad part: the squash is literally taking over EVERYTHING. it is starting to suffocate my basil. I think I’m going to need to take out some of the squash plant, because the basil is more important to me than squash!
cilantro that has already bolted
I also need to go out today and harvest all of this cilantro, since it is flowering and it is way too hot for it to grow right now. I think i’m going to buy more basil plants and fill in my empty areas with them. and then make pesto with all my basil!
red cherry peppers
so lessons so far:
1) do not plant squash in a square foot garden – there is just not enough space
2) plant things that need frequent harvesting, like basil, in the outside areas so they are easy to get to (my basil is in the hardest place to reach)
3) plant cucumbers on the edge of your garden where they can grow up on a trellis or other structure
cucumber vines
4) when growing peas, train them onto a trellis early. If you wait to long like I did, then they will get all tangled and many of them may die =(
5) when planting radish, do NOT over crowd them – they will not have space to grow (I got lots of radish leaves and flowers, but no radishes)
6) eggplants are usually plagued by beetles…be prepared.
7) if planting cilantro from seed, you CAN over crowd. Just sprinkle them out over the area and barely cover them with soil. It is best to first soak the seeds overnight in water and if you can, use a brick or stone to VERY LIGHTLY break the seeds in half. I know it sounds crazy, but my mother in law has been doing that for years and it worked beautifully.
8) Don’t leave broccoli on the plant too long…it will start to flower!
jalapeno peppers
Well that’s it for now…
Hope everyone else’s gardens are going well!
4th of July Apron!
When I went to Joann’s once, I saw this $3 plain beige kids apron and put it in my cart. Then I, of course, promptly thought: “I can make that!”
So I took note of what it looked like and how it was constructed, and made one for R – out of her favorite: American Flag fabric.
She insisted on wearing it out to the playground, which of course made me happy…until I realized that we lost it.
So I’ll have to make another one and when I do, I’ll take pictures and put up a tutorial afterwards. I can say this much – it was VERY simple, took about a 1/4-1/3 yard of fabric and some double folded bias tape. That’s it.
Hope everyone had a GREAT 4th of July!
My first upcycled project
I finally did an UPcycled project of my own! I converted a small t-shirt of mine into a new dress for R.
I pretty much winged it. Which was fun, and I think good for me to do in terms of learning different things about what works and what doesn’t.
So I started out with my shirt and some elastic I bought off of Pick your plum (fun stuff!)
Checked to see how much I needed to take in the shirt to make it fit my SKINNY MINNY
And I went for it! Cut, cut cut!
This is what I was left with. I wanted to keep the sleeve attachments intact so that it would make it easier to complete =)
Since I recently explored how to shir, figured I’d tighten up the sleeves and neck with elastic thread. Quick and easy.
Then just added some elastic as an empire waist to cinch it up.
And used the beautiful serger to do a rolled hem along the bottom with a tight tension to make cute little ruffles.
And then used an old white t-shirt to make flowers!
I think R liked it!
Only thing I’m not a huge fan of is that you can see the seam on the inside of the collar.
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