Another birthday popped up in our family, and I needed to make a pretty and useful gift for the birthday girl. So I found a favorite piece of fabric in my stash, and a couple of other fabrics to go with it, and made another zippered bag.
Like the last time I made a zippered bag, I got help from a video on YouTube. It’s one I’ve used before for zipper application tips, but this time I followed the entire process. You can’t beat Jenny Doan’s videos for clarity:
I needed a birthday gift for a friend and found a tutorial for fabric baskets. To make one basket, I used two of my favorite fabrics from my stash, and broke open a new package of Hobbs Thermore polyester batting. (I keep a LOT of batting on hand!)
This project was fun to make. It used 2 16″ squares of fabric and one 16″ square of batting, plus four buttons. I free-motion-quilted the joined squares and batting before turning them into a basket. Polyester batting makes for a lightweight basket. If you prefer something sturdier, to put heavy things in, you might want to use thicker batting. But the polyester batting worked fine for this project. (I put a couple of bars of gift-shop soap and a bottle of hand lotion nestled in tissue paper in it for my friend.)
My little granddaughter will look adorable in this top I made for her. It’s from a McCall’s pattern, #6022, and was quite easy to make. I think the pom-pom trim cost more than the fabric did, but it was worth it. That said, she’s still pretty oral, and if she starts pulling off the pom-poms in hopes of eating them, I’ll have to cut them off. Hence this photo, for posterity 🙂
A year after my daughter had her first baby, she decided that many of the craft projects she’d been working on pre-baby were never going to get finished, so she cleared them out, but not before offering them to me. I felt bad letting the many t-shirt squares she had cut up so carefully go to waste, so I offered to finish the quilt she had intended to make.
T-shirt quilts are easy but time-consuming. In this case, I was working with 6” squares and one big rectangle. I paired up the squares with a 5” scrap of batting in the middle (I had tons of batting scraps from previous quilts I’d made) and sewed an X across each pair.
Once all 250+ squares were stitched, I sewed them together in rows using a ½” seam allowance, making sure to keep all seam allowances to the front. I cut the rectangle to fit, paired it with batting and backing of the same size, and arranged the squares around it.
I also cut the edges so that they will ruffle nicely once the quilt is washed. This is very time-consuming and, if you don’t want your hand to get very sore, requires the use of a certain kind of scissors.
Here’s what the quilt looks like on the back: 
I had enough squares for an ample-sized quilt for my daughter and son-in-law, and a little one so Baby can have her own:
I hate waste, so it felt good to make something warm and useful out of those squares. And now I have more room for fabric in my sewing area since I used up all my excess batting scraps on these quilts. 🙂
The good news is that I lost weight. The bad news is that my lovely vintage corduroy jeans are way too big on me. They’re made out of strong and stretchy corduroy, the kind you can’t find in stores any more:
They’re a good brand, too:
What to do? Make them into corduroy pants for an active 5-year-old grandson. First up, smooth out one pants leg:
Then pin and cut out a boys’ pants pattern piece:
Do the same for the other pant leg and the other leg pattern piece. Then cut out the pocket:
Attach to the pocket piece something that makes the pants into “Superhero pants!” at the request of said grandson:
Follow pattern directions, and you have a “new” pair of Superhero pants. Front:
And back:
Then, so little sister gets something, too, make a pair of flannel Peppa Pig pants in a smaller size:
Those, of course, were not repurposed and required a trip to the fabric store for Peppa Pig flannel 🙂 Grandma doesn’t want anyone to feel left out!