Sew Much Fun

You know what I love? Sewing.

My grandmother is an amazing seamstress, and I have the best memories of walking around fabric stores with her, surrounded by the colors, textures, patterns, smells of every kind of fabric imaginable. To this day, I will find myself going to a fabric store just to browse (ha!) when I am feeling sad or overwhelmed.

I remember sitting next to her and learning to sew the most intricate little doll clothes out of fabric scraps that she kept. I would go up into her attic and look through boxes and boxes of fabric. She kept ALL extra fabric. A couple of years ago, she made an apron for me, trimmed in the fabric FROM MY CRIB BEDDING then I was baby!! She sent a dress for Sophia, which was made from fabric that she had used to make a dress for my mother. These are some of my most cherished possessions, partly because they give me such a tangible feeling of having my grandmother near. My extended family still lives in Austria, where we are from and where I grew up. When I sew, I feel like she is sitting next to me.

I am nowhere near the seamstress that she is, but what I lack in talent I make up for in enthusiasm. I just LOVE to sew. I've made a few little projects lately, like this bed for Porter, and a bag and blanket for Porter when he goes to daycare or to be boarded (along with a matching leash and some doggy toys and treats - it's a diaper bag for a dog, and yes, I know I'm crazy):

I also started to make a nap mat cover and attached blanket for Amelia for Mother's Day Out (the girls go two mornings a week to give Daddy a break, and learn new things and play with their friends). But my cheap little sewing machine just quit on me, and all I finished was the blanket part:

Everything after that looked like this:

I adjusted the tension, cleaned everything, and did just about everything else I could think of to fix it. It's now stuck in a closet and I'm too mad at it to get it back out. BUT my mother in law is letting me borrow her Pfaff, which I covet and LOVE sewing on. So I'll get that at the end of the month when we go visit her, and I am SO excited!!! I have a ridiculous number of projects bouncing around in my head, and best of all... a BIG trip to the fabric store planned!

If anyone has any easy projects/patterns to share - PLEASE do!!!

Oh and when I go to my mother in law's house, I am going to see if we can reconstruct the pattern we made up for the hospital gowns, so that I can share it.