Birdy Legs

the Dyson Animal!

2010-12-14T10:25:00.000-08:00

Okay, so it is rather expensive. I needed it. I have mentioned my enormous shedding dog, right? Well I had a really crappy vacuum cleaner to go along with her. On Friday it refused to turn off without unplugging it. It fixed itself the next day, but it was too late to save itself. I had already logged on to Amazon and ordered the Dyson Animal Ball for an incredibly low price. Because I am a sucker for Amazon Prime, it came two day delivery. After vacuuming half of my 10 x 14 rug the canister was full of crud. Why is that so satisfying? In addition to the joy I get from seeing all the crap that has been sucked out of my rug, it is also super easy to roll around and no big deal to switch from carpet to hard floor. The rest of my house may look like hell, but my floors will always be vacuumed.

Gift Making

2010-12-11T20:45:00.000-08:00

I have been trying to make some homemade gifts for the holidays this year. I got a jump start in July when I made a set of the Wee Wonderfuls Sleepover Pals for a friend's daughter. But then I gave them to another friend's daughter for her fourth birthday in September. So, back to square one. I finally made a new set for the intended recipient. I probably would have scrapped the whole idea except that I had started making her older sister the Margot topsy turvy doll. It turned out to be pretty quick to whip up another set of Sleepover Pals. As for Margot, I just finished her this week. Monday they will be off in the mail.

For teacher's gifts, I made the Sew Liberated apron for my daughter's second grade teacher. She is the awesome rule-breaking teacher. She cooks with the kids in class. The Emmeline apron is perfectly sassy and goes together pretty easily. So then for my other daughter's kindergarten teacher I made the Hobby Apron from the last issue of Stitch. The pattern is by Erin Harris of House on Hill Road.

My big distraction was this: I made myself a Mischevious Gnome Messenger Bag, also by Sew Liberated. And I used suede! My husband was giving an old suede jacket to Goodwill and I decided to snatch it and cut it up. I was hesitant because if I wasn't able to sew with it I would be ruining a perfectly good jacket that someone might have loved. Instead I have an awesome bag. So then I made another one as a gift for my friend, Anne. I loved hers too, and was really tempted to keep it for myself. Now I want to make them for everyone I know.

One of my points, or maybe my only point, in this post, is that I'm amazed at how well all of these patterns were written and how great they looked finished. I have sewed using patterns and books by big name designers and had loads of trouble. I won't name names, but the errata on some patterns is longer than the patterns themselves. So, in case anyone is wondering, Sew Liberated makes really great patterns and the Wee Wonderfuls book is incredible!

Six months later...

2010-10-07T13:43:00.000-07:00

So much for trying to post regularly...
We have a new(ish) addition to our house. Her name is Sam and she was a rescue from German Shepherd Rescue Orange County. She is super tall and long and skinny, but was extra skinny when we got her. Her blood tests were abnormal but the vet thought it was just parasites that weren't showing up on her fecal exam. Is this too much information? Anyway, after a deworming program and two months of overfeeding her, she has gained a whopping eight pounds. They did a full blood panel today, so I'll know tomorrow if she is in the clear for any major problems.

Getting another year out of 'em

2010-04-29T16:56:00.000-07:00

The girls love their Far, Far Away double-gauze dresses too much to part with them. So I did the frugal mom thing and just added a band of contrasting fabric to each of the bottoms. I actually took the time to rip out the old hem seam before adding the bands, which makes me really pleased with myself. As is evidenced in the photo, I only ironed the parts I was sewing. Apparently it would have killed me to iron the rest of the dresses before photographing them. If I didn't cut some corners and do some lazy mom tricks I would never get anything posted to this blog. And I know how upsetting that would be to the two people who check in with me now and again.

Heather Ross Keds from Zazzle!

2010-04-19T19:07:00.000-07:00

I couldn't resist ordering some of the custom Heather Ross Keds from Zazzle. For one thing, my oldest daughter never wears sneakers. And she needs to. At least sometimes. So I figured if the prospect of purple unicorn shoes wouldn't get her to start wearing them, nothing would. I let the girls customize them. Let's just say that the choices they made wouldn't necessarily have been my choices, but that's okay. I'm letting go a little. It's hard to walk the line of wanting to instill good taste (meaning, of course, what I consider to be my own good taste) in the kids and letting them develop their own creative little minds. They know that nothing bearing the name or likeness of a TV or movie character will be worn in our house or on our backpacks and they can live with that. But I let them cut their hair the way they want and I even let them walk around in their cheap sparkly Target mary janes that were purchased solely for the purpose of wearing with Halloween costumes.

Aaaarrrrrrrrrrgggggggghhhhhhhhhh!

2010-04-07T17:37:00.001-07:00

I just cut into some of my Anna Maria Horner voile to make a dress for my daughter. Using one of my Japanese pattern books. Which don't include seam allowances. Guess what I forgot to do?

Purl Soho Booty!

2010-04-05T15:54:00.000-07:00

On Friday morning I snuck off to the Purl Soho warehouse in Tustin rather than helping at my daughter's school Jog-a-thon. I seriously spent two hours touching everything and having a minor freak-out. I kept changing my mind about what to buy--like I would never be back there again, even though it is fifteen minutes from my house. I narrowed it down to two fabrics each for my daughters and two for me. The girls got some great Kokka double-gauze that I think I will probably use for shirts.

I also bought the girls some great mermaid fabric that the Purl website describes as Soft Upholstery. I would describe it as heavier weight double-gauze. It's amazing. I think I'll try to make skirts out of it. I have been trying to stay away from pastels more lately, but this fabric was so great I couldn't resist.

Finally, for me, I bought some Nani Iro. The first I have ever purchased. If I can successfully make a summer sleeveless top for me I will be back for more. I also got some of the Globalweave linen/cotton but I forgot to photograph it. That stuff is not cheap, but it is wide, about 55". I got the hourglass pattern in light brown and orange. I'm going to try to just make a simple elastic-waistband skirt. Hopefully I'll post what I make. Because I'm so good at posting regularly.

Sample Size Blocks & Stripes

2010-02-22T11:07:00.000-08:00

Last week I saw a great tutorial by Ashley at http://www.filminthefridge.com (If I were at all web savvy I would have just written Film in the Fridge in some magical way that would allow you to click on the link) for a quilt she calls Blocks & Stripes. At some point in the tutorial she laid out the fabric on white and I loved the way it looked. I want to make a quilt that way using some of my painfully and sometimes pointlessly acquired out of print Heather Ross/Munki prints. While waiting for more solid fabrics to arrive in my mail box, I made this little 20" x 30" quilt using some of my scraps. The proportions aren't exactly the same as they will be on the larger one, but it gives me some idea. My oldest daughter keeps calling the quilt hers, but I'm putting it on etsy instead. Those girls of mine would take everything I make if I let them. I would find it flattering if they didn't also hoard every little plastic crap toy they get in various "treasure boxes" and gumball machines.

Munki Alien Quilt

2010-02-16T12:23:00.000-08:00

Okay, I'm just going to start throwing things up here. This is the most recent quilt I made. I kind of had the intention of giving it to a mere acquaintance who had a baby boy, but then I thought I'd throw it up on etsy and see what happens. I did manage to sell a mini quilt on etsy and I donated one to CraftHope, which sold in about a minute. So now I am apparently too big for my britches--thinking I can sell bigger, more expensive quilts!

Lovin' the ShakeIt Photo App

2010-01-15T10:27:00.000-08:00

Since I can't seem to keep up with blogging--partly due to the laborious process of taking photos, uploading photos, editing photos, etc.--I'm just going to show you some lovely photos taken at Trail 5 (San Onofre) with my iphone. If you are unfamiliar with this part of Southern California, it straddles the beach area between Orange and San Diego counties. When people refer to San Onofre they usually mean the beach part of the state park that is just north of the nuclear power plant. Trails (1-6) is just south of the nuclear power plant. While that may sound horrifying if you haven't been there, it's actually pretty incredible. And then to the east and south there is Camp Pendleton, so it is a stretch of amazing coastline with native scrub and beautiful cliffs to the ocean. And no tract homes. Turns out Trail 5 has the most rugged hike down to the beach, but if you wear flip flops 10 months of the year, hiking it in your Rainbows is not a problem.

pictures might help...

2009-07-11T11:20:00.000-07:00

Here are the photos of the Plain Spoken gone wild quilts...

An actual quilt

2009-07-01T19:22:00.000-07:00

Okay, clearly I suck at this whole blogging thing. Apparently I'd rather read about what other people are doing. But I did finally make a quilt. Two of them, actually. I had it in my head that I was going to make the Plain Spoken quilt from the Modern Quilt Workshop by Weeks Ringle and Bill Kerr. And I did. Sort of. I had so many great fabric scraps from making things for the daughters that I ended up taking that beautiful, subtle quilt and making it crazy busy. And since they were twin size quilts, I gave them to someone else to actually quilt. I didn't get off all that easy. There were still 390 rectangles to be sewn together, and I did do the binding. And then I took my extra rectangles and made doll size quilts that I quilted myself. And now I want to make more quilts and more quilts.

Quilting for a Cause

2009-02-18T20:28:00.000-08:00

Okay, so I've never actually made a quilt before. That being said, a much nicer, more talented person than I is making quilts for the fire victims in Australia and all she asks is that people make some quilt squares and then send them to her. She and her quilting guild will do all the hard parts, like the actual quilting and binding. http://campfollowerbags.blogspot.com/ She is an army wife doing good deeds. What could be better than that? So, this is my first attempt at a quilt square. I followed the directions for the wonky star posted on the site. Leave it to me to be too anal to have my star come out wonky looking. I'm going to try to do a few more now that the kids are in bed. Because if quilting for a cause while watching Lost isn't a good excuse for not cleaning the house, I don't know what is.

Oh, and my lovely, just-turned-six daughter decided to empty her piggy bank and send all her money to an animal shelter that cares for the koalas, joeys and other displaced animals.

Some Dinner Party

2009-02-16T17:38:00.001-08:00

I'm apparently too lazy to keep up with my published ramblings. To make up for my laziness, I'm offering up this example of my daughter's awesomeness.

CPSIA

2009-01-13T13:45:00.000-08:00

I have been consumed by the new CPSIA law going into effect on February 10th. If you don't know, the Consumer Product Safety Information Act was intended to protect children from lead poisoning, but it is very poorly crafted and vastly overreaching. It threatens small businesses, libraries, booksellers, etc. I won't go into it any more than that, but offer up instead this link to smartmama's blog.

http://www.thesmartmama.com/bg/

Facebook

2008-12-22T15:21:00.000-08:00

I succumbed to pressure from various family and friends to finally get on Facebook. I'm still not sure how I feel about it. A big part of me didn't really want to be found by anyone. Another part of me just thinks, "Who cares?" Someone I never talked to in high school wanted to add me as a friend. I know it wouldn't hurt to add him, but really, why should I? I don't care about what he's doing. I guess people just like to have a lot of friends. I'm secure enough not to add everyone I've ever met. I purge people like I purge old clothes. If I haven't talked to them in a year, they generally get deleted from my email and address book. That being said, there are some former really good post-high school friends with whom I have lost touch and this is really an easy way to catch up. In the real, off-line world it would seem like a big deal to make a phone call and talk about everything that has happened in my life in the last ten years. And I do have plenty of regrets about how many people I have let kind of slip away. So, there, I've talked it out and decided that I am pro-Facebook. But I want to go on record as saying the site is surprisingly nonintuitive. You would think with so many people using it they would figure out a more interesting user-interface.

And if anyone is reading this and is dying to know the outcome of the rain boot issue: they arrived today and it is raining. And it may rain most of the week. So there.

Christmas Trees

2008-12-17T17:31:00.000-08:00

I was just reading some of my favorite blogs and aluminum Christmas trees seem to be a common theme. I love them, but they just seem to make too much of a statement for me. I'm going retro in a whole different way. We always buy a real tree, which my mother never did when I was growing up. I'm sure it's because she was convinced it would dry out and then the lights would start the whole thing afire. I swear you would think someone in my family died a horrible death. Among my mother's biggest fears were me living in an apartment with bars on the windows, a fire starting, and me burning to death because the firemen couldn't get in. Another was us kids wearing scarves while sledding because if they got caught on trees we would get strangled. She is still big on donating blood and coercing people into signing their organ donor cards. But, I digress. My retro Christmas tree came about inadvertently when we (and by "we" I really mean my husband) agreed to let the girls have colored lights on the tree. After that small step away from my notion of what constitutes good taste, I took a giant leap and bought that fat, fuzzy looking garland. The girls and I chose white, because of course it will look like tubes of snow resting on the branches. Indoors. In Southern California.

RAIN!

2008-12-15T09:14:00.000-08:00

It's raining here in So Cal. I had to send my mini five year old off to kindergarten in the rain! I know it seems silly, being that I had to walk to school year round in Chicago, from the age of 6. Still, you get used to every day being mild and pleasant when you live here. So there we were, in the drop off lane at 8:20 this morning. When I opened the door the rain blew right in on the three year old, causing much screeching and calls of, "I hate the rain!" (The three year old, Annabelle, has her seat on the curb side of the car, so every morning Ella has to climb over/around her to get out at school. No amount of cajoling will persuade them to switch sides of the car). I popped up Ella's umbrella and watched all 35 pounds of her plod toward the building, with her hood up and her little stick legs lost in the vast openings of her rain boots. There's good reason this blog is called birdy legs. I really need to get a photo of the calves of our family, all together in a row. It's a condition that afflicts every one of us. Even my husband, with his firm, bike riding muscles can't be saved when that calf muscle is propped up on the longest shin bone known to man.

Being that the courtyard between our house and garage is flooding, I did what any sensible person (and by person I mean woman) would do and went on-line and ordered rain boots. My husband, being a man, asked why I didn't just go to Target and get some, so that I'd actually have them when it was raining. But, you see, I am a cheap person who mostly likes non-cheap things. So I prefer to find a great deal on nice boots at Amazon, then add whatever random special they are having. I got Annabelle a pair of $25 rain boots on sale for $15, then a pair of $60 boots on sale for $30 for me. Add to that their special 20% off on two pairs of boots, and free shipping, and I ended up with boots for both of us for $36. Of course the rain will be over when they arrive, and it may not return for two years, but you just never know.

Garp

2008-12-13T22:55:00.000-08:00

We have this lovely new babysitter, who happens to not yet be of driving age. Her grandmother lives two doors down from us and has become a good neighborhood friend. The babysitter, however, lives about 25 minutes away from us. This is fine if she happens to be staying with her grandmother. Which was not the case tonight. Tonight her mother dropped her off with the understanding that my husband or I would return her home. Of course it turned out that our dinner party was about five minutes further than her house. So we just drove all the way home, only to have one of us have to turn around and drive right back where we came from. I had volunteered to do this before I knew the location of the dinner party. My husband is infamous for asking me (at the last minute) if I can get a babysitter, and then not knowing the exact time or place of the social event. (Not so incidentally, if I do this to him, even if it is just our closest friends asking us to come by to BBQ "later in the afternoon" he goes ape-shit about my lack of details). So then, being the good southern gentleman that he is, my husband felt like he should really drive her home but wasn't sure if he should. I placed my hand on his knee and said, "I trust you, Garp." He was more worried about what he would talk about for 25 minutes. But now here I am, typing away to no one in particular, while he has to drive around making awkward conversation. So, I guess I win.

time-consuming children

2008-12-13T10:35:00.000-08:00

Yesterday I was making more fabric covered notebooks for yet more teachers--I forgot about those lovely and patient women who strive to teach my small children ballet--when it hit me hard that if I do actually work on sewing projects the trade off is that my kids trash the house. Gone is the notion of cleaning up one thing before dragging out ten more. The family room becomes a tornado of toys, most of them in various animal forms. I get the most peace when they sneak into my bedroom. The trade-off there is that all the sheets and blankets get stripped from the California King bed. The one with the cool Danish bed frame that requires heaving up the enormously heavy latex mattress to tuck the sheets back under. It's at times like those that I think to myself, "Wow, I could get a lot more done if these kids weren't around!" Which is quickly followed by the realization that if the kids weren't around I'd probably be at a job that I detested on some level. And after all the only reason I started sewing again was to make Halloween costumes the year before last. (Ella wanted to be a ghost, which seems simple until you realize that you don't actually want your [then] four year old to have a sheet over her head).

etsy ennui

2008-12-02T15:34:00.000-08:00

It's funny to me that I occasionally write on this blog. Funny because no one reads it (and if they did I'd be horrified). There are, of course, ways I could draw some attention to myself, but what would be the point? I'm actually worried that if I ever take blogging seriously people might see these early postings.

I'm really torn about the whole etsy thing. I put stuff on there, under www.birdylegs.etsy.com, of course. Sometimes I even sell something. But this is another area where I am really uncommitted. Like with all of the tutus. I enjoyed making the tutus, I think they look great, and girls really love them. But is it my goal to make tutus for a living? Not really. I can't get all wound up about it and promote it like crazy. I just like to make things. Some weeks it's skirts for the girls, some weeks it's tutus. Right now it is pencil rolls and crayon rolls for Christmas gifts. And fabric covers for composition books for teachers. I didn't come up with these ideas on my own and I'm not the first person to love great fabrics or wool felt. So if I make extra and put them on etsy I don't really have the time or energy, or really even the will, to promote them enough to make serious sales. I neglect my children enough while I am doing these projects. And there are just so many sellers on etsy that you really have to work to be seen. It just kind of depresses me. But then there is this stack of tutus mocking me every day.

What a Bust

2008-11-12T16:11:00.000-08:00

There were far more vendors than buyers at last Friday's boutique, so I am still the proud owner of quite a mound of tutus. I've started sending them out into the void that is etsy. I mean, I know that etsy is great for a lot of people, but for girls like me, not so much. I'm just not a marketing kind of person. I'd just like to sit in my house and make things all day. Isn't it enough that I deal with two chatty little girls all day. Shouldn't karma give me credit for that and allow the world to just come to me?

27 Tutus

2008-11-02T18:44:00.000-08:00

I decided to make a heap of tutus for a boutique on Friday. I figured it was easier than sewing. So, I did my usual thing of buying way more supplies than I needed and this is the result. I compressed and flattened them as much as possible, but now what? Do I leave them lying on the floor all week? I've never sold tutus before, so I don't even know if there is a market for them among preschool moms. I fear one of my daughters may end up having a ballerina themed birthday party this spring. Oh, and any of my friends with daughters will be seeing them in gift baskets.

Am I really starting this?

2008-06-27T14:53:00.000-07:00

I had to get a new Blogger account to post to someone else's blog. So now here I am, wondering if I should really start my very own blog. Wondering if I should share the things I make and the ideas I have with anyone who cares to read about them--since my friends are probably quite sick of hearing about all of it.