New Projects!

I'm back! I have a two completed projects! Well...three...but I only have pictures of two of them. 1) During my long blogging hiatus, I have completed a very large knitted scarf that has proved wonderful during the snowy Boston winters.

On another note, a few months ago, my friend Lauren made me a beautiful skirt:


and I got the sewing bug!

Sewing has a long history in my family. My Grandmom Warner and Aunt Dianne were/are avid sewers. I told my aunt about the skirt project with Lauren and she sent up a massive amount of fabric for me to play with; and soon, she will be giving me a fancy sewing machine which used to belong to my Aunt Betty-Anne. yay, new toys!

However, the sewing machine won't be here until September, and then I need to learn how to use it, and well....I got impatient and decided to hand-sew a few projects.

I made a 4 square pillow will the scraps of my skirt and the left over stuffing from the toys I made for Micah and Zoe. Also, I put together a yoga mat bag!


The pillow was pretty easy. 8 squares, sewn together, stuffed, sewn shut. Easy-peezy-lemon-squeezy.


it's actually really comfortable.

The yoga mat proved more difficult since I did not have a pattern, I just made it up myself. It is complete with a carrying strap with adjustable D-ring fasteners, and a cinching top closure. This fabric came from my Aunt Dianne and I really, really love the pattern/colors. I initially wanted to make clothing out of it but the squares are slightly to big for my ever-so slight frame.



I had some difficulty with gauging the diameter of the bag since the yoga mat can vary in size depending on how tightly it is rolled, and the mat is also very grippy so I had to made the bag loose enough to easily slide over the bag. After a few tries I managed to get it right.


While I didn't have any patterns, I did look up a few different yoga mat designs on the internet. I found a few that had flat bottoms, a-la this bag. Which would have been super easy but I really didn't like the way it looked. I went a head and attempted securing a circular bottom. It wasn't fun to sew it together, but all in all it worked pretty well. I was left with a bit of a fold at the end, but it tucked in nicely and isn't proving harmful or unattractive. I'm assuming I just measured it incorrectly.


And there we have it! New toys and I saved probably $20-30 by making my own yoga bag, and the pillow will look really nice in our new apartment...as long as I don't wear the skirt any where near it...