Hollman Hullabaloo: Crafty momma....

Er. Or pintrest fail momma?
Don't approach her with scissors momma?

The post on the nursery is all the final product, but before the final product there were lots and lots of trials.

First, I made the boys curtains. That went pretty well, until I got to the window seat and mis-measured the fabric. Woops. I had to piecemeal a white piece to the back of the seat cushion. Hopefully no one spends much time looking at the bottom! And, as a bonus they are already using it, which makes me happy :)

Second, was the nursery curtain. Here's where the real nightmares began. I knew that I wanted to make a ruffle valance and pinterest offered at least three "easy to do" tutorials. They made it sound so easy- you get your fabric, cut and sew into long strips that are at least twice as big as your window opening, you determine how you want to fix them to the curtain, get the ruffler, ruffle them and sew them on! Voila! Ruffle valance.

ha ha. That shit is funny.

First, have you ever seen a ruffler? It looks like some sort of torture device. Exhibit A.

And of course, because I'm cheap I ordered the 10.00 version from Amazon, which worked splendidly exactly 0% of the time. Ruffler =10, Alisha =0. It was quite an adventure. Lots of messing with needles, tension settings, threads, fabrics, you name it, I fiddled with it on my sewing machine. I could get it to sorta work on a setting I had absolutely no use for, but on the setting I needed it to work, I couldn't get it to do anything but jam up. Not to mention, the tension on the back of the fabric looked like I had tied about 10,000 knots. It was awful. I thought I could bust through it in one evening, a few hours at most since the tutorials made it sound so easy! 1:00am later, I was still working my sweat shop to get the thing done (Drew on cutting and mercifully, Drew's mom on ironing). I couldn't quit of course, so that night I put that sucker up at 1:30 am.

I wasn't done there though. I mean, I'm a total glutton for punishment, so I decided a quilt was necessary too.

I encountered this round of crafting more apprehensivly. So far its going okay. Not wonderful. Quilters make it sound like lining up fabric seams is cake, like you can always so easily make each seam perfectly aligned. I'm here to tell you I can't. I'm always trying to figure out the secret and mostly always failing. Sometimes they accidentally line up, and I think I did something right, but then I can't replicate it. Another good thing about the quilt is that I'm already constructing the top quilt! That was half the battle with Owen's quilt- piecing hexagons was a nightmare for his. For this one the blocks are triangles and easy to take on bit by bit (even if they don't line up perfectly). So, if I keep up a pace of 20 blocks a week I should be able to get the top quilt ready in about 5 weeks, with a few weeks left to baste, get the back fabric, sew and quilt the thing together!

Alongside the quilt were two more craft jobs- much smaller and easier. One is the bunting for her nursery with letters on it. These were fun to make- I found a font I liked, used it as a template, interfaced the letters and sewed them on banner triangles. Then I pieced them all together to make the alphabet with bias tape. The second was a boppy cover- these are super easy to make. A zipper and a hunk of fabric, an hour or so later, and voila! boppy cover! I used the same pattern to make Owen's years ago and hung on to it. I'm glad I did!