The first Friday of the month, I took an amazing class from my friend Heather and learned how to make homemade bagels – such a great morning. I wasn’t sure I could duplicate her magic and skill at home, but sure enough, my first two dozen bagels (half sesame, half plain) following her recipe and tips turned out pretty perfect. I’m in love. Thank you, Heather!!

Then, my sweet Pearl turned four (!) so I just had to drop everything else and make her a birthday skirt. I fell in love with an apron at a vintage store in Silverton last month, and cut it up to make the cutest little skirt for her. She’s a big girl now who won’t wear anything except exactly what she wants to, so I kind of held my breath while she opened the new tote bag I sewed her to see what was inside…

but she loved it and put it right on for her birthday party and beyond. Happiness! I also got to make my favorite cupcakes (with purple frosting, by request) and a “triple berry cake” (aka blueberry boy bait + raspberries + marionberries). The girl loves her sweets, and you only turn four once.

I forgot to get a first-day shot of planting my garden this spring, but this is about three or four weeks in (I started later than usual, after an epically rainy March). Everything is loving it so far – from left to right, it’s spinach, mustard greens, dinosaur kale, white russian kale, and chard. I have beets and leeks in a smaller bed and I’m hoping to put in my tomatoes soon too, then summer squash a little later on. Tucked behind all the greens, which you can’t really see, I finally took my herbs out of all their random-sized containers and dug them into a real garden bed. I also rescued my little blueberry bushes and pomegranate from the relentless grass invasion all that rain brought, and we have about two dozen tiny Bartlett pears nestled in on our tree! I’m pretty excited… almost five years into living in our house, I feel like my yard is finally becoming what I hoped for, after a lot of baby steps forward (most recently, a birthday sandbox and a new fence!). We have flowers, native plants, and succulents planted on one side of the house, and herbs, berries, and the vegetable garden on the other.

We went away with the kids for a very needed long weekend to Mt. Hood on Wednesday and stayed at the sweetest cabin. Such a beautiful place, right on a creek, with a hammock and a hot tub and green everywhere you looked.

Along with lots of easy 18-month-old-friendly hikes, splashing in the Columbia River, skipping stones in the creek, and getting an ice cream cone in Hood River, we headed up to Timberline Lodge for a grilled cheese (Pearl and Everett) and a glass of wine (me and Andrew) and spent half an hour gazing out the window at this view. The photo above is just a regular old iPhone snapshot, no editing or anything.

This second one is a Hipstamatic from the same spot. (I find it totally impossible to stop taking photos of Mt. Hood.) Bonus – I just learned from Merritt that those amazing cloud formations we were admiring, gracefully skirting the summit, are called lenticular!

I bought this dreamy little succulent dish garden with two teeny cairns and a few seashells mixed in at the Saturday Market in Hood River. So beautiful! I wish the vendor (Rose) had a card so I could credit her, but she said she was just getting started and this was her first event ever…

Midway through our idyllic getaway was a really awesome May PMQG meeting I drove back for. I am so excited that Nancy finished quilting my Oceanside quilt and I got to share it at show and tell! She did a really cool all-over quilting pattern of waves with three whales here and there – a small, medium, and big one. I love whales so much and this was just perfect.

If anyone is interested in the process, I’m hoping to write up a longer post about how I made Oceanside… and it will be at Sisters so I’m very excited about that!

Hopefully I’ll have a side-by-side photo of the quilt with the Oceanside sign that inspired it to share soon too…

As Diane noted in her recent review, Mend It Better is arranged like a textbook, with her suggested techniques neatly organized by chapter. There are tons of photos and tips for undertaking a new mending project, which is also a nice touch.

I am very happy to have contributed one* of the 22 mending projects to the book, and along with my contributor copy, Storey Publishing sent me an extra book to give away at our Portland Modern Quilt Guild meeting this week. I asked Kristin a few questions about mending, especially patchwork projects, and here are her thoughts…

Do you have any favorite decorative stitches for covering a seam or line in a mended patchwork project?

I know it’s so bland, but I really love the whip stitch or overcast stitch. Just going to town and completely covering it, kind of sloppy, in a bright color!

What’s your favorite mending or embellishment use for binding tape?

I love using it as straps, or sometimes a little accent in a seam, like small piping. So cute!

Have you ever mended a larger quilt or patchwork project? Any general tips for that?

I’ve done some light mending on a quilt I made – one of my first sewing projects – just some basic patchwork. I’m really excited to be embarking on a huge mending adventure this year: restoring a quilt my husband’s grandma made. She passed away a long time ago and it’s in tatters. He doesn’t remember her, so it’s his only connection to her. It’s going to be one of those “for the love of it” projects because mending it will probably take more time than completely making a new one!

Here are a few tips for mending quilts:
1. DO NOT wash it before you mend it. It will just make the damage worse.
2. Unlike darning where you want to stretch the fabric taut, if you stretch the quilt in a hoop before making the basic structural repair, it will actually cause the fabric to ripple when you take it off, or stretch the tear even further. You’ll want to mend it while it’s flat, then repair any quilting stitches in the hoop only after the structure is sound.
3. If you can, work on a large smooth surface with the quilt completely flat. The kitchen floor works great!
4. Sometimes you won’t be able to match the pattern exactly when patching, if that’s the case, think accent vs “sloppy”. One of my teachers used to always say “do it or don’t do it”. So if you can’t match, make it look intentional. Bold contrasting colors can be really fun!

- – - – - –

I think quilters, sewists, lovers of vintage, upcyclers, and wardrobe-refashioners will all love this book. This pieced-vintage-fabric skirt hem idea Kristin included is my favorite project… so adorable!

I’ll be giving away a copy of Mend It Better at our PMQG meeting at 7 pm this Thursday, April 19 at PNCA. We’ll be meeting in room S1 upstairs in the Stagecraft Building right across the street from the main PNCA building (where we’ve met the last two months as well). Hope to see you there!

*Here’s my little project! Thanks so much again, Kristin!

It was a bit of a whirlwind trip. Nancy and I drove up Friday night with a Burgerville stop, and got to hang out with Michelle, Brittany, Kaci, Rachel and Cherri for a glass of wine and some fabric-shop-hop show and tell. Saturday morning, I did my book event at the Pendleton Woolen Mills booth, which was great – thank you to everyone who came to say hi!

Then, Nancy, Brittany, Michelle and I walked the show for another five hours of awesome treasure hunting – the four of us brought some good things home. Here are my finds, roughly in the order I snapped them up. I started with this fabulous plaid waterproof laminate tote at the Pendleton booth, which held everything else I got all afternoon.

And I could NOT resist these Sublime Stitching sew-in labels, also from Pendleton (if you’re in Portland, they have them at the WMS in Southeast). Genius.

I bought a yard each of the new ice blue and fresh green Pearl Bracelet from Island Quilter,

assorted yards and half-yards of Lotta Jansdotter Echo prints from Heartway International,

a beautiful 8.5″ x 11″ card of 42 vintage pearl buttons, “carded between 1945 and 1955 in Pennsylvania,” from Betty Henry,

two yards of this darling Tammis Keefe holiday reindeer reissue from Michael Miller for a tree skirt (can’t remember the vendor but will look for the receipt and try to update!),

and a pezzy mono-color jelly roll from Sandy of American Jane herself. She was so nice and so happy about the reissue, and I was so excited to get some of this fabric!!

Then, I got some very special trims and ribbons from Nifty Thrifty Dry Goods. I fell in love with the scissors ribbon, and needed the bluebirds too (I already have them in pink), plus the tiny red-and-white trim and the measuring twill tape. Then I saw a $9 package of 3 large shank-style milk glass buttons – very nice, but not my button style – with this darling scanned “baby pearls” label.

Since my daughter is a Pearl and I love pearl buttons so much, I asked the owner if she had any other buttons or trim packaged with this same vintage image that I could buy instead. She cut the label free of the three buttons, handed it to me and charged me 50¢ for it. So sweet of her! I will definitely be shopping with NTDG again soon.

I also got to meet Angie from The Quilting Loft, who is lovely! I fell for a gorgeous sample of this Indygo Junction dress in her booth sewn in a Lotta print, so I got the pattern, plus some adorable dot laminate, a yard of Valori Wells’ birch trees, and a yard of the Melody Miller typewriters.

I got this celebration print from Pacific Fabrics (plus two things not pictured – some large, unphotogenic placemat blanks that I’m going to try out with patchwork this week, and a beautiful vintage-button embroidery pattern they’d sold out of but are shipping me this week, no extra charge).

Two and half hours and another Burgerville stop later, we were back in Portland in time for the big game I’d DVRed to watch with my nephew who was in town this weekend (hi Julian!). Now I’m trying to decide what projects get what fabrics, in between finishing my Craft Hope tote bags and Think Outside the Block bee blocks, and dreaming of a PMQG –> Seattle ferry-powered shop hop weekend with friends…

If you are also sewing littlest warriors tote bags for Craft Hope (or making hats) and want to ship them together, or share photos, that would be great! Thanks to everyone who has contacted me or commented here or at PMQG. I will try to mail out Friday so they arrive in time, and would love to add yours (I’ll gladly cover shipping). Please email me over at portlandmodernquiltguild at gmail.com if you want to team up!

I love it so much. Michelle and I headed over to Artemisia and I picked up some tiny, pretty plants that will hopefully slip through the narrow bottleneck. (I also got to go to Pambiche, the park, Bar Avignon, and Ringside. It was a pretty good birthday!)

Way back in the freewheeling crafty 70s, my parents made a bottle garden for my grandparents in a giant green-glass solvent bottle from my grandfather’s physics lab, and I loved it. I’ve always dreamed about making one myself. Approximately three million tiny, small and medium terrariums later, here I am, trying to figure out how the heck to pull it off – my mom says it’s pretty challenging! Luckily, I have some allies in the form of fabulous vintage craft books…

This is from The Family Creative Workshop (Volume 2: Beachcombing to Bottle Gardens). Love this whole series so much. (I snapped photos of all the pages in the whole Bottle Gardens entry that are here in my flickr set if you want to see them.)

I also have a copy of Sunset’s Gifts You Can Make. I really wish more vintage craft books had color photos, but this is a fantastic book, and I’m so happy that they included bottle gardens as an idea for presents.

If you’re looking for either of these books, here’s what the covers look like… in glorious color!

Andrew found the bottle here, on Division in Southeast Portland. I asked the owner how often he sees these giant bottles, and he said they’re pretty rare, but this is the place I’d keep an eye on if you want one too. Would love to add some other giant-bottle sources if you have any!

My other birthday gift from Andrew was this beautiful Oregon myrtlewood cutting board, made by Coast Range Woodworks on Etsy. It’s really awesome too.

So, hopefully my next bottle garden post will be lots of photos of a beautiful miniature world of lush plants… or maybe just a list of what not to do when it comes to plants and bottlenecks. Either way, I have a hardware-store shopping list ready to go and I hope I can get started on it this week!

Also coming up – just wanted to mention that I’m teaching a scrap projects class at the Pendleton Woolen Mill Store this Saturday from 2-4! We will be making two projects, a sunglasses case and a patchwork draft snake, and all the materials are included for $25. PMQG members get $5 off any class at Pendleton, too…

… and Michelle and Daniela are teaching some great classes too (scroll down).

PS: Thanks to everyone who came to our January meeting last week! Petra wrote up a lovely meeting recap over here at the PMQG blog. We are so excited to do some fun things this year… we have an all-day sew coming up at Fabric Depot on February 4 (9am-8pm) and we’ll be announcing some good surprises for the February meeting soon, too!

This vintage dress, which was a $5 Rose Bowl treasure, had been on the long-neglected mending pile since 2007 (?) with a broken metal zipper. After moving everything in my craft room downstairs and finding it again, I stole half an hour, dipped into my newly organized card catalog of notions, and put in a new zipper. I have never loved my little Pfaff more than when I was zipping along on this project, realizing I was going to get to wear it out to dinner in ten minutes when the babysitter got here (it was the evening of our sixth wedding anniversary). I usually don’t post many photos of myself, but here I am very happy, and just so glad to be wearing this dress again instead of losing it to the perma-pile.

My favorite thing I’ve made in forever is this denim wrap skirt. Love the pockets, which hold an iPhone and keys perfectly, love the a-line, and love the total simplicity of it. I’m also kind of amazed that I finished it after all this time… I prewashed the fabric and cut all the pieces out in summer 2007, right after we moved back to Portland. Then I found out I was pregnant (the first time), suddenly got the chance to write another book (Button It Up), and reluctantly put the skirt project away to whenever I could fit it in time-wise, not to mention fit into it body-wise. Two more books, a house move, a craft room move, and another baby later, I got those long-forgotten pattern pieces back out (I really thought this one might end up in my crafty estate sale for someone else to finish a few decades from now) and started sewing.

I love top-stitching. I find it so relaxing to just go forward with these neat, even lines. This is kind of a dream project for me, I guess – three full bobbins’ worth of relaxing! The skirt is sturdy denim, top-stitched basically everywhere, and almost architectural on. I’m not nearly as worried about a sudden gust of wind as I would be in some adorable light, frothy thing. But a well-placed safety pin never hurts…

Anyway, I’m hoping for a good photo soon, but none of my mirror ones turned out, so I’ll update when I have someone around who is not three or nine months old and can take a decent picture of me wearing it. Oh, and I lost the pattern envelope sometime in the last four years (unsurprising) so the vintage pattern wiki page was awesome for reference – it’s Simplicity 9541. My only tweaks were shortening it 5 inches to just below/at the knee, and a few of my own attempts to set the waistband, etc. differently than the 1980 “UNIT 6″ approach I couldn’t really get my sewing head around.

Next, I finally got started on the Carousel Quilt kit I bought from Pink Chalk Fabrics a couple years ago, which is a charming pattern Kathy designed, built around the Denyse Schmidt County Fair cheater print panel. It’s stitching up super fast but I didn’t have a chance to finish piecing it last time I had childcare. Next week for sure!

I also mended a pair of Pearl’s old cowgirl pants (my favorite kids’ pattern, Burda 9772), hemmed a pair of Andrew’s cords, and then jumped into Mic-Mac part 2. I sewed Pearl a brown George the Puppy from Girl’s World a little while ago, which she promptly named Mic-Mac, and then requested “so many more Mic-Macs.”

So I cut a couple more out last week (a red one for her and a green one for Alex, both with yellow number-print ears), and sewed and stuffed them on Monday. Well, I think I’ll be making another green one for Alex, because Pearl loves the trio of Mic-Macs, and they are basically partying together all day long.

She lines them all up, she tells me stories about them, and they go on trips together. Not bad for a project that takes much less than an hour and a quarter-yard of fabric. Actually, you could probably make two in an hour or so, if you didn’t have to change thread colors. (My only tweaks were top-stitching the ears, and I didn’t clip curves this time since the seam allowance is only 1/4″ and I had a hard time not cutting too much on the brown Mic-Mac.)

So, now that I’ve caught up on some sewing to-do’s (to say the least!) I went to JoAnn Fabrics in search of Denyse Schmidt‘s new line Sugar Creek. Here is what I found at the Eastport store in Portland on Tuesday:

Not a ton of Sugar Creek in the mix, but yay, there was some Picnic (which I wasn’t expecting to see again) so I snapped up three yards of this very-favorite print, plus a new Lisette pattern – Continental, for the cute dress:

So, we’ll see when I have time to make it (hopefully in time to wear it at least once before sweater weather officially descends). By the way, I bought the Lisette Market pattern (for the adorable a-line skirt) at JoAnn a few weeks back too and I’ve already lost it! If you know any finding-things charms, I’d love any good thoughts. I want to make that skirt…

Oh, one more project (no sewing involved). My dear friend Alison came over last week and we made terrariums, so I got to re-make my Star Wars Terrariums from World of Geekcraft. I had disassembled them all in 2009 to send the action figures and rocks and sand away for the photo shoot and I was missing them so much. So she made wedding centerpieces, and Pearl and I made my Star Wars worlds again. Yay!

PS: If you have been following or helping with Quilts for Quake Survivors (thank you!!!) I put a new post up on the blog a couple days ago, about our last sewing party and final push to raise money for Mercy Corps and donate the remaining quilts. You can check that out and add your two cents over there if you’d like to.

PS again: If you are into these things, I’m finding the one minute to post things on my craft writer page on Facebook or my new twitter a lot more often than the hour or whatever for a real, full-on blog post with pictures over here. So please say hi over there if you’d like to!

I first met Cathy in 2005 at the very first Felt Club sale in Los Angeles. I was selling my crafts, and we chatted when she bought one of my skirt kits. At the second Felt Club, I stopped by her table and snapped up one of her burlap-covered wastebaskets (now a project in the book!). I am also the proud owner of a brown-and-pink ribbon-straw flower pin (now a project in the book), a mushroom pincushion (ditto), and a pink-and-orange Enid Collins-style papier-mache brooch (more on that in a minute…).

She contributed awesome projects to both Bead Simple and Button It Up, and when she asked me to do a project for Vintage Craft Workshop, I couldn’t say yes fast enough! She asked me to reinterpret one of my favorite vintage projects, Hazel Pearson’s mushroom pincushion from Burlap Bounty (1967). I love the pink one I bought from Cathy, so making my own in two tones of yellow and orange was super fun.

A few of my other favorite projects (it’s very hard to pick just a couple!) are…

Cathy’s Loomed Flower Wall Hanging – amazing. If you’re in Los Angeles, she’s doing a fantastic book event teaching this craft at my favorite store ever, ReForm School, tomorrow (5/14) from 2-4! Don’t miss that. I wish I could be there…

Nicole Vasbinder‘s Citrus Slice Bulletin Board is so cool (you can see the project instructions here on CRAFT: too!). It’s on my craft wish list – as soon as I get that magical, elusive free afternoon, it’s going to be all about cutting circles and hand-embroidery.

And my favorite-favorite has to be Lara Bobo’s Antiqued Jewelry Box. One of the big things Cathy and I bonded over was our mutual love of Enid Collins. I collect her handbags (these two are my favorites – I’m a Capricorn and my husband is a Cancer so I think it was kind of meant for me to find these ones). I love her work and love the painted details, the jewels, the papier-mache, the typography, just all of it is so good.

Cathy loves all things ec too, and found this treasure, a 1973 photo catalog of the current handbag designs – don’t miss her lovely post on it. Here’s just one of the photos, I just love it.

So while Cathy was researching Enid Collins for her book, she met Enid’s granddaughter, Lara Bobo, and asked her to do a project too… and the gorgeous Antiqued Jewelry Box was born. Lara’s father made the wooden box she embellished, so three generations of Collinsania combined in this lovely piece. I got chills reading Cathy’s introduction about it all.

So, that’s my dream project – not sure when I’ll pull it off but I hope it’s in 2011!

Now, the fun part – Cathy and Chronicle Books have kindly offered up a copy of the book for me to give away to a reader! Please comment on this post by Thursday, May 19 mentioning your favorite vintage craft, and I’ll ask Cathy to choose her favorite from all of them. I can’t wait to hear them myself too! Cathy’s blog tour has lots of great vintage craft posts and some other fun giveaways so be sure to follow along the way. Yesterday’s post was by Jenny at Exit Through the Thrift Shop (with bonus Felt Club pics!!) and Monday’s post will be at whipup and I know that one will be awesome!

And if you’re going to Maker Faire, Cathy and I are doing free book events, back to back – at 2:00 on Saturday, I’m doing a POW! ZAP! Magnets demo from World of Geekcraft (make one to take home!) and at 3:00 Cathy’s giving a new “Crafty Lady” slideshow all about vintage crafts and their pioneers. Both are in the CRAFT: Magazine area and we’ll be signing books afterwards – please come say hi!

The show has work from 30 artists and designers (or 29 designers and artists and one crafty duo, more like) and it opens on Friday, February 18th at 6pm at Land Gallery! Clifton posted this awesome sneak peek at some of the other pieces, and I can’t wait to see it all in full glory.

Andrew came up with the concept – a Blazer blazer – and I spent all 22 games in January and February planning, stitching, gluing, embroidering, and embellishing a dark red blazer that looked straight out of Meier & Frank the year the Blazers won their NBA title, 1977. I like to think the original owner was wearing it at the victory parade on Broadway. By the time I was done, it felt like a cross between a real Blazers uniform, a Pearly Kings and Queens suit, and a Shriners/Elks/Lions extravaganza. (By the way, any unevenness, glue streaks, asymmetry, or other homemade-ness are 100% thanks to some good freaking games the last two months! Six-game winning streak, anyone?!)

I started with a ton of vintage buttons (of course).

That part was fun.

Black and silver rick-rack and quite a bit of wool felt were my next go-tos.

The 20 honors Blazers legend and assistant coach Maurice Lucas, who passed away last year.

I also made tiny embroidered replicas of all 12 retired jerseys. Loved that part too.

Since this is a heartfelt fan love letter in blazer form, we thought we’d sign it. Both of the kids have Blazers jerseys (Everett has #30 Rasheed Wallace and Pearl has #7 Brandon Roy) but neither of us do… so now we have our very own hyphenated-name jerseyesque craftstravaganza for the rec room instead.

The last big push was sewing buttons, buttons and more buttons on the front. This is when it really started to feel like itself! I stitched a Blazers flag over the original striped lining as a little finale, and I’d probably still be adding more stuff if there wasn’t a deadline.

Hope to see you at the opening – I think it will be awesome! A huge thank-you to Clifton for including us in the mix.

ps: if you come to the show and want to try the Blazer blazer on, you are more than welcome to. Boomshakalaka!

This is a very sweet project that is super-customizable, depending on your craft stash… I used miniature trees and animals from the Decorette Shop and Bake It Pretty for my little scenes, along with leftover quilt batting for snow, Martha glitter in gold for fanciness, and vintage rick-rack from the Kitten to edge each one. I’ll detail my ornament hacks later on, after some photos.

Along with our favorite reindeer and squirrels (the first photo, and the first ornament I made – to make the button + ribbon rosette, you can check this post out), I knew we needed a couple of fancy ballerinas on the tree.

This hula couple ornament is a gift for someone special.

After making four hanging ornaments, I decided to switch things up a little bit and make some winter wonderland mantel terrariums instead. I love how these turned out… the spinning ornament style is cool, and they’re adorable on the tree, but I really love these little stationery worlds.

We needed some more reindeer, of course, and then we had to have some super cute bunnies. Pearl dug those the most.

And a friendly gnome visiting with a little pack of squirrels,

and some spun-cotton mushrooms with an evergreen tree for the last one.

I really love how these teeny winter scenes look on the mantel with all our other little treasures. Pearl’s favorite is the Snoopy Christmas plate, so that is the king of the decorations, but I got to set out my gossamer thread trees from last year, along with a herd of vintage reindeer, two angel candlesticks, two gnomes, two champagne-cork mushrooms and a vintage Santa on a sled.

Updated living room picture! Still need to sew a stocking for Everett (I settled on a fall tree theme!) and one for my mom. And still hoping to make a tree skirt. I might see if there’s a round vintage tablecloth I can cannibalize instead of starting from scratch.

So, the original winter wonderland ornament tutorial is right here, but I made a few changes to mine. I used a hot glue gun to set my little miniatures’ feet in place under the batting snow (instead of tacky glue). I also added a vintage rick-rack trim set in place with tacky glue all the way around the bottom of the cup, and a dab of hot glue to secure the ends, instead of using decorative scissors to edge the cardstock circles (I couldn’t find mine, to tell you the truth, but I like the rick-rack better!). I used a flattened recycled cardboard gift box for my circles instead of the pretty silver cardstock in the original, and a thinner batting left over from quilting projects that I could kind of make landscape-y, instead of the thicker fluffier stuff.

So, two thumbs up for sure. I rarely get the chance to make eight of anything for fun, and this was really nice to do. It’s supposed to be for kids to do with you, and I’m sure older kids would have a blast. I’d say that judging from my afternoon, 2.5 is not old enough to really participate, but definitely the right age to admire the finished ones with a lot of enthusiasm. Maybe next year it will be more of a collaboration between us, I have a dozen more drink cups saved for the next round.

Last little holiday project idea: I added some button-and-holly-leaf embellishments to my Christmas cookie boxes this year! The super-simple how-to is over here on my Button It Up blog if you want to try this one, too – it would be perfect for fancying up a gift box, bag, or canister.

Okay, hopefully I’ll have a new felt stocking, preferably two, to show this week too! I hope your holiday crafting has been fun, if you’re as last-minute as I am…

Andrew took this Polaroid earlier in the day, before we got the rest of her costume on, but I just loved it anyway. I found this 1950s bouncy horse on our street a couple of years ago with a free sign on it and lugged it home. Pearl LOVED it and she and her little buddies rode it all the time, until the day one of the springs connecting the horse to the base broke and it just wasn’t really that fixable. So now it’s been freed to live on as a lawn ornament and cowgirl photo destination!

Holly did a photo shoot with a group of mothers and children in September and October and Pearl and I were lucky enough to be included. On the last shoot day, she surprised us with an awesome gift: this gorgeous 1970s hand-embroidered Western shirt, a Sears size 4. It fits my lanky 2.5-year-old perfectly and voila, along with a $5 cowgirl hat we got at the stables in Sunriver the week before, the Halloween costume dilemma was solved! Who could possibly resist the chance to run around in a super cool shirt embellished with a ladybug, a goldfish, a star, a puppy, a turtle,

a mushroom, an enormous carousel horse, and a WHALE?!

Pearl really seemed to enjoy life dressed as a cowgirl, though she told everyone who asked her on Friday what her costume would be that she was going to be a dog, and everyone who asked on Saturday that she was going to be a kangaroo, and I had my doubts she’d cooperate so happily. But on Sunday, she was a cowgirl, and so was I actually! It was super fun. Even though I didn’t end up getting to do any actual crafting for the costume myself, and did end up carrying her little stuffed horse around all night, it was so much better than sewing three or four (or let’s be honest, eight) costumes and endlessly doing battle over which one might actually make it out for trick-or-treating.

p.s. Thanks so much for the super compliments on the Pendleton patchwork quilt, and to Rachel for posting about it on CRAFT:! I really, really, really love that project and it makes me so happy every time I see it. I wish everyone else who likes it too a big armful of beautiful wool fabric samples, a blissful afternoon sewing, and a cozy evening curled up under your new favorite quilt. Seriously, don’t miss the Pendleton Woolen Mill Store, it is a craft paradise full of unexpected treasures.

I haven’t had much time to sew or craft lately (and until this morning, I would have said “any” instead of “much”… more on that in a second), so cooking has been pretty much my only chance to be creative. Well, I have also been doing a lot of chalk drawings on our sidewalk, but that’s not quite the same. So in my never-any-crafting-time rut, I have been trying and bookmarking recipes every day. We have been having fun picking berries pretty inefficiently ourselves, but we are so lucky to have a neighbor who goes out to farms once a week and buys gorgeous, picked-that-day berries for restaurants — and picks up extra for friends at cost — so last week I got us a flat each of beautiful marionberries and raspberries!

We picked them up in Pearl’s trusty red wagon and brought them home, though we just ended up sitting on the back steps eating them for about half an hour first.

So with 24(!) pints of berries in the house, I’ve made marionberry cornmeal muffins, banana-marionberry walnut muffins, a second round of raspberry popsicles, and raspberry brown-sugar gratin in the last few days. All of them turned out super-stellar. I’m also excited to make (marion)berry sorbet, (marion)berry boy bait, and hopefully some freezer jam if I can dig up a good beginner-friendly recipe. Years after everyone else who’s better organized, I started bookmarking all my favorites on delicious, so check that out if you want to see my little recipe archive!

In garden news, I picked my very first zucchini today (this photo is from yesterday, and it’s noticeably bigger just 24 hours later). I am so thrilled at how pretty and green it is, even though I know most people complain about being overrun with them. We made these zucchini pancakes last week (which were great) and I am super excited to make another round when we have enough of our own. Which hopefully won’t be long in this heat!

And in sewing news, I saw Amy’s fantastic video tutorial for sewing your own snack bags this morning, and took a break from writing, editing photos and sending work emails to run upstairs and sew three of them. It had been at least six weeks since I’ve made anything (I can tell by the thread in the machine, sigh) and it was so nice to take even that half-hour to do some real live sewing!

I made them with prints from my stash, chosen entirely because they clicked with the lemon-yellow thread that was still in the machine from the quilt I finished in early June. The strawberry one is my favorite (that was a Kitten find). I followed Amy’s instructions pretty closely, but my serger was in the closet and I didn’t want to bother getting it out, so I did a narrow double-fold hem on both sides instead of serging. I cut and then ripped wide strips of my fabrics selvedge to selvedge, trimmed them to about 18 inches long (yielding 2 bag pieces per strip, plus a nice-size squarish scrap for my quilting stash) and sewed a narrow double-fold hem on both ends, and then did the rest of the steps the same way she did, but without pretty nail polish on. The yellow one was about 6.5 inches wide and the other two are closer to 8, as an experiment for greater snack capacity.

I also added my favorite decorative stitch to the business end of the fold hem, perfect for my star-loving Pearl who will be toting these around with her Cheerios or sandwich inside. Thanks, Amy!