happy stuff.

last night i decided the time was right to try out this recipe for a zucchini and ricotta galette from smitten kitchen.  it had these healthy looking slices of zucchini and a very intriguing description of the crust that made me just have to try it.  the only problem was that we were out of butter (luckily they sell it at the convenience store located — conveniently — at the end of my street) and the ricotta in the back of the fridge was semi-frozen and had a mysterious pink splotch that earned it a speedy trip into the garbage.  but we had the rest of the ingredients (oh, except for the basil, which i ended up just leaving out and it was fine).  i had a brilliant brainstorm and e-mailed mr. happy stuff and asked him to stop at the italian deli close to his workplace to see if they sold a good ricotta.  see, i generally don’t really like ricotta cheese.  it seems like such a good idea, but all of the ones i’ve eaten leave sort of this weird chalky sensation on the back of my teeth and it never really tastes like anything.  i was pretty sure this was because i haven’t had good ricotta.  when he came home, mr. happy stuff said they were sold out of the “homemade” ricotta in tubs (note to self:  should try to get this sometime)  but instead he found something called “ricotta salata” that i’m fairly certain was not what this recipe was asking for since i could shred it, but let me tell you that it was so very, very tasty and rich and let’s not talk about how much butter was in the crust, let’s instead just say that i very much enjoyed eating this, but i think that the richness does mean that in the future this may be relegated to the category called “party food” where you can share it with at least 5 other people and then eat a nice healthy salad or something.  but if you have a party in the near future and a zucchini waiting patiently in your fridge, this is the recipe for you.  i’ll let you decide on your own which type of ricotta you’re going to use.

who says girls get all the cute clothes?  check out these rompers i made for the happy baby (using a few alterations on the 90-minute shirt tutorial):

i especially love the back on the striped one where i added a freezer paper stencil of a design i sketched (to cover up a stain from the original thrifted shirt):

a few notes:  for clothing this small, i like to use a 1″ strip of the ribbing instead of the 1.5″ and also i’m still working on figuring out the best way to install the snaps on the bottom edge.  i’ve also made a version with sleeves that’s pretty cute, but a little too small when it’s not made with super stretchy knit, so i’ll have to make another one to show you.

and then, because i am a crazy crafter, i also whipped up a simple pair of purple pants and two stripey hats on friday while babysitting a friend’s baby.  i wanted to try the larger size pattern from this site, and the friend’s baby is older than the happy baby so i hoped he didn’t mind if i used him as a model to see if the pattern worked.  i gave him the pants as a thank-you for being my sewing mannekin and i threw in one of the hats to boot.  i didn’t get a picture of the pants (they’re pretty basic) but i was very happy with the way both hats turned out (each was made from one sleeve of a short-sleeved t-shirt, one with the cuff up, one with the cuff down).

(i just did a running stitch with a needle and thread to gather the top of this one and i love the way the stripes turned out!)

in an era of trimming down my google reader in a vain attempt to spend less time on the computer, it is only a very exceptional blog that gets added to my list these days.  yesterday, i followed a link from somewhere and “discovered” made by joel.  granted, this is not the first time i’ve seen his blog.  i think i’d seen at least three of his projects posted elsewhere on the blogosphere before, but for some reason, yesterday i finally took the time to stop and look around on his site and i was totally blown away.  over the course of the day, i read the entire blog, all the way back to his first post (it’s not thaaaaaat long-standing).  he’s got so many great crafts for kids.  they are all elegantly simple, beautifully designed, made from inexpensive (usually free) materials, and best of all–often offered with downloadable freebies to print and make with your own kids (or, ahem, the kids at your library).

here are a few of my favorites (all photos by joel henriques):

wall hanging box aquarium–the buttons and slots on top allow the user to move the sea creatures back and forth across the aquarium.  so many possibilities for variations on this theme!

paper city–he also keeps adding more pieces for the paper city in subsequent posts, all available for free download!

small cardboard cutouts–so simple and i love that he shows how his kids actually use the toys he creates with them.

play squares for baby–you’ll have to click through to learn how this one works!  but i think i might have to make a set for the happy baby.

okay, you get the idea.  go check it out.  oh, he also posted a latch hook rug that he’s working on that inspired me to accept a serendipitous gift at church last night of a partially finished latch hook play rug.  if i ever finish it (or get around to working on it) i’ll post pictures of that.  good grief.  the man not only got me to add him to my google reader, he got me to pick up a long-lost (and very time-consuming!) craft again!

here’s the current state of my common threads “bookshelf” quilt (hooray for the process pledge!).  last night i finally finished sewing all of the strips of books together (after adding about 30″ of my own “books”).  i have to give a big thank you to everyone in the common threads quilt bee who contributed to this quilt.  first of all, i love the enormous variety of prints that everyone contributed!  fantastic colors and i just love the way it’s looking so far!  secondly, even though i tried to be really precise (after hearing from others about how easily the books go wonky) even the small strip i sewed was challenging to keep straight.  this would have been a much different (and not so nice) looking quilt if i’d tried to do it alone.

the next step will be to trim the top edges of each row of books (they’re different heights right now) and add in a strip of white fabric between each row.  but then … i still need to make a decision about the back (pieced?  maybe a solid piece of stripes?) and the quilting pattern and i’m toying with the idea of hiring a long arm quilter to do the quilting… any suggestions about a quilting pattern?  or tips for finding a good long arm quilter?  (i’m assuming i can just ask around at my local quilting shop for names??)  any good questions i need to ask?  i’m just a bit nervous about shoving a bed-sized quilt into my own sewing machine and i want this quilt to turn out really nice when it’s finished.  plus, i’d like it to be finished sometime this year!

i got several requests to see the process of my reading fox design, and so i’ve created this blog post which should give hope to everyone out there who thinks they “can’t draw.”  i’m surprised to find that it feels a little scary to show you all of my rough drafts and to talk about my process, but i always find other people’s process posts so interesting and inspiring, so i’m diving in.  my guess is that this post will be pretty wordy and picture-heavy, so apologies to anyone who just came here to see pictures of the baby.  you might want to skip this post.

okay.  my first step when i’m working out a new drawing idea is to make a sketch just out of my brain and onto the paper.  this helps me to figure out what i need work on and i keep hoping that someday that first sketch will turn out “not too bad” and that at least part of it will end up in my final design.  that was not the case with my fox.  here’s my original, very first rough draft:

yes, i suppose the tail stayed sort of the same, but that’s the easiest, most distinctive part of a fox, so no surprise there.  however, this drawing (is that a wolf or a dog?) did help me to realize that i wasn’t sure what made a fox face distinctively “foxy,” so i went online to google images and did a search for a line drawing of a fox and remembered that they had white cheeks/eye areas, so i tried again (sorry for the soft focus, but you get the idea):

definitely on the right track, but somehow still a little more hunchbacked than i’d like it to be and i wasn’t sure how i was going to add a book into that sketch and not hide the fox’s face, and it just was more scary and less cute than i was hoping for.  i can’t remember if it was at this point or at the next sketch, but at some point, i remembered a recent post on small fox’s blog where she talked about this super cute fox mini-quilt that pinktrees had made for her, so i went to look at that fox.  this fox is sitting at a similar angle, so it might have been at this point.

but then i just decided to sketch pinktrees’ fox almost verbatim to try to better understand the construction of her drawing (is that kosher in the art world?  or is it plagiarizing?):

definitely starting to look more like a fox, but … how was i going to get a book into her hands?  and make the design my own (not just steal pinktrees’ design)?

here you can see where i experimented with putting a fox head on one of my typical monster bodies and then put a big fat back leg on it.  getting cuter, but still not quite right and hard to put on a stamp.  i also experimented with some of the whisker designs i’d seen on google images and some different noses.  then, i quit sketching for the day and put my notebook aside to let the ideas percolate for a little bit.

the next time i picked up the sketch was (shhhh….) during a lecture in my class at library school.  you can see some of my monsters lurking around the edges of this sketch, but then i remembered the fox and i started working on her again:

you can see that the head tilt from pinktrees remained, but i reverted back to my sort of “hunchback” body shape.  i was still not loving the paws on the fox on the left (the not-colored-in one), but i did like the way that the right-hand fox’s paws looked. if i remember correctly, i had (at some point between the first day of sketching and the second) gone to frizzelstix’s website because i remembered that she had also drawn some awesome foxes for small fox and i wanted to see what she did for feet.  the skinny black feet were inspired by her (again–plagiarism or par for the course?  please tell me if i’m doing something wrong!  i don’t want to offend!)  here are two more attempts from that day:

definitely settling in to this body shape and i played with a few different foot designs.  again, put it aside (concentrate on the lecture!) and let it stew on the back burner for awhile.

the next time i picked it up, i knew i needed to figure out how to get the book in her hands.  i started with a warm-up fox to remind myself again how it looked and to try out the feet with toes:

then i put a book in one paw:

ouch!  that looks painful!  let’s try both paws:

bingo!  that’s the one.  i knew it as soon as i sketched it.  although i wasn’t sure if she needed a hind leg or not, so i did  a quick mock-up:

and decided that simple was best and this turkey leg thing wasn’t necessary for my fox.  i don’t have photos of me carving the fox (the only tricky part was figuring out what was going to be positive and negative space) but here’s the photo of the final fox again:

a few days lapsed between my last sketch and the sketch i drew to make this stamp, so some slight morphing happened, but i am so happy with the way she turned out and it’s also so freeing to just throw that whole “i can’t draw” excuse out the window and say instead, “i’m discovering my own artistic style.”

and if you want to see a great process video on how to carve a stamp (the one that i watched that taught me how to carve a stamp), check out this one from the very inspiring geninne (3rd post down on this page).

it’s been awhile since i’ve done a giveaway here at happy stuff, so let’s have one!  here’s the set-up:  you give me an idea for a stamp design (like, “fox reading a book” or “octopus in a bowler hat”) and i’ll pick my favorite idea(s) and if i can figure out how to draw it, i’ll send you a free stamp!  i reserve the right to sell the design later in my etsy shop if i ever get around to putting my stamps in my shop (i’m currently waffling on whether the stamps are of consistent enough quality and whether i can really charge a price that is tempting enough to shoppers and fair enough to me for the realistic amount of time i put into creating them) and i make no promises that the stamp will be mailed to you anytime this year (i have a new baby in the house–have you heard?), but the winner(s) will eventually be rewarded for their excellent idea.  feel free to suggest as many ideas as you want.

awhile back, i’d posted that my crafting/children’s librarian/bloggy friend, small fox had invited me to be part of an “art exchange.”  i’m pretty sure that the chain ended with me (i can’t really blame anyone for not signing up — i don’t do them myself 99.2% of the time) and so i decided that at least i could create a little piece of art to share with small fox directly.  and the moment i had that idea, this little reading fox idea popped into my head.  granted, it went through quite a few sketch variations (hmmmm… does rossie’s process pledge extend to non-quilt projects too?  would you like to see the rough drafts of this?) before it turned into this, but in the end i was sooo pleased with the results.  small fox told me that she loved it so much that she showed it to everyone who came to her house for a visit, which just makes me even happier.  i love it when tiny inspiration strikes!

okay, you caught me.  this is another baby-related post, but it’s also a furniture makeover and i am soooo excited about it, i just had to share it with you.  a little back story:  when we started to decorate the nursery, one of the pieces of furniture i knew i wanted to have in there was some sort of rocker/glider chair.  long story somewhat shorter–i spent waaaaaaaaaaaaaay too much time shopping for the perfect chair. (*see longer version below if you’re really interested)

i finally found a glider for sale in a city about an hour’s drive from here and they only wanted $75 for it.  it had most of the features i wanted (it reclined, it had a wide seat, it had padded arms) but it wasn’t particularly modern and it didn’t have an ottoman.  still, for that price (even with the gas to drive there to pick it up) it was a steal and we drove there that same night to pick it up.  here’s the before:

not terrible, but the upholstery was both faded and stained and the wood color didn’t go great with the other woods in the nursery, but it was very comfortable and had great gliding action.  we gave in and bought an ottoman new (on sale and with a coupon it still cost quite a bit more than we’d paid for the chair) and over the course of the last few months, i’ve worked in a few stages to sand/paint it (i did the whole chair with just one of the “sample” jars of paint in the martha stewart line from home depot and still have enough left over for touch-ups), make slipcover patterns (using a twin size flat sheet to make a trial slipcover, which also helped me to calculate how much fabric i needed) and sew new covers and now i’m so pleased with the results.  here is the “after”:

photographing things in this room with natural lighting is almost impossible, so the color isn’t quite right in these pictures.  this one is slightly more accurate although still a bit more yellow and not quite green enough:

this is the perfect fabric. i wanted something modern and interesting, but not too bold (the room’s already pretty bright!) and this tone-on-tone pattern with round shapes that echo the other design elements in the room fits the bill.  it’s a lovely, heavy-weight but still soft-to-the-touch and at least somewhat stain-resistant and also washable upholstery fabric that i purchased from modern fabrics online.  i love this company’s concept (reclaim professional upholstery leftovers from furniture manufacturers that is headed to the landfill (!) and sell it to the public for less than it would cost new.  professional dumpster diving?  awesome.) and have been wanting an excuse to purchase fabric from them and this was the ideal opportunity.  they were very easy to deal with (i requested two fabric sample swatches which were sent very promptly and they answered my fabric care questions to the best of their knowledge and when i finally placed my order, they called to clarify one detail about yardage over the phone and the fabric arrived a few days later) and i will happily buy more from them the next time i decide to do a make-over for my furniture.  i was so excited when i got the fabric yesterday that i immediately dumped it into the washing machine for a pre-wash (i’d washed my sample already and learned that it doesn’t shrink much, but didn’t want any surprises) and had the chair covers sewn up before i went to bed and had the ottoman finished in an hour or so today (although i’d still like to attach it more firmly to the ottoman itself).  soooo much better than stained, faded (slightly scratchy) country blue cushions.

*first, i had to decide if i wanted a rocker or a glider (and yes, there’s a significant difference between the two.  i chose the glider because it’s less likely to develop a bumpy ride if used on a less than smooth surface and it won’t scootch all over the room while you’re rocking.), then i drooled for weeks over some beautiful modern options but couldn’t bring myself to pay the steep price tag attached to those chairs, and then i went to some furniture stores and actually sat and rocked in some chairs and fell in love with dutailier gliders.  they had the smoothest, longest glide of any chairs i sat in and they had wide seat options (important if you’ve met anyone in my family.  ahem.) and they reclined!  and then i made the mistake of sitting in one of their “comfort recliner” chairs and it was so amazingly comfortable that i almost invested in one, but realized that i really wanted to be able to rock with my feet up (not an option on those chairs) and was able to talk myself out of it.  barely.  so i spent months combing the craigslist listings in every city within a 3 hour drive of here (and sometimes farther if we were going on a road trip) to try to find a dutailier glider.  i wanted one that reclined and that had a wide seat and i was hoping for something with relatively modern styling.  these chairs are available on craigslist, but the good ones go quite quickly and usually still cost $300-$350, minimum.  so i looked.  and looked.  and looked.  i’d begun to resign myself to an ugly chair (we’ll just use it for a finite period of time anyway, right?) when i saw this inspiring makeover and i suddenly had hope that i could make this work.  (story continued above)

as promised, here is a post about something other than baby crafts.  this one features my new favorite summer sandwich!

i know i’ve posted about summer sandwiches before (wow.  that is some vintage happy stuff. no photos!  hardly any text!  look how far we’ve come…) and i do still like all of those sandwiches, but it’s nice to figure out a new recipe to throw into the mix every now and then.  this one is lovely.  from the bottom slice of bread up, it contains hummus, shredded carrot/ginger salad (leftover side dish from earlier in the week), avocado, sprouts i grew myself using this tutorial (so easy!), cucumber, and labna from a local ethnic food store.  a friend of mine recently introduced me to this particular variety of greek yogurt–it’s so thick that it’s closer to cream cheese almost and makes a beautiful sandwich spread.  i might have thrown a little salt and pepper or possibly za’atar on the sandwich too.  this sandwich is the perfect combination of textures–from smooth and creamy to crisp and crunchy and just enough sticky stuff so that the whole thing doesn’t fall apart the minute you take a bite.

it seems to be all i want to do these days–make stuff for the happy baby!  maybe if you’re lucky my next post will be about food or flowers or something.  :)

this installment of crafting-for-baby includes binky leashes made with purchased clips i found at a local scandinavian imports store and japanese linen tapes i purchased from an etsy seller (except for that top one–that was a gift from the lovely and generous rebekah who sent it to me ages ago and i finally found the perfect use for it!).

these were super fast and easy–just three itty-bitty seams and hammer on two snap halves and you’re done!  the hardest part was narrowing my choices of ribbons.  drool.  i was extra fond of the phrase “hello, my friend” combined with lego-like images.

i also discovered the “90-minute shirt” this past week and had to drop all other projects to try one out (well, actually, i made two, but i only have a photo of one–the other one is almost identical except the fabric is grey instead of butter-yellow and it’s slightly larger (although they are both still a rather tight fit on my boy.  still tweaking the pattern….)

and because that’s such a bad photo (sorry, only have access to the iphone camera at the moment), i am, of course, forced to show you a picture of the shirt that i took earlier, while it was being modeled by the 3-month-birthday boy:

here we have the boy doing a pensive gq pose, showing off the detail on the collar.

and here you can see a wider shot and notice that the shirt barely covers his belly button and might be the reason he’s scrunching up his shoulders?  blowing bubbles is another one of his baby modeling tricks.  at least, i think those are bubbles.  maybe you shouldn’t look too closely.

i love this tutorial.  it is so very easy to make a shirt that looks like a million bucks (or at least like 50 bucks on your first try) in a short period of time.  it recycles clothing and is another way to get some clothes that aren’t emblazoned with cutesy-poo into your child’s wardrobe.  or, if you’re into the cutesy-poo, you could freezer paper stencil your own flavor of cuteness onto these tees.  so many possibilities!  one thing i learned from this project that wasn’t really mentioned in the tutorial is that the fabric they use for men’s shirts is generally less stretchy than the fabric used in baby onesies.  when choosing a onesie for the pattern, pick one that fits quite generously.  now i must go make more before the baby wakes up.  i am completely addicted.

i finally got my hands on a library copy of lotta jansdotter‘s book, simple sewing for baby and it is so inspiring!  in fact, despite my pile of things to do (top of the list:  take care of baby who is developing a shorter nap habit, yikes!) i dropped everything to make two projects right away.  first, i tried a bib.  i made some adjustments to her pattern instructions and made it two layers instead of one (my laminated cotton material was curling up and wouldn’t lie flat, so i added a flannel back) and my serger was acting up at the time, so instead of serging the edges, i sewed it inside out, turned it and edge-stitched it.)  and i left off the pocket (out of sheer laziness).  the extra brown piece around the neck was because i only had a quarter yard of the laminated cotton and i wanted the pattern to go in this direction and i thought that maybe flannel would be softer on the back of the neck than plastic anyway.  i’m not necessarily advocating that others make these changes (in fact, i can see how there could be some inherent flaws in wearing a bib that doesn’t absorb liquid or have a pocket…. can you say soggy lap?), but just wanted to explain why my bib looks different than the one in the book.

the second thing i made were the super cute bloomers.  i love this pattern and may have to make more of them.  i also love that the way she’s sewn and styled them in the book they are completely appropriate for boys and not just for wearing under dresses anymore.  the only changes i made to this pattern was to use a contrasting fabric for the bias trim around the leg holes (it’s hidden on the inside) because i didn’t have enough of the plaid to cut a bias piece and i still had some leftover bias-cut brown from the quilt i just made.  i was a little confused at first about how those leg holes worked (i thought the brown would be visible) but when i studied the pattern and the pictures a little more closely, i figured out my mistake before they were sewn together wrong.  here’s my version of her bloomer pattern on my own cute little model:

funny story:  that fabric was repurposed from an old pair of mr. happy stuff’s boxer shorts!  :)  tee hee!

i’m pretty sure i need to own this book.