Sew Busy!

With Halloween finally here, I have a quick break between now and the rest of the 90 million things I'm sewing before Christmas to update what's been going on around here.

I only sewed two things for Halloween this year, but it took the majority of the week and a half leading up to this past Friday to get everything finished.  Sounds last minute, but I was honestly just glad not to be hurriedly sewing on Saturday afternoon to finish the girl's costume.

So what did I come up with?  First was this adoraBOOle pillowcase dress I saw over at Sugar Bee.

The only way this could have been easier would be if you painted the face on with fabric paint rather than sewing it as applique.

I taught her to say "Boo" to everyone when they asked what a ghost says.  She was so cute!  She got compliments everywhere we went on Friday!

For her costume, I figured that - since she's a super opinionated 21-month-old - this would be my last year to have a say in the costume choice.  So I decided to dress her as one of my childhood favorites:  Dorothy from the Wizard of Oz.

I used Simplicity Pattern 4024

 

I think it turned out very picture-like, don't you?

 The only trouble I had was in getting my STUPID basting stitch to work; the bobbin stitch was looped so huge that the gathers fell out of the neck as I stitched the band on, and I was NOT taking that neck band off to possibly have the same problem happen again.  So it was a little funny looking in front, but I kind of felt like no one was going to notice but me.  I love it when I'm right.

Here is little miss Too Cool for Halloween in her "Dorty Dress" and "Sbockly Shews."  (Please note the upside down sunglasses.  She put them on herself.) Unfortunately, although I have watched the Wizard of Oz movie with her, she only knows Dorothy as Elmo's goldfish friend, and probably wonders when she's going to see that fish in a blue gingham dress.

In all, a very successful Halloween sewing season.  But I'm nowhere near finished yet.  I have so many projects to do in the next six weeks that I wonder if I'm going to have to start taking crystal meth to finish it all.  I hope not, though, because I really like my teeth.

Home is Where the Heart is.

I never imagined I'd live outside of the state of Alabama.  Not even for a little while.  I vaguely daydreamed of living in other countries one day, but my primary residence would always be Sweet Home Alabama.

While I will always have a place in my heart for Alabama the Beautiful, I am not sorry I moved to South Carolina to be closer to my (then) boyfriend so that we could date more "regularly."   In the six years I've lived here, I've come to really love this state, and in particular Greenville, more than I could have ever imagined.  I know part of that comes from seeing how much my husband loved and appreciated his hometown and home state, but for me, being here with him just felt like home.  So I couldn't be more pleased to offer other people the opportunity to give a playful shout out to their hometowns - by birth or adoption - via this new scarf, now available at the etsy store.

 

How precious is this?!?!  I imagine doing these to represent school pride - orange and purple with a tiger paw button over Clemson?  Garnet and Black with a rooster button over Columbia?  The possibilities are absolutely endless!!!

 

And how precious is this little heart?  I know pink isn't for everyone, so I'm hoping to get some more colors when I can, but for a gal, I just knew I couldn't go wrong with this one! 

 

And not wanting to leave the guys out, I'll gladly send it plain so you can show your whole state pride, until I can find some more manly heart buttons. :-)

Don't forget - Any state, any color combo (that I can find) and any city.  Get yours today for just $25.00 plus shipping!!

Let it snow!!

I have been trying to figure out a way to do some fun reverse applique stuff for sale in the etsy shop; I love, love, love my celebretees, but I'm so out of touch with pop culture that I don't even know who I should try to put on a shirt right now.  Then I had the idea to do a scarf for the winter...and of course the most iconic image I could think of for winter was a snowflake.

I set off on the task of designing my own snowflake.  This is much harder than it sounds.  First of all, when you have limited design skills, it takes forever to do something that I'm sure a better designer could do in a minute.  But I did it and have my own, original snowflake design to sell on the scarves.

This one is the prototype and as such has some flaws here and there.  I've learned a lot about doing this process with fleece and some other possible directions I can go with it, so I'm hoping the next ones are even more awesome than this.  But for a first try, I'm definitely pleased.  It will be on sale by tomorrow at the Etsy store for $18; the future incarnations will be $25.

Do you have a flag?

A couple weekends ago,  a friend contacted me to help her out with a wedding shower she's throwing for her sister-in-law and SIL's fiance.  Since this blog is seriously lacking in "Ink" posts, and I needed a fun graphic project to distract me from life, I jumped at the chance to help her by making some supercute cupcake toppers for the tower she's constructing.

The theme of the shower is a tailgating/stock-the-bar shower, so I felt that school pennants were in high order to decorate the cuppycakes.

Ok, not only do I love, love, love the way the pennants turned out, but can I just say that if you have an iPhone, please go spend $1.99 and download the "Hipstamatic" camera ap rightnow?!?!  It is SO SO SO much fun; you can spend extra money to buy new "films" and "lenses" and "flashes" and if you have the iPhone 4, then it is probably even MORE awesome, but even on my old fashioned phone it has been a joy to play with.  I do have a great love for photography and wish I were more learned in the technicalities of taking photos.  But maybe it's a good thing that I'm not a great photographer, because then the blog would just have to be bigger and include more, because then I'd want to include food, so I could share things like the apple butter I made on Friday.   But I think that maybe it would be a little overboard to have a blog called "With Pen and Ink and Lens and Food."  Yes?

ANYWAY - Back to the cupcake flags:

Here is a photo of all the different options guests can choose from when they pick of up their cupcake of choice.

Although I do not currently have any pre-designed cupcake flags on my etsy shop, I will be happy to create some custom orders for you if you want to request them via the "alchemy" link on etsy.  At least I think that's how it's done.  So if you have a party coming up and are planning to go the cupcake with flags route, but don't find what you're looking for anywhere else, let me know and let's work something out!  I was able to put together this order of 30 toppers for just $25 plus shipping. 

Hm.  Now I want a cupcake.