Wee Wonderfuls

Easter Togs

These are some of my favorite vintage kid's clothes finds. I keep them hanging up in my craft room for inspiration. It just dawned on me that they're all perfect Easter outfits!

The bunny and carrot smocking on this top is awesome!

I love this sweet dress so much. And it's just Oscar's size!

This is my favorite little baby cardigan. Little lamb intarsia done in super fuzzy soft angora (?) or something. The lamb designs are so dense at first I thought this was a little wool sweater that had been accidentally washed and shrunk up. But I don't think that's the case. It must be a larger guage yarn knit on tiny needles? It is still a mystery to me. I've tried a few times to recreate the effect and it's never come out quite right. Maybe because I stink at intarsia/fair isle knitting!

Strip Piecing

The first baby girl is being born into our family this May so I was enlisted to make a baby quilt to send to my cousin and his wife. The colors they wanted were lavender, greens and pinks. I decided to use another pattern they gave us in my FunQuilts class. This one is called Marquee and uses strip piecing to make the striped bands around the squares. I've been really wanting to try this technique.

Now my mother never liked the color purple, and nature or nurture I seem to have followed her lead in this. I really LOVE the fabric I found for the center squares but when this many pastels get together I don't seem to be any good at judging what's going on. I'm hoping it's doing more of a Kaffe Fassett sort of thing than a sugar headache sort of thing.

I was able to get a huge chunk of the work done out at my parents' this weekend. The strip piecing is pretty cool. It goes really fast after you get those strips sewn together and then cut up. I set up my old sewing machine at their place and with Oscar being entertained by Grandma and Grandpa I was able to sew away for hours while getting to watch him play. ideal! I told my parents all they need is high speed internet and we're moving in!

yippie!

Look who came in the mail today...

Pippy! One of Claire's fabulous little kittens. She is so wonderful. Her little expression and her bright red jumper and her soft soft fuzzy hair..I'm a smitten kitten! I've put her in with all of Oscar's trucks and balls in an attempt to lure him to her. So far all attempts at introducing dolls to him have had little success. I'm glad to see Buttercup has made it there safely and is basking in the hot Australia sun. At least someone from the Lang household is enjoying some warm weather!

And look what else... a pear!

I've been in love with these pears since the moment I saw them. I kept going back to them and showing them to Tim. me - look how cute. tim - yes very cute. me - but look how CUTE. look at the little o mouth. Tim - yes very cute. Now I have one in my house and I'm going to pester him all day long with her.

Thank you Claire!!

japanese softies

Ice Cream Headache

Bear's Kitchen

DaisyPond

atelier mi*mi

curtas

(curtas = shortness. I've learned at least that much Portugese from reading Rosa's site everyday!)

via Kelly's cool new weblog buzzville... great kawaii links. My favorites are decole (below) and artist Toshiyuki Fukuda.

I wish this lily's rooster bag was my Easter basket!

Very cool embroidered paper towels by artist Kathryn Spence via lj gal cmdean.

And here are some shrinky dink pins I made to send out with the squirrel pincushion.

Catch Up

I feel so behind on my posting lately. I've got all sorts of things I've been wanting to write about and I keep getting sidetracked. I'll start with the mail. I wasn't getting any mail for weeks and weeks. So depressing. Then last week almost everything from the outstanding trades I had with people came in a windfall. Almost all on the same day! Now again, mail drought. I have suspicions about my mail carrier.

From hopefully the first of many trades with Angry Chicken Amy...bits of kimono and obi fabric, some of her hand dyed fabric (!), a frog closure and a cute little notebook with graph paper - perfect for quilt designing. Thanks Amy! And thanks for the Oscar music - it's great!

From the vintage clothing trades...

From Carolee a very cool "wee" journal she made for me and some great ribbons. Thank you Carolee, I love it! And you'll be happy to know it has been mussed. I jumped in and started making crafty to-do lists.

From Chrissy... awesome bright beautiful fq's that I'm dying to use, a very cool embroidered bookmark that is now up on my inspiration board, ric-rac, ribbon, kogepan and a cream puff eraser! So good! Thank you Chrissy :) And I'm so happy to hear you took that clutch to Sin City. It wasn't seeing much action around here.

From Andrea...a cute little cafe pupu notebook, polka dot fabric and buttons and some cool vintage postcards. Thanks Andrea!

Also in the mail, a surprise from Carolyn. Thanks Carolyn - what a great book! And I love my mix CD :)

 

And some neat Fairytale Calendars from Amanda Woodward Design. Her photos are better than mine would be. Thanks!

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What else is new and exciting. Well, let's see. It's snowing! And I have a horrible cold. Neither new or exciting. It's around this time every year that I start thinking about moving back to Texas. Hopefully more catching up tomorrow...

hop hop hoppity hop

Bunnies for sale! phew...I was overambitious. I wanted to make some bunnies for Easter and wanted to get them up on the auction in plenty of time for the holiday. I got carried away and made 8 of them! (#8 is still on the craft table in progress). Here are the others. I'm going to be putting them up on the auction today and tomorrow.

L to R, Fred, Daisy and Blossom

Clover and Amaryllis

Petal and Tulip

Bunnies were all made with thrifted felted sweaters and vintage fabrics. They all have button eyes except for Tulip whose eyes are felt. I can replace button eyes with felt ones for any babies who like to eat button eyes.

Thank you Aunt Katie and Rich for helping out with Oscar while the bunny factory was up and running!

shrinky dink pins

I was inspired by Craftlog to buy some shrinky dinks at the hobby store to play with. I was going to make some buttons to go out with my orders. Instead I got sidetracked by making fancy pinheads. After trying to melt the shrinky dink on top of a pinhead I realized, duh, you can stick a flat headed pin *through* the colored, cut out shrinky dink shapes and then put it in the oven together and voila! So fun! I'm excited to have a project to work on in the kitchen while Oscar is poking at his food. I'm going to send some out with each of the pincushion auctions that are ending today.

And here's a new lily pad pincushion I made.

felt for felt

Camilla and I had ourselves a little felt swap. I sent her one of my felt flower pincushions and she sent me one of her cool felt flower pins (click on shop). She also sent me 2 postcards of her amazing artwork and this very cool fabric square with an iron-on transfer she made. Look at those guys! Aren't they awesome! I'm envisioning a log-cabin quilted pillow with these guys as the center square. I've been wanting to try out that pattern and a pillow seems so perfect for these guys. That way they can sit on the sofa with me and watch Super Nanny!

suwappu

The japanese-english dictionary online says that suwappu = swap so I thought it was the perfect title. Jen in Tokyo and I did another fabric swap. I sent her FunQuilts fabrics and she sent me some fabrics I picked out from Cotton Bow-wow. (eek - Jen, I just clicked over there and saw that the new Nani Iro stuff is out! So pretty!)

Here are the fabrics from Cotton Bowwow...quarter meters of these...

A half meter of this neat roadway fabric. I'm thinking Oscar's room is going to soon need a "big boy" redesign and this would look so cool hanging on the wall.

And a half meter of Lisa and Gaspard fabric!! We're so excited about this. We have all the Lisa and Gaspard books. We just love them!

Jen also threw in this book for me because she thought I'd like it. "Palm Sized Softies" Of course I LOVE it! I'll have to make one of these up for Emily. Although bigger than palm sized because that's more like "snack size" to a baby.

Then she was sneaky and sent off a second package with more goodies! Sashiko thread, wood buttons, a couple of the good zippers, cute little orange butterfly appliques and two awesome tenugui (right jen?) pieces. Good thing I've already got your second package started.... speaking of which I have to get back to those bunnies!

Thanks for the suwappu Jen!!