Super Power Sunday

Hi everyone! It’s Cindy here. When you were a kid did you ever watch TV shows like The Adventures of Superman and wish you had super powers like him? I know I did. Of course I really wanted to be Samantha from Bewitched. Just a wiggle of her nose or a blink of her eyes and everything would be better.

We’ve all had someone or somepet in our lives that has suffered from some sort of health problem and wished we could do something to make them better. Here in Blogville there is always somebody in need of our Power of the Paw support. If we had those super powers like Samantha did we could wiggle our noses and make everyone better. Sadly we know that isn’t possible so we do what we can by putting our paws together, saying prayers or sending all the positive vibes we can.

Recently one of Blogville’s residents shared with us about a young girl that has been battling a mysterious health problem. Just like with our pets it can be more upsetting when a child has health problems because it is difficult for them to understand why things aren’t normal. I’m talking about Macey the granddaughter of the author of the Three Little Pugs blog. If you haven’t been following Macey’s story you can go here to read a little about what has been going on.

Macey the Super Girl!

A couple of weeks ago Macey had some scary tests coming up and I wanted to do a little something to help her get through it. Being the crafty person that I am I fired up my sewing machine and created a  cape for Macey to wear whenever she needed some super powers. It’s made of fleece on the outside and the backing is a fun cotton print.

Pow! Zoom! Zap!

I hope the cape helped Macey feel stronger during her tests. The one thing I do know is that she will know that people all around the world are worried about her and hope she feels better soon.

Super M

The cape is in her two favorite colors, purple and pink. It was a challenge sewing the “M” on the cape with the stretchy fleece fabric. I used a tight zigzag satin stitch and had to be careful to make sure it didn’t go too wonky.

Another challenge I had was figuring out the correct size for a 6 year old girl. Of course I used my friend Google to help me. I found a few patterns and put them together to come up with my pattern.

Super Girl with Super Cape

I used Velcro at the neck to allow for easy on and off. As you can see by the above picture it fits her great and even allows for her to grow a bit and still fit her.

Pretty package for a pretty girl

I wrapped the cape in purple and pink and included a funny get well card with a pug on it.

Not sure what they’re giving you…but I want some!
Get well soon!

I enjoyed making the cape for Macey and seeing her smile in her pictures made me smile too. If you don’t already know The Three Little Pugs you should go visit them and say hello. You could also include some encouraging words for Macey as I know her grandmother shares them with her. Get well soon Macey!

Super Macey Cape

 

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Let’s Help Holly!

Hi everyone! Today I’m going to share two events that are happening right now to help out our Blogville friend Holly. So the first question you might have if you don’t already know her is who is Holly? She writes at many blogs but her pet blog is called CreekHiker. Now you might wonder why she needs our help. I will let her tell you in her own words.

On May 8th, my beloved dog Mabel Lou, started showing symptoms of bloat. I raced her to the vet for emergency surgery. It was unsuccessful and I lost my companion and sweet baby. It’s one thing to spend over a grand and get your baby back…it’s another to still have to pay for her cremation. That same weekend, the local bakery where i sell my jewelry burned to the ground! As a struggling artist, these unforeseen events has thrown my precarious finances into turmoil.

As usual Blogville has come together to try to help Holly with those bills.

Mollie & Alfie are hosting an auction. There are lots of great items available. It runs from today through next Tuesday (June 17th) at 1pm UK time. I’ve donated a couple of items to the auction that I will share with you now.

Best Dressed Dogs

The first item is a custom dog bandana in any size. You can see a few examples of them above but there are a couple I haven’t told you about. The first one I did for our auction host Mollie.

Pretty in Pink Mollie in her bandana

It is a custom design to fit Mollie’s personality.

Mollie the Ball Junkie – custom bandana design

The second special bandana design I want to show you is one I did for the now Angel Mable Lou.

Mable Lou in her custom bandana

Holly’s friends from the Rottrover blog had this bandana custom designed for their special friend as a Christsmas present. You need to read their blog to understand the story behind the design.

“Queen Bitch of Everything” really is a term of endearment 😉

You can also read what Holly had to say about how Mabel Lou got her nickname.

These are just a couple of examples of the custom designs I can make for your dog too. You can check out all of the embroideries that are available by hopping on over to my Cindy’s Thread Craft blog where you will find a wide variety of pet related designs that would go great on these bandannas. If you don’t see what you are thinking of for your pup just ask and I will probably be able to make it happen. The bandana is item #12 in the auction.

The next item I’m offering for the auction is a pair of custom designed medium sized plush squeaky dog bones.

Medium Dog Bone Samples

This fun dog toy is about 9″ x 4″. It is made of fleece fabric with machine embroidery embellishment and includes a squeaker inside. These dog bones can be personalized with your pets name or a short message. I have fleece available in a wide variety of colors.

Hafiz loves his squeaky bone!

The dog bones are item #18 in the auction.

The other auction happening right now is one Holly is having on Facebook. Now don’t be intimidated that you “don’t do Facebook” because you can still see what she has for auction (I had my husband, who isn’t on Facebook, see if he can access the links). Just click the link above.

Holly’s Folly Bracelets

Holly is a gifted artist and makes beads that she then crafts into a wide variety of jewelry. Here is what Holly has to say about these items up for auction

 I’m having an inventory reduction sale of my jewelry stash (since I no longer have a venue to sell it!) to raise some funds to pay off the vet bill and cremation cost.

When you get to the main page of the Jewelry Sale just click on the “…See More” link in the first story. That will open the story up to show you links to the different categories of available items and instructions on how to bid on an item. Click on one of the links and then click on the photo to see pictures of all the available items in that category (just hover over the picture to see an arrow to scroll through the pictures).

If you are a Facebook user you can also “Join” the event which will let you receive notices of new items added to the auction. You have to hurry because the jewelry auction is only running through June 13th at 5pm PDT. Now I haven’t asked Holly but I bet if you aren’t a Facebook user and see something in her auction that you really like you could leave a comment on her blog or email her from there (there is a link on her side bar) to place a bid. Just let her know which item you are interested in.

Let’s do what Blogville does best and help a friend in need! Thanks for bidding.

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The Modern Jeans Skirt

Hi everyone it’s Cindy here to tell you about another crafty thing I’ve been up to in the past couple months. A while ago Miss N, a younger member of the knitting and crocheting group I belong to, put out a call to action on Facebook looking for someone that could help her convert some jeans she had to skirts. Miss N is working towards her Doctor of Ministry degree. For her internship this year she is working at a university interfaith chapel where she interacts with people of many faiths. In keeping with the preferences of certain religions Miss N wanted to be able to have some long skirts to wear for work. Other than formal wear there wasn’t much she could find in the stores to fulfill her requirements so she was hoping she could convert a couple pair of jeans to skirts.

Blue Gradient Jeans Skirt (click image for full detail)

If you are of a certain age like I am you might remember making these as a youngster. Back in the seventies it was cool to turn your jeans into skirts. We usually did them short and were able to use the bottom of the legs for the filler piece. Since Miss N wanted the skirts to be long I had to find fabric to fill in the center area.

Jungle Batik Jeans Skirt (click image for full detail)

Miss N came to my home and we looked through my fabric stash to see what would work well. With a little help from Charlie we decided on the two batik fabrics you see above. Now I’ll show you how I transformed a couple pair of jeans to the skirts.

Rip open the inseams

The first thing you have to do is rip open the inseams and the center crotch seam of the pants.

Re-sewn center seam

Then you adjust the front and back center seams so they lay flat and re-sew them.

Create patterns for the inserts

In order to fill the open area I had to make a pattern for the front and the back. I have a large roll of drawing paper that I placed under the legs and then drew a line to mark the edge. If you look close you can see that the paper was folded in half. After I drew the initial line I folded the paper in half and then adjusted the pattern to be the same shape on both halves. I also had to add about a half inch for a seam allowance. I then traced the shapes to the fabric.

Since batik fabric is fairly light weight I decided to add a little heft to the center areas. I used a thin muslin for backing and a very light weight batting and then did some quilting to hold all of it together. The truth is I let my embroidery machine do the quilting.

If you look closely in the picture above you can see the line I drew on the fabric from the patterns I made.

Paisley Quilting

On the light colored skirt I used a paisley style of quilting.

You can see the pattern on the reverse side better. For each paisley I had to re-position the embroidery hoop. There were about 10 on each side. I used a dark blue thread that blended well with the fabric.

For the jungle batik I used a quilt design that had butterflies and flowers and quilted it in a dark green thread.

Butterfly and Flower quilting

I fit each block of quilting together so most of the fabric was quilted.

Inserts cut for skirt

After the quilting was done I cut the front and backs out. Then it was just a matter of pinning them in place and sewing them to the jeans. The final step was to fit and sew the hem. I’m happy to say that Miss N was very excited to get her new skirts.

Walter poses with a skirt

While I don’t have a picture of Miss N in her skirts my super model Walter was more than happy to pose with them for me. I was glad I could help out a friend with this project and didn’t ask for anything in return but Miss N insisted on compensating me and gave me a gift card for one of the eateries where our knitting/crochet group meets. Thanks Miss N I was happy to help you out on this fun project.

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Fashion Friday – It’s for the Dogs!

Hey Otto! This one’s for you! It’s Cindy here to tell you about a new addition to my Etsy shop. This is what some of you have been waiting for. I’ve added custom made dog  bandannas to my Etsy store.

Do you want to be the best dressed dog in your neighborhood? Then send your mom or dad to my shop and have them order you your own bandanna.

Best Dressed Dogs

First you can pick from over 20 different colors of fabrics and then choose an embroidery that suits your personality.

Backyard Security Bandanna for Sarge

You can check out all of the embroideries that are available by hopping on over to my Cindy’s Thread Craft blog where you will find a wide variety of pet related designs that would go great on these bandannas.

Of course you have all seen the “Rescue Paw” embroidery and the most recent addition of the “Backyard Security” embroidery I created for Sarge (shown above). I’ve created another version of that embroidery for all the squirrel hunters out there.

Squirrel Patrol Embroidery

How about a couple of designs for the upcoming holiday season?

Nice Until Proven Naughty

All I Want For Christmas Is You

Get the look that is just right for you by choosing the fabric color that compliments you furs and then choosing the colors in the embroidery that goes well with that color.

Rescue Paw on Red and Pink

Each bandana is double sided with embroidery on one side and printed fabric on the back to make it reversible. I will choose an appropriate backing fabric to coordinate with the bandana. I use high quality quilter’s cottons for these bandanas.

Sizing:

• Small – fits neck size 10″ – 16″
• Medium – fits neck size 15″ – 20″
• Large – fits neck size 18″ – 27″

Large and Small Bandannas

Well what are you waiting for? Grab your humans’ plastic card and head to Cindy’s Thread Craft to order your bandanna now!

Sharp Dressed Dogs!

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Hooking on Hump Day – Storage boxes

Hi everyone it’s Cindy here. I wanted to share a simple project I finished recently. Since I started crocheting I have been accumulating yarn and my stash closet was starting to get messy. I wanted to find some nice boxes that I could use to put the yarn in, but most of them were too high to fit between the shelves. Of course I figured why not just find a pattern to make something instead of buying it? That way I could also make sure it was just the size I needed. I also had a lot of cotton yarn left over that I used to make the granny square pin cushions so I decided to use it for this project. It would also help to use up some of my stash!

Large Crochet Box – green side

I found a pattern by Bernat (which also is the brand of cotton yarn I had) that uses two strands of cotton yarn to make these boxes. Since the Bernat people changed their website I can’t find a link to the pattern or I would include it here.

Large crochet box – blue side

You just use single crochet for all the sides and can even add a handle to the sides. I used one strand of white and one strand of colored yarn for each side.

Large crochet box – bottom view

This box measures about 12″ x 12″ x 11″ and fits perfectly in my stash closet.

If you want you can use a fabric stiffener to make the box stand up better, but when it’s full there is no problem with that.

Much neater with the yarn contained

There used to be a lot of skeins of yarn stuffed between the stacks of fabric, but now most of it fits in my new box. This is a large box and did take a while to complete, but I will probably make another one when I need to contain more yarn.

Small Crochet box

I had so much fun making the big box that I made a smaller one too.

Crochet box keeps sewing tools contained.

When I’m working at my sewing machine there are a lot of little things you use such as scissors, seam rippers, and thread. I used to have a small cardboard box to use, but this looks so much more elegant.

Small Crochet box – just right for sewing tools

Being small this one stands up on its own without any need for stiffener. I find working with cotton yarn to be slow since it doesn’t slip through you fingers very smoothly and especially so with two strands at a time, but I love these boxes and can see making more in the future. After all Bernat came out with another set of purple/turquoise cotton yarns that I had to buy when it was on sale a while ago and of course I didn’t have anything in mind to make with them yet (they are very large skeins too). Making these boxes can be a bit addictive.

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Wordy Wednesday

Hi everyone! Yes, we are alive and well. So sorry for the unexplained absence the past week or so, but I’m here to tell you all about it. Last week was a very busy quilty week for me. Monday and Wednesday were the first meetings for both of the quilt clubs I belong to. I’m now the membership secretary for the Genesee Valley Quilt Club so that means extra work to get ready for the meetings each month. Then on Thursday my mom and I went on a quilting retreat and didn’t get home until late Saturday. We had lots of fun and that is what I’m going to tell you about today.

Our retreat was organized by the Perinton Quilt Guild and was held at Watson Homestead. My mom picked me up Thursday morning and we made the 1 1/2 hour trip south in perfect weather.

Our workroom is under the chapel

We unpacked all our quilting stuff and then headed to our room.

Our room viewed from the work room

Our room

A nice hotel style room, but with no TV. WiFi was available in the common areas so I was able to keep up with reading blogs, but didn’t take much time to comment.

Main dining hall – dressed up for a wedding

Our workroom was large and bright. With only twelve of us there was room for each of us to have our own table as well as some common tables in the middle for us to do our cutting or lay out our projects.

View of workroom – Claire lays out her project

Right away my mom and I, who had never been on one of these retreats before, noticed an unusual picture posted at both ends of the room.

The ladies call him Lance

The ladies said that “Lance” comes with them on every retreat. I believe he is from an Abercrombie and Fitch bag. We knew right then that this weekend was going to be fun.

Most of the ladies brought more than one project. I started out by working on the quilting for the king sized quilt I had basted way too long ago.

My work space

I can’t remember when the last time was that I did some quilting on this project, but I hit a wall when I was having problems with the fabric bunching up. The first thing I had to do was pick out some of the last bit I had stitched and start over. I’m happy to say that I was able to complete quilting the parts I wanted to and now feel better about keeping it going.

A little working and a little chatting

Everyone had a great time working on their projects and getting to know each other a little better.

Mary W. worked on many different projects

One of my favorite projects was one that Patty P. worked on.

Patty P says her brothers aren’t really devils.

In addition to lots of quilting and chatting we also had some great catered meals. We were very lucky on Friday night and were treated to a delicious salmon dinner with a side of macaroni and cheese that was incredibly creamy.

Salmon, Macaroni & Cheese and Steamed Veggies

Apparently salmon is not a common meal to have, but the caterer had an earlier event where he served the salmon and there were far fewer attendees than he was told. We were the lucky recipients of this great left over meal. To top that meal off we also had a scrumptious dessert.

Chocolate Mousse

All our meals were great if not quite as special as the salmon with mousse.

On our last day there I worked on piecing the backing for the flannel quilt top I finished a while ago. In addition to our work room there was another smaller room that had large blank walls. I came prepared with the batting, quilt top, painters tape and 505 spray baste in the hopes I would have a place to baste all the parts together.

Basted Flannel Quilt

I didn’t take pictures of the process, but first I taped the backing with wrong side facing out to the wall. Then I sprayed the backing with the adhesive. The next step is to stick the batting to the backing. Of course it isn’t that simple, but for the sake of finishing this post lets just say it went on smoothly. The last step is to spray the batting and then stick the quilt top to it. I was jumping for joy to get this done. At home I don’t have a wall tall enough to do this so the only alternative is to pin the backing to the floor and do the same process on my hands and knees. This is so much easier!

As you saw above there was a wedding held at the center Saturday evening. Claire and I decided to surprise the happy couple with a little gift and made a couple of Christmas placemats for them.

Christmas Placemat for the Newlyweds

My mom did the sewing and I did the quilting. We never found the  bride or groom, but were able to give the gift to the brides father and hope the youngsters like them.

For our first ever quilt retreat we had a great time and I have plans on going next year too. I think Claire will join me if it fits her schedule too. Thanks to Sue P-T for organizing the retreat and thanks to all the other ladies for helping my mom and I to have such a fun time.

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Etsy Excitement

Continuing on the crafty and alliterative theme (for the blog titles) I thought I would tell you about a few of my recent orders from my Etsy shop. In case you didn’t know I had an Etsy shop I will let you know that I sell custom and ready made pet toys and various bags from tote bags to clutch style. All of my creations are embellished with machine embroidery to personalize it for the buyer. So without further ado here are a few of the recent purchases made from my shop.

First up is an order I received a couple of months ago from my blogging friend Samantha at The Quilting Doberman. As we get older so do our parents and when it comes to birthday and holiday presents we struggle with what to get them because it seems like they already have everything they need. Well Sam had the great idea to get her mom’s pets some special toys and ordered them from me.

Her mom has two mini Australian Shepherds and two cats so the dogs received personalized small squeaky bones and the cats got the mouse and clown fish catnip toys.

Sam had me ship them directly to her mom and since it was a birthday gift I wrapped them up and added a little card.

Gypsy quickly claimed both dog toys for herself and even enjoyed using one of the bones for a pillow. What a cutie she is.

The next order I want to tell you about is a clutch style bag. After a few conversations via email with the buyer she settled on a pink micro suede clutch with an “I Love My Dachshund” embroidered on it.

The buyer is a knitter and told me that her dachshund GingerSue liked to steal her balls of yarn like a cat and play with them so I picked a special fabric for the lining.

The embroidery on the bag turned out perfect. If you are interested there are a variety of puppy and kitty breeds of similar embroideries that can be embroidered on any type of bag. You can check them out at the Embroidery Library where I get most of my embroidery files. The buyer also let me know that she was buying this bag as a birthday gift to herself so when I packaged it up I added a few special things.

I had some left over yarn from a skein so I used it for a bow and added a birthday card. I also included a skein of Lion Brand Bonbon yarn as an extra treat. After the order was delivered I received a lovely message from her that read in part:

My beautiful doxie bag and surprise contents arrived. I picked it up at my apartment clubhouse yesterday afternoon and immediately took it with me to my knitting group. Another knitter who have a precious doxie too immediately had tears pop into her eyes. I am sharing your Etsy link with my galfriends.

It’s notes like this that make the work so fun.

The last order is the one I received a week before I had to finish the crochet baby blanket and it was a big order. The buyer ordered 7 different custom dog bones in all three sizes that I make.

The buyer did a great job communicating her choices for the order and let me know what color, size and embroidery she wanted on each toy. There are three large and two each of the medium and small bones. I really wonder what “Itchy Richie” thought of his bone. Do you think he used it to scratch his back? 😀

As you can see in addition to the baby blanket and bandannas I have been keeping busy with other crafty things. A couple people wanted to know if I sold the bandannas in my shop. So far I haven’t added them, but would be curious to know if there is a genuine interest among my readers.  I have a few cute embroideries that I think would look great on a bandanna like the ones you can view here (check out the “Kisses” and “Queen/King of the Dog Park” embroideries). You might remember that I also embroidered a bandanna for Millie with a cool “Rescue” tattoo style embroidery. I could make the bandannas in almost any color you would like.

The price would vary by size, but they would probably start at around $17. Let me know what you think. If there is enough interest I will add a custom item in my shop. Thanks for visiting and checking out my craftiness.

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Birthday Bandannas

I thought I would continue on a crafting theme this week and show you another project I completed recently.  First I want to thank everyone for the compliments on my baby blanket. The baby is due in mid-October and hopefully I can get a picture of the baby with the blanket after then.

To answer Madi’s mom Cecilia’s question I might guess that it took me about 100 hours to complete the blanket, but that is only a wild guess. It took a long time, but some of that was figuring out the pattern and some of it was wrestling with the yarn. Do any of you other hookers (or knitters) have a problem with your yarn turning into a snotty mess when you pull from the center? Sometimes it goes smoothly, but it seemed that when I was in a hurry that purple yarn would just become a big tangle. Oh well, hopefully things will go better next time.

Now on to today’s subject. A couple of weeks before the baby shower there was a surprise birthday party for the father to be. They said that gifts weren’t necessary but I thought I would make something special for him and his four legged family members. The birthday boy is a graduate of the University of Texas and a big sports fan so I decided to make a couple of bandannas for their two dogs so he could show his school pride while walking them. Currently they are living in Ithaca, NY where Cornell University is which just happens to be the birthday boys wife’s alma mater.

 

I started by digitizing the Texas logo and stitched it out on black fabric.  Joann’s sells logo fabric for many colleges, but I couldn’t buy any for Texas locally. Lucky for me just before I wanted to start working these they were having a sale on the fabric and also had free shipping so I picked up some of both the styles of Texas fabric (I also got some West Virginia University fabric – my alma mater – no sense in wasting a good sale).

 

Above you can see the back of the bandanna. Since the bandannas have embroidery on them I like to line the back so it can’t catch on anything.  I was really glad I got the Texas fabric because the orange color is not what I thought it was. With the fabric as my guide I was able to match the thread for my embroidery with the fabric.

 

My original plan was to make two of the same style, but while I was cutting the stabilizer from the back of one of the embroideries I nicked the black fabric. I put my thinking cap on and decided to trim the black to remove the cut part and then add the border shown above. The fabric had the perfect pattern to make a border and I really love the way it turned out.

These colors look great against my furs.

I haven’t received any pictures of the birthday boy’s dogs with the bandannas, but before I wrapped them I had Millie and Walter model them.

 

Does this bandanna make my head look small?

Both of the recipient dogs are a little bigger than my two so the bandannas might look slightly big for them, but I think the colors look great on my two.

Now my plan was to just make these two bandannas, but Charlie, being an alumni of Cornell too, insisted that I make at least one Cornell bandanna. “After all,” he said, “they live in the town where the school is and the birthday boy’s wife is an alumni so it is only right.” So it was back to the computer to work on digitizing a Cornell logo. I didn’t want to just use the big C as I thought that would be too boring so I picked one with the Big Red Bear on it.

 

It took a few tries and there was still a little problem with the stitch out, but for a dog bandanna I think it turned out very well. Here is Walter modeling that one.

Hey mom, dad says you need to make one of these for us too.

Unfortunately being a hoity-toity Ivy League school logo fabric is not available for Cornell so I settled on red for the backing. Someday I will make Cornell and WVU bandannas for our pups to wear too. Needless to say the birthday boy was surprised and pleased with the unique gift. I hope to get pictures of his dogs wearing them someday and when I do I will share them with all of you.

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