Have you seen this?

Amazing Mae show a way to make a cute toddlersized skirt out of a napkin.
Such another great way to get rid of all those scraps of fabric lying around!



*click here for the whole tutorial*

Have I told you lately that I hate you?

Not you, dear reader. Never you.

But you! YOU! YOU crappy scrappy fabric. It took me a few days to transform a bag full of IKEA fabricscraps into 400 perfect 6" squares. I think it was around square number 120 that the hatin' begun.
Thank the goddess for my good old rotarycutter otherwise I would have stopped then.




The result was rewarding though: 400 squares of heavy quality fabric. Too heavy for a supple bedquilt but perfect for the kind of quilt that I need: small, easy to wash and extremely cheap. Quilts that can withstand two leaky children, a hairy dog and two drooling but semi-hairless cats.
I think these will. They still need backing, binding and quilting but I'm really looking forward to doing that.
I was a bit worried that the big bold designs would disappear after the cutting and I although I tend to consider myself pretty knowledgeable when it comes to designing and colours I couldn't imagine how all those different squares could fit together.
So for the yellow/red/orange one I decided to just use random simple squares in order to make the most of the print on the fabric.
For the blue one I decided to see if I could work with a bit more structure. I made nine identical blocks of nine squares each. Then I cut the blocks in four and sewed the four blocks together in a shifted order. It gave the quilt a nice "order in the chaos" pattern. I like it.

I started hoarding ikeascraps so I could see if quilting really is as cool as I though it would be. So far, it isn't. It is waaaaay cooler!



I think that from now on I will be making this small quilts everytime I need a present. They are fast and easy to make (except for the cutting, but that is what the precut charmpacks are made for, baby!) and the small size is perfect as a playblanket, footwarmer, lapquilt, wallhanger, etc.

By the way, it is blissfully silent here. Officeman (and again: he specificly asked that I call him officeman online) is away for a two days and both children are asleep. I should go to bed but I just can't pull myself away from the washinmachine in which a silk indio didymos is rinsing after a shoking ping aciddyebath.

Oh well, I better go and leave the rinsing for tomorrow. Goodnight!

How now nekkid pfau

Remember how I told you about the wrap I love most of all: pfau?

I managed to get my hands on another one of those pretty birds and to make it into the ultimate summerwrap I decided to play around!

Ingrediënts:

One purple didymos pfau. Washed and not dried:


A big plastic, heatresistant tub (I choose one that has a lid so the heat and fumes stay inside), a smooth wooden spoon, rubber gloves and some dylon color remover. The tub is placed on a woolen blanket so it will stay warm as long as possible.



I dumped in two buckets of boiling water, stirred in the color remover, said a prayer or two and then put in pfau.
Immediatly the color started to change:



It went from purple to a soft lilac in a couple of minutes.









After half an hour it had turned to grey:



The water slowly went murky and grey as the wrap got lighter and lighter...

After a while there didn't seem to be much change anymore so I put pfau in a bucket, dumped out the water and started to warm a new batch of water with a new pack of color removing.
While in the bucket pfau changed from grey to beige, probably because the grey waterresidue could drip out.




It stood for an hour more in the fresh solution and by then it was as light as I think it can get. I took it out, washed it, dryed it and wrapped it. I love it, it's perfect for summer!







It lost about half an inch in width but that stretched up after wearing it. It is allready as supple and soft as my old pfau, stripping it hasn't changed the texture at all.

Summer, here we come!