DIY Harry Potter quilt
Ah, that feeling when you’ve spent $300 — and countless hours of your time — sewing your child a one-of-a-kind Harry Potter quilt … and they quickly toss it aside for the next Christmas gift. Ouch.
Let’s back up, though. I decided back in the fall that I wanted to sew a Harry Potter quilt for our nine-year-old son. He loves Harry Potter and he’s been using the same red-white-and-blue plaid bedding set since he was a year old, so it was certainly time for an upgrade.
I spent ages browsing online for different Harry Potter fabrics and ended up deciding on 12 different ones. Actually, 10 were official Harry Potter fabrics and two were just fabrics that coordinated: red bricks for Platform 9 3/4, and swirly dark clouds to represent Dementors.
- Brown Quidditch at Hogwarts Harry Potter | Camelot Cotton (1/2 yard)
- Hermione Harry Potter (1/2 yard)
- Multi Scenes Harry Potter (1/2 yard)
- Ron Harry Potter (1/2 yard)
- Dark Teal Symbols Harry Potter | Camelot Cotton (1/2 yard)
- Harry | Harry Potter | Camelot Cotton (1/2 yard)
- Hogwarts & Characters Harry Potter | Camelot Cotton (1/2 yard)
- Logo on Black Harry Potter | Camelot Cotton (1/2 yard)
- Logo on White Harry Potter | Camelot Cotton (1/2 yard)
- Red Bricks | Landscape Medley | Elizabeth’s Studio Cotton (1/2 yard)
- Storm Clouds | Timeless Treasures Cotton (1/2 yard)
- White Newspring Harry Potter | Camelot Cotton (1/2 yard)
I like easy math, so I purchased a half-yard of each of the 12 fabrics.
Since a half-yard of fabric is 18” long and 44” wide, this would easily give me 24 quilt squares — two squares cut from each fabric.
After the fabric was washed and dried, I cut two 16” squares from each half-yard.
Then it was just a matter of deciding how to arrange all 24 squares.
I decided to make six 4×4 squares, each with two fabrics, trying to balance the lights and darks as much as possible.
Continue reading in my weekly DIY column, My Handmade Home …
Continue reading in my weekly DIY column, My Handmade Home …
Little boys with long hair
“Mom! That man called me a girl.”
Oh, I’d heard. I’d just hoped he hadn’t.
Balancing the pizza box across his arms, he slipped through the door after I opened it, tinkling the little bells overhead.
He didn’t ask why the nice older man had thought he was a girl. He knew why. He’s nine and a half now and he hasn’t cut his hair since just before his eighth birthday.
He tells me this isn’t the first time it’s happened — being called a girl. A substitute teacher accidentally called him a girl a few weeks earlier but he’d never mentioned it to us at home.
“What did you say?” I asked curiously as he buckled his seatbelt and took back the pizza box, ready to hold it while I drove us home.
“I said ‘Excuse me, Mister [REDACTED]. I’m a boy!’”
I was impressed. The teacher apologized and everybody got on with their day. It wasn’t a big deal.
When I was a kid, I was called a boy on multiple occasions and it was absolutely a big deal. It crushed me.
Read MoreMom’s mental load
I did a bad, bad thing.
Something I swore I wouldn’t do again.
I re-downloaded The Sims.
It doesn’t sound that terrible until I fill you in on the fact that I have a long and tortured on-again/off-again relationship with this computer game.
I started playing the original Sims back in university and fell deeply in love with the way I could design people and houses, right down to the size of each room, the style of the wallpaper and each piece of furniture.
I bought the expansion packs so I could have new outfits and furnishings, and somewhere along the way I upgraded to Sims 2 and started all over again.
I was young and child-free with plenty of free time, so the only issue was that I developed painful hand cramps if I played for too long.
Then I had babies — two under two — and there was barely time to shower, let alone time to meticulously drag and drop tiny digital shrubs into a tiny digital backyard.
Read MoreDIY fur wreath (that won’t scratch your painted door)
When we first moved into our home back in 2011, there was a wreath of faux berries on the front door.
It wasn’t my style so I took it down, and that’s when I realized the terrible truth about front door wreaths: they can wreck your paint job.
We live on top of a very windy hill, so any outdoor decorations need to be extremely secure, otherwise they’ll get blown around and potentially sent crashing through a window.
Our enormous wooden planter for next to the front door? It crashed over dozens of times — sending a thundering echo through the whole house — no matter how much weight we stuck inside the bottom.
DIY memory quilts from loved ones’s clothes
Last year, I started sewing memory quilts for people who had lost someone close to them.
These quilts are a nice way to preserve someone’s favourite items of clothing — T-shirts, dress shirts, ties, nightgowns, sweaters, jeans — in a way that allows their loved ones to still snuggle up with them.
For this particular project, I was asked to make several lap-sized memory quilts from someone’s favourite soft, stretchy nightgowns and sweaters.
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Heather's Handmade Life 