The hodge-podgiest of crafts (that actually turned out really well)
See the full tutorial in my weekly DIY column, My Handmade Home.
(Seriously, it turned out really awesome. Let’s hear it for projects made from crap you already have in the house!)
There once was a child who swallowed a screw
He confessed right after breakfast, as I was busy trying to get all of us out the door. His guilty expression gave him away.
I stopped in the middle of styling my daughter’s hair and asked him to repeat himself. “You ate what?!”
“I ate a screw.”
Life is never dull with young children, except I wish it wasn’t quite as exciting as a four-year-old swallowing a hunk of metal.
I put down the hairbrush, knelt at his level, and started firing questions at him. He couldn’t tell me when he’d swallowed it. He said it happened when I was at Zumba and Daddy was working, which was clearly not true because he’s never home alone.
Then he told me it happened “last week.” When I pushed him again, he said “maybe Sunday?”
Four-year-olds have no sense of time, which is frustrating when their stomach might be a ticking time bomb.
My journalistic instincts took over and I started asking if it had been dark out or light out. Had it happened at naptime or after bedtime? Where did he get the screw? How big was the screw? Oh yeah, and WHY WOULD YOU SWALLOW A SCREW, CHILD?!
The only details I managed to get were that he’d taken apart “a wittle green car,” and eaten one of its screws.
We were about to head to our family doctor for flu shots, so it was a pretty well-timed confession.
Twenty minutes later, we were heading straight to the hospital with a typed X-ray requisition. In the description, it simply said “Swallowed screw.” It was almost funny. Almost.
We’re no stranger to ER visits, especially with our eldest. When he was two, he pulled his dresser down onto himself and wound up with a black eye (yes, it’s since been bolted to the wall).
When he was three, he opened up a toy and gnawed the coating off a couple of batteries. (WHAT?!)
Twice in the last few months, he has stuffed a LEGO up his nose — the same damn piece, both times!
We were taken straight into the X-ray room, and Dexter quite enjoyed the whole process. The tech was very gentle, and kept making him laugh as he stretched out on the table so she could “take a picture of his tummy.” A few minutes later, he was hopping back down and getting stickers to share with Charlotte.
The whole experience was far too pleasant. Is it wrong that I wanted someone to lecture him about the danger of swallowing non-food items? He certainly wasn’t listening to me. Where was the stern healthcare professional who would scare him straight?!
In the end, the X-ray didn’t show any screws. He’d either already “passed” the screw, or it was too tiny to be seen in the X-ray, they told us. My husband was convinced he’d made up the whole story, but I’d pulled out enough details that I believed him.
As punishment, we took away his wooden train set for a week. He begged us every day to give it back, and we stuck to the same line: “You can’t have any toys in your room until you learn that it’s dangerous to put things in your nose or mouth.” I also threw in “Screws are not for eating!” a few times, which felt … weird.
A few days later, I was putting away his clean laundry and found conclusive evidence: a little green car (possibly from a Happy Meal) missing a front axle. A microscopic screw lay next to it on the carpet, and there was a gap where a second screw should go. Where’s my CSI vest? I’m ready.
Triumphantly, I presented Exhibit A to my husband. Our son was telling the truth! We’re not raising a liar, but we are certainly raising someone with questionable judgement.
All the chevron in the world
My mother-in-law is a fantastic quilter. She measures twice, cuts every precisely, irons everything, and spends months hand-quilting over a frame.
I am totally not that kind of quilter.
I started making little quilts when I was pregnant with my son, mostly because I love to pick out different fabric combinations. I don’t use patterns, I never do anything complicated, and I do everything on my sewing machine, so I guess that makes me a Cheaty McQuilter, but that’s fine.
I’m a firm believer that anyone with basic sewing skills can make a quilt, because it’s essentially just sewing a bunch of little pieces together to make one big piece.
Bigger pieces of fabric = less work, and smaller pieces of fabric = more work. It doesn’t have to involve cutting flower petal shapes and following a complicated design.
When we moved our two-year-old daughter to her big-girl bed, I couldn’t find any bedding that I liked. I decided it was time to make my first “big” quilt — i.e. something bigger than crib-sized or lap-sized.
So if you’re like me, and like the idea of quilting but not so much the measuring the repeated ironing?
Here’s how I made a simple twin-sized quilt in four afternoons …
I started by cutting out about a zillion (well, 12) 4” by 4” squares from 10 different fabrics, for a total of 120 squares.
At this point, I had no idea how many I would actually need. If you’re good at math, you could work out exactly how many squares you’d need on a piece of paper. But I spent most of Grade 4 math in tears, so I prefer to skip the calculations and just wing it.
I took my 120 squares and began arranging them on the floor in cubes of four. After playing around with it, I decided it would be best to have four rows of seven cubes each, and kept mumbling “4 x 7 = 28” to myself.
Once I was happy with the look of my 28 cubes, I carefully took them — one at a time — over to the sewing machine and stitched them together. Then I’d replace the cube in the arrangement, and take another one over to the machine.
After the 28 cubes were sewn, I cut short strips of bright pink fabric and sewed them to the bottoms of each cube. For the cubes at the top of the quilt, I also sewed strips to the top — giving everything a nice border. Then I sewed the cubes together so I had four long rows — each with seven cubes.
I cut long strips of fabric and sewed those to the edges of each row, so the “grid” of bright pink fabric was making a frame around all of the cubes. Then I sewed all four rows together, and it was really starting to look like a quilt!
I spread the quilt top out on the floor and decided it was definitely too narrow — and a little too short — to fit on a twin-sized bed.
This is where “planning” and “foresight” would have come in handy, I suppose. So I cut out some large rectangles of fabric, because I was done with piecing together tiny squares. I sewed the rectangles onto the main part of the quilt top, to make it large enough to cover a twin mattress.
It was time to start assembling the quilt! I spread out a big piece of plain aqua fabric as the backing (pretty side down), then a piece of cotton batting, and then the quilt top (pretty side up) to make a “quilt sandwich.”
I trimmed around the edges, leaving about half an inch of backing and batting, and pinned everything together to keep it in place.
Machine-quilting is much faster than hand-quilting on a frame, but it’s also a pain because the batting is making it fat and puffy. You can sew around each cube, down the edges, anything you want — just enough to keep the quilt layers together, and give it that soft quilt-y feeling.
I put the quilt aside at this point, and turned my attention to the special chevron-inspired trim I wanted to try. I grabbed my unused fabric squares (and my leftover fabric) and cut out a bunch of squares that were roughly 3” x 3” — don’t measure or anything, because they don’t have to be exact.
I folded a square into a triangle, and then folded the triangle in half to hide the raw edges of the fabric. Then I ironed it, tossed it in a pile, and grabbed the next square until I’d made approximately 4,000 triangles (well, 70).
To finish off the edges of the quilt, I folded the edge of the quilt top underneath by half an inch, folded the backing underneath by half an inch, slipped the flat part of the triangle inside, and secured it with a pin (or three). This neatly sealed up the “quilt sandwich,” and it was faster than doing traditional binding or a ruffle.
Our two-year-old daughter is thrilled with her big-girl bed — and her new quilt — and it’s been satisfying to admire it every time I tuck her in.
It’s certainly not as picture-perfect — or flawless — as one of my mother-in-law’s crisp quilts, but it was made with love, finger-pricks, and a lifetime supply of chevron.
Don’t forget to pin this post for later!
Hello, my name is "Mother."
Please excuse me for a second. I need to find my gingham dress and pinafore, because my four-year-old son has taken to calling me “Mother.”
No longer “Mom” or “Mommy.” I am simply MOTHER.
It all started because we read a chapter of a book together every night, once C is tucked into bed. We started with The Boxcar Children and now we’re working our way through Beverley Cleary’s length Ramona series. Ramona says “Mother,” and he liked the sound of it.
So this is what I hear, 10,000 times a day …
- “I love you, Mother.”
- “I’m really sorry, Mother.”
- “Thank you, Mother!”
- “Oh, Mother!”
Five chilly thoughts on a dreary (snowy) Monday
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| The view from my basement office. The lights are off, and it is quite dark and gloomy down here today. |
- It is SNOWING today in Nova Scotia, for the first time of the season. It’s a total rip-off, though, because it’s a wet, disgusting snow-rain. I believe the first snow of the year should be a fluffy sprinkling of pre-Christmas excitement, not glorified RAIN.
- It’s also cold. I bought the kids new hats and mittens this morning, because … ugh. Winter. It’s coming.
- I actually don’t hate winter, exactly. I just hate that I haven’t found my favourite leather gloves. I bet you $20 they are buried in a coat pocket somewhere, it’s just a matter of which coat …
- My main problem with winter — my only REAL problem — is the driving conditions it brings. I am a terrible wiener of a driver in snow, and I get nervous worrying about Darling Husband driving in the snow.
- Although … I just remembered hot chocolate, so … I might have to run upstairs and make some before my next interview!
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Heather's Handmade Life 