Embrace your inner librarian! Wear cat glasses and a lot of wool cardigans! Above all, alphabetize!
I painted this bookcase for a school library to (loosely) organize paperback picture books, but I think it would be fun to have in a kid’s room. I used precut cardboard stencils and leftover paint from other projects. The bookcase was leftover, too, and languishing in the basement. I set the bookcase on the ground for browsing, but I think the stencils would work well vertically, too.
Welcome, Captain Wonderpaws! This is our 3-month-old kitten, and no, I didn’t name him. (That would be my comic-loving, crimefighting kids.)
But I did make him some new digs! My husband jigsawed a piece out of a wine crate, and I painted the inside orange and sewed a little cushion (with fab fabric from Jessica Jone’s Outside Oslo collection). Despite his superhero name, Wonderpaw’s a shy guy, so this photo was the best I could do.
A red zipper! And a side view of the crate.
These fabric eggs–ok, in this case, lumpen footballs–come from a pattern posted by retro mama. Mind you, her eggy creations aren’t in the least lumpen, and she seems to have mastered the ladder stitch (that maddening little stitch!).
(I like these house ornaments on retro mama, too. Could imagine making a more disheveled version myself.)
If you have some fabric scraps, leftover cotton or polyfill, this is a fun, quick project with an upside: no endless egg salad.
Happy chocolate bunnies and matzo ball soup, everyone!
I am so excited to have discovered the lovely online magazine petite purls (thanks to the oliver + s blog). It is a treasure trove of free knitting patterns for kids with a few sewing patterns. Meg, I thought these mittens would be a great use for your upcycled sweaters. I made some felt mittens for Betty using a similar pattern that I painstakingly resized for her little hands from a pattern for adult fleece mittens. This pattern looks much easier! I might add a soft cotton lining if I made these in wool–just tuck the lining inside the mittens and bind the tops together. I love the ’70s style racing stripes.
This no-knit shortcut to making mittens is so preposterously easy (and somehow ridiculous) that it makes me giddy. To prep, toss an old sweater into the hot cycle of your washing machine and shrink it to kid-size. The finished cuffs of the sweater sleeves make excellent cuffs for mittens.
Constructing the mittens takes about 10 minutes. First, I turned the sweater sleeves inside out and lay them flat, using the existing sleeve seam. I traced my hand with pencil and sewed around the top and thumb. Turned right side out and that’s it: new stripey mitts!
This was my first foray with felted sweater wool–I’d like to collect enough sweaters to make a blanket, like this one from the Better Homes and Gardens blog.
homemadecity.com 