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Tag Archives: sewing

I make! Sharpie tie dye edition (2)

Remember this from last week?  It’s ok if you don’t.  There has been an abnormal amount of posts between then and now.

Last week, we played with permanent markers and isopropyl alcohol and managed to tie dye some cloth.  Not t-shirts.  Because can’t imagine the girls wearing tie dye t-shirts on a regular basis.  And thus, we transformed those very colorful pieces of cloth into these!

The stuffed milk carton is a cell phone charm, which is attached to a cell phone, which is in the bag.

This one ended up being sewn by another counselor-like person because the kiddo wasn't able to make it.

And this one is mine, which was the sample.

You’ll note that there were four pieces of cloth from last time and only three bags shown.  That’s because one of the girls suffered a quite a few technical difficulties and wasn’t quite able to finish her bag.  But instead of opting to let me whip it up for her, she decided she would  finish it on her own as she was starting to feel more comfortable with the sewing machine toward the end.  Good for her.

I had the girls follow Tally’s instructions for her lined dice bags and you can find a well-written tutorial on her site.  The lining we used was more of the same cloth we had tie dyed (but not dyed, of course).  As for mine, I made a couple of modifications. But first, a story.

I have been thinking about starting Yaris on clicker training (or really just training her in general).  I’ve been terribly lax about her education and I don’t really want her to grow up to be a heathen.  I haven’t really had the time to train her like I had with Choco.  So, while Yaris is quite smart, she’s wasting all that smart on things like getting people to play with her or how to best dig a trench in the backyard (she actually hasn’t dug any trenches in a long time).  Well, it’s time to change that, but in order to entice her to learn new things, I need a bag of treats.  The treats I can handle.  I make my own training treats and I’ll probably post the recipe sometime in the future.  The bag part wasn’t working.  They were too expensive for what I wanted to do, or too ugly, or too large, or too small, or had too many extra things I didn’t want…it just wasn’t what I was looking for.  So, I made my own.

Enter my modification(s):

It actually isn’t much of a modification.  I just made two smaller tubes of cloth, flipped them inside out, and then sewed them in at step 7 from the tutorial.  Actually, that’s what I had meant to do but I had forgotten until I had almost finished.  Good thing I am friends with the seam ripper.  I have two loops because I was uncertain about weight distribution when I was sewing this up.  With two loops, I can either hook the carabiner through both loops or just one depending on how many treats are in the bag.  And a carabiner works for me because I am almost always wearing a belt.  You can take a look at all the other treat bags on the market for ideas if you don’t want a carabiner.

The other modification was also minor.  I recently came into possession of a Crop-a-dile eyelet and punch setter and I wanted to try it out.  So in place of the buttonhole for the ribbon, I used two 3/16″ eyelets side by side.  I don’t have a picture of it, sorry.  It works just fine in case you can’t figure out how to use your buttonhole foot on your sewing machine.  You may want to put an extra liner where the eyelets are though.  Depending on how loose a weave your cloth is, it may rip and fray.

So, I am now in possession of one very colorful treat bag.  I kind of matches Yaris’ personality and I’m sure it’ll make all the other dogs jealous.  I’m sure.

Moar laundry bags (2010)

Continuing the presentation of secretive summer sewing…

Twenty ten was a hard year for me in terms of getting these laundry bags out.  I was ridiculously late in doing so.  Only two of the five seniors got their bags before they left for school.  It was just a mess of things kept happening one after another.  Pipe burst and flooded a good portion of the house, insurance company took their sweet time getting people to fix things up so there was just no room to make this stuff, work was crazy, I ended up going to Egypt for about three weeks for work at one point…the list goes on.

When I got back from Egypt (it was in the summer, not a fun time to go to Egypt), it was abundantly clear to me that I would not be able to finish all of them before school started.  What’s more, is that four of them were going to semester based universities, instead of quarter, which meant they’d all be leaving in August.  Even less time for me to work on the bags.  So, I gave them out as I completed the bags and asked them to send pictures to me of them inside them.

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Cow!

First up was the cow.  I made this one for one of my girls whom I’d seen grow up from jr. high.  I made the cow first because the recipient was the last to leave of the semester people and I had a clear idea of how I wanted this bag to look.  This one was pretty easy to make and went pretty smoothly.  I rather liked it.  She got a cow because of her stuffed animal cow she brought with her to a few of the conferences we attended.

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Bashful turtle!

Second was the bashful turtle.  Only his tail stuck out.  I had a clear idea of how this one should look too, so I made this one next.  I had to mail it to the recipient though.  She very nicely obliged my request to send me pictures of her inside her laundry bag.  She got a turtle because she wanted turtles on the pillow that we were making one time as our Friday night craft.  We…never finished the pillows.

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Dignified camel.

Then came the camel.  The kid just reminded me of a camel.  So…I made him a camel.  He doesn’t understand why I think he looks like a camel.  Anyway, he was the only one going to a school on the quarter system, so I knew I could get this one out in time.  It was also the last one I had a really clear mental image of how it should look.  I had to revise the eyes a few times (it looked a bit like an alien at first) but overall, I was rather pleased with how it looked.  He was a good sport and even put the photo of him inside his laundry bag as his Facebook profile picture for awhile.  The comments it generated still make me laugh.  (=

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Then came the ill-fated whale.  This one was the first laundry bag I made that wasn’t a typical cylindrical bag.  It took two paper prototypes and a ruined cloth prototype before I got it right.  And then…it got lost in the mail, along with some other stuff I had sent her.  This made us both very sad.  I had sent her the bag just before Thanksgiving and it should have gotten there right after the holiday.  Never showed up.  I waited a few weeks and it didn’t come back to me either.  I figured it was just lost in the mail and I started another one.  The photo you see is the third attempt that was completed early January.  I gave it to her in person as she started school later than the rest.  Since I gave it to her in person, I also took the photo of her inside her bag.  Since it’s not a cylindrical bag, I figured it would be better to have her go in head first.  Hehe.  Incidentally, about a week after I finished the bag, the lost package came back to me.  She has two whale laundry bags now.  I think I have enough pictures of this one to do a tutorial too.  Maybe I’ll write one in the future.

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Propeller mushroom!

And finally, my brother’s.  I made my brother’s laundry bag last (not counting the third time I made the whale) because he’s my brother and it’s easier to get things to him, and also I figured he wouldn’t mind as much to get a really late grad present.  He got a propeller mushroom from Super Mario Wii.  It took some calculating to get the mushroomy look, the brim of the hat, and also the propellers.  They’re stiffened with some fusible interfacing, but without some wire the propellers won’t stand up on its own.  I don’t have a better picture of it where you can see the whole mushroom with propellers.  But still, I rather like it but I probably won’t do another one.  Mushrooms are hard to make in laundry bag form.