Autumn Creations

I've been dying to post about my newest quilt but was continually thwarted in my efforts to take pictures. I leave for work before the sun is up and get home just as it's going down, so I can't take them during the week. And every time the sun came out the past two weekends either I wasn't home or I was busy doing something else and couldn't stop long enough to set up for pictures.

Thanks to a few days off this week, I *finally* got the shots. This quilt is a wedding gift for a friend from college who absolutely loved the color red when we were in school together. Now she claims her favorite color is green, so the challenge was to combine red and green and NOT look like Christmas. I am really happy with the result, especially because I completely made it up as I went along. Usually working without a plan does not work out well for me, but this time I love the finished product! It's going to be hard to give up...




But just as soon as I finished this one, I was off to start another. And this one is just for me, so I'll reap the fruits of my labor. I totally splurged and bought a beautiful collection of fat quarters from Amy Butler's Midwest Modern line from ruralFABRIC's shop on etsy.

It'll be a while before I finish this quilt because it's different from any of the others I've made and requires a lot of handsewing. But it's definitely going to be worth it.

While I was shooting the quilt I also got shots of the fall bag I designed...



...because if it were up to me, leaves would turn pink instead of red.

Really I designed the bag for myself, but my mom and I have a new rule that if we make a bag for ourselves we have to make another one to sell in our etsy shop. So this is a two-of-a-kind bag, and #2 is available right here!

Coming soon to the blog and the shop: My mom's totally silly Christmas bag...

Sugary Discovery

How did I not know about this?!:

"The penny candy store elevated to an art form"
— Gourmet Magazine

Last year when my cousin was getting married and wanted to have a candy bar at her wedding, we went to this ghetto "candy warehouse" here in Jersey--clearly we should have hopped on a train and visited this place instead!

Watch the panoramic video...it looks like a little slice of old time candy store heaven...

Diaper Bags

This blog has admittedly been slowing getting off the ground, but I'm resolving to post more often about what we're up to here at dirtsa (which sometimes isn't much). To start, we've received a few Pretty Prints Diaper Bag commissions in the past few months, so madre's been busy sewing for some moms and their new babes. We try to remember to take a picture of every custom diaper bag we make, for our own records and to build up a library and give a feel for how different the bags can look depending on the fabric. Here are some of the most recent creations:

Baby Sabo

Featuring fabrics:

Covington

and

Robin

Baby McArtney

Featuring fabrics:

Spring

and

Daisy

and most recently:

Babies Arenger - Twins!

For this we used

Jellybean, which unfortunately is no longer available as a diaper bag, but can be had as a cute GPS case!

Someday we would love to offer the designer fabrics we so love (such as Amy Butler or Heather Bailey), like those we used for cousin Sarah's bag...
...but right now it's just too expensive to keep a selection of those fabrics in stock, plus they drive up the cost of the bag. But maybe when we hit the big time we can have different fabric pricepoints! For now we'll work with what we've got and hopefully the orders will keep coming in, slowly but surely...

Up next: another finished quilt (!) and a special edition fall bag that we'll be selling on etsy. Stay tuned! I promise it won't be so long between posts...

Finished!

I recently finished this quilt as a wedding gift for Becca & Randy, friends I met during my time in grad school. Becca's favorite colors are blue and brown, so it only made sense to make her quilt in those colors. It's composed of only one quilt block, repeated in all different fabric configurations.  I found the block in Susan Briscoe's Japanese Quilt Blocks to Mix and Match. It's one of the easier blocks in the book; someday I'll get around to trying the harder stuff.

One Step Ahead

For about the past 8-10 years, my mom and I have discovered that we have an uncanny knack for being one step ahead of new trends. For example, when I was in high school we decided it would be fun to embroider a bunch of my tank tops with my initials and monogram. My friends liked it so much they brought over their tank tops and we did it for them, too. A few months later, I walked into Old Navy and found the store filled with tops with embroidered letters. Other brands soon followed suit.

Little things like this happen to us more than you would think. Twice this month we were flipping through magazines and found things strikingly similar to ideas of our own.

Exhibit A: Hamper redo.
We got a cheap hamper at Ikea for 99 cents. I decided that I would utilize the frame but make my own laundry case in a pretty fabric. I altered the original a bit by adding a top flap, to hide my dirty clothes. Well waddya know, flipping through Domino magazine this month my mom discovers a little blurb about doing exactly the same thing -- and look at the picture--the same thing right down to the top flap!

My hamper redo


Domino's hamper redo

Exhibit B: Quilting Fabric Choice
A few days later, my mom showed me this pillow from one of her sewing magazines. The fabrics are extremely similar to those I'm using in my latest quilt (which I'll post pictures of when I finish in the next couple weeks):

The frustrating thing, of course, is that other people are making money off these ideas. So in the end, being one step ahead leaves us one step behind...

Peanut Butter

Did you know there's an entire blog devoted to peanut butter?

Peggy over at The Peanut Butter Blog found our lunch bags on etsy and was kind enough to feature us in her post today! It's always fun to be recognized and hear that someone likes your product.

I always thought peanut butter was a worldwide thing [actually if I'm being honest I never actively thought about who has access to peanut butter, but I definitely assumed it was pretty standard] so I was more than a little surprised last year when we had some relatives from Sweden come visit and say they had never even heard of peanut butter. What do the Swedish school children eat for lunch? Baltic herring and boiled potatoes? Uffda! as my Scandinavian relatives might say...

My mother insisted they try a peanut butter & jelly sandwich before leaving America. She thinks PB&J is so good that if peanut butter were really expensive to make it would take on the cultural cache of caviar and be reserved for special occasions and fancy parties. It was the most extravagant wedding I've ever attended--they had a 40 piece orchestra, vases and vases of imported fresh flowers, and they had servers walking around with trays of peanut butter & jelly sandwiches!

The sandwich did not go over well with the Swedish relatives, though I thought it was cute that one of them said she did like the "marmalade" (Welch's Grape Jelly, it wishes it was as refined as marmalade). In any event, visit Peggy's blog to see our bags and learn more about peanut butter than you ever thought possible...and remember, choosy moms really do choose JIF. Creamy JIF to be exact.

The Eyes Have It

When I was in grad school I adopted a policy of "deferred maintenance" when it came to taking care of myself. My living stipend was very small, and my health insurance was comical--I think I paid $400 a year. Thankfully I never got sick but if I had I can't imagine that would have covered any more than a pillow for me to rest my head on as I died.

Now that I'm out of school and (somewhat) gainfully employed, I've been able to do some things I couldn't do before--exciting things like going to the dentist and the doctor(!) The past few months I've been taking care of my eyes. First I decided to get contacts. I'm not going to wear them everyday since I have astigmatism and the ones I got don't correct for it, but they'll be good to have on certain occasions.

Of course, when I went to order the contacts I checked out the glasses frames and found a pair that I simply had to have. My prescription hadn't changed too much, but I sat on my old pair of glasses a few years ago and they haven't been the same since, so I decided to treat myself to a new pair. My new frames are geek chic...the geek is the thick black frame, the chic is the awesome pink enamel and rhinestone detailing on the side. They are so me.


After taking care of my eyes from a medical standpoint I decided they deserved a little beautifying as well. I went to the MAC store (the cosmetics, not the computers) and had a fabulously gay man show me how to do use some beautiful green eyeshadows to make my brown eyes pop. It definitely takes longer in the morning to achieve the new look, so to make sure it lasts all day I invested in an eyeshadow primer that I saw recommended on another blog. The picture below is of my eye after a very sweaty 4th of July picnic, 14 hours after I applied my makeup...

The green shadow is still in place! (Though i definitely could have touched up my undereye concealer--eesh). Impressive primer, eh? It wasn't cheap, but you only need a little bit and the tube is big so it'll last a while. It's by Urban Decay, you can buy it straight from their website (click on the pic), but I got mine at Sephora.

I've also been to the dentist quite a bit in the past few months, but I'm thinking pictures of my fillings would not be as entertaining...