Little Fox

I recently sewed up this little jacket for my daughter - Simplicity 1477 designed by Molly Goodall from Little Goodall. It's adorable! One of my favorite creations of late. There's something about children in animal clothes - and with ears! - that makes my heart glow. You can read more about the jacket here and here.

Figgy's Patterns

I recently took part in a pattern tour for the latest collection of sewing patterns by Figgy's Patterns. You can find all the info about the patterns and Spoonflower's lovely new modern jersey I used to sew up the tees, over on the Fiskateer blog.

Caterpillar to chrysalis

Neighbor Don, or "The Dude" as we shall now call him, brought us over a large monarch caterpillar last week. It spent about 5 days eating milkweed and exploring a homemade habitat made from a cardboard box, wooden skewers and netting made by by 9 year old.

Then, for about 2 days, it hung in this "J" position you see here in the first photo. After successfully catching a hatching butterfly on camera a couple of weeks ago, I was determined to catch the metamorphosis into a chrysalis, so yesterday I set my alarm to remind me to check on it every 5 minutes.

Sure enough, I caught the whole weirdly wonderful process on camera. For lack of any technical terminology (I am not a scientist) I can tell you that it really looked like a miniature, slimy, green, alien brain breaking through the skin of a caterpillar and wriggling around. It had no eyes, head, legs or arms, but once the caterpillar skin was completely shed, the chrysalis did a strange spinning and very deliberate dance, until finally hardening and becoming immovable. There, I told you I'm not a scientist. I'll just let the photos do the talking, shall I?

Hatching butterflies

Some pretty amazing things have been happening around here lately. Our neighbor asked us to adopt some of his monarch butterfly chrysalises that were growing on plants against the outside of his house. He was having his house painted and the plants would have to be moved, so to protect the forming butterflies, he removed the twigs and branches that had chrysalises attached, took them into his house for safe keeping, and gave us some to us to look after too.

New cushions - sewing tutorial

I've been spending much of my time writing the Fiskateer blog for Fiskars over the last 18 months, which leaves little time left for writing here. You know how it goes.

Today I'm sharing a project I just posted for the Fiskateers and you can see it here. There's a full tutorial and instructions on how to sew these up. There's piping detail on the side seams, and my new favorite closure method - an invisible zipper in the back. Go and take a look.

Tripod floor lamp DIY

We used an old farm surveyor's wooden tripod (I say farm, because when we first got it is smelled like it had spent time on a farm..) to make this standard lamp. This project was a year or so in the making, simply because it took us that long to find just the right tripod - and luckily for us we eventually found this one at a garage sale about 5 houses away from ours. I think we paid $60, which whilst a fair amount of money for something you'd find at a garage sale, it's less than the average asking price for similar items on ebay plus we got to see this in person before purchasing.