Pigeon T-Shirt, Inspired by Mo Willems

The other day, I was out with my son while he was wearing this t-shirt and someone actually stopped me and said, "I love the Pigeon shirt! Where did you get it?"

I was so tickled to say, "I made it!"

And that's when I realized I hadn't posted anything on this shirt before.

You do know the book Don't Let the Pigeon Drive the Bus, right? It's by Mo Willems and it's a Caldecott Honor Book (in case you'd like to check it out). My son was really into Mo Willems's books last summer so I made this shirt with him.

We got the shirt from a craft store, along with some fabric markers. Then I practiced the drawings once or twice on a piece of paper before drawing on the shirt.

He really likes wearing it and I'm glad it has fit for a second summer in a row.

Fabric markers are just so much fun! Maybe we'll tackle another t-shirt in the coming months. Hmmm...wonder what'll go on it... :)

Linking here today:

A Pinafore for Daughter

A couple weeks ago, I went shopping online at LemonTree Studio. Beautiful stuff here! I bought this pinafore and was so delighted with it, that I thought I'd try to make one myself from fabrics I had in my stash. 

I didn't have a pattern. Basically, I laid out the pinafore I bought on a piece of paper and traced the parts. Then I messed with it a bit, trying to figure out to put the parts. Well, it took some time, but I finally got it to work (not exactly in the way the original pinafore was made--there was some extra hand-stitching at the shoulders involved--but it works anyway). And it's reversible!

FRONT

BACK

I'm definitely going to make another one -- or two. And I'm sure it'll go quicker and smoother the next time, now that I have some practice under my belt. I think this pinafore is just so dang cute. It makes me smile when my daughter has it on. :)

I'm linking up here today:
Our Creative Spaces
Craft Junkie Too

Girl on a Tree Swing First Finish

This is the one I started second, but finished first (partly because it's the smaller of the two and partly because it was my trial-and-error one). You can see my other girl on a swing here (it's not done yet!). I'm happy with how this one turned out. A fun little project!

Once again, I used Aneela Hoey's super-fabulous tutorial to complete this mini-quilt.

I had a lot of fun experimenting with the loopy-loop quilting around the border! 

Do you see my green apples in the picture? This scene is definitely harder to see than my other one, but I think that's part of what makes it special and unique. 

I'm happy to be linking up here:

Binding and Fabric

Making progress. I did the binding today for my two little Girl on a Tree Swing mini-quilts. Can you guess which binding goes on each quilt?? (We had this terrific thunderstorm going through at the time of this top photograph -- 3:30pm EST -- so it was very dark!)

 The dark blue fabric above is a current favorite. I really, really love it. It's part of the Denyse Schmidt line and I found it at JoAnn's! I love the vintage-y look to it. So I thought it was neat to pull out this old bed sheet my mom gave me a month or so ago and see that there are MAJOR similarities. I remember seeing this bed sheet on my parents' bed when I was little. I liked it then and I love it now - just about as much as I do in the "updated" D&S version. 

My gramma's old house had wallpaper just like this in one of the bedrooms too. Wish I had a scrap of that...

Work-in-Progress Girl on a Tree Swing

 Like so many others out there, I was captivated by Aneela Hoey's Girl on a Tree Swing quilt. I remember reading her tutorial on how to do the mini-quilt and bookmarking it many, many months ago. And it just stuck with me. So, now that things have settled down a little more for me this summer, I decided to give it a try.

The piecing and free-motion quilting of the scraps was a lot of fun. I liked putting everything together. When it came time to outline the tree, the apples, and the little girl, I was excited! The face was harder than I thought it'd be. But I think it turned out well enough. My girl looks like she's yukking it up about something.

Here's a close-up.

I saw so many neat versions on blogs out there that I decided to give it another try with a red-white-and-blue background. This background is also half the size as the one above (though the parts like the tree and girl are the same sizes).

And another close-up.

 I'm in the process of now quilting the designs so that I'll have two little wall hanging mini-quilts in the end. It's a relatively easy project (depending on how fussy you are) and fun to do something different. I'm hoping to get the mini-quilts done in the next week or so!

I'm happy to be linking up here with Lee at Freshly Pieced today:

 

Wonky Potholder...or Mug Rug?

I set out to make a wonky log cabin potholder. I had never done wonky, log cabin, OR potholder before. Well! I had a good time and I think I was doing fairly well...until I got to the binding.

 I thought I could just machine-stitch the binding and it'd be fine (I hand-sew the bindings on my quilts and haven't had much experience with machine-quilting bindings). I mean, the thing was small. Really. How hard could it be?

 I ended up having to stitch around the square twice. I wasn't very happy about that. In the end, I think my wonky creation could've been a potholder if I had the fancy insulating material to sandwich inside. But, alas, I didn't. And so.

 I think my wonky potholder is better suited as a Wonky Mug Rug.

I believe the square works well for this sort of thing. Imagine the little plate with a pumpkin scone next to my mug. 

How did I finish and 

what did I learn in the process?

I ended up quilting with long straight stitches in a random-ish up-and-down way. I do like how that turned out. I also added a little label and loop on the back (next time I will just do a loopy label and skip the extra step). Finally, I think the next time I do a log cabin block, I will try to match up the scraps a little more to create some visual unity. 

Overall, a fun afternoon project. And having some cute scraps to work with makes it easy on the eyes, which is never a bad thing. :)

I'm excited to link up with all the talented folks here: