Spring cleaning and still sewing daily....

Day 146

I am so happy to finally be enjoying the cool mornings and warm SLIGHTLY breezy days (not persistent 40mph sand storms) that make me love New Mexico this is the best time of year for me as everything is budding, its not too hot to go out, we can open the windows and throw off the cloak and dust of winter ONLY IF you are fully medicated against Cedar/Juniper allergies lol

FYI if you ever visit New Mexico no matter how hard we dust there is ALWAYS a fine layer of sand and dust on everything it is just impossible to keep up with....seriously its a desert around here LOTS of sand

So this Spring Break I laid out my plans to clean the house top to bottom, every nook and cranny and as of today I can say the upstairs is finished.....the loft where I fully expect my preteens to be bringing home friends in the Summer to hang out, watch movies, play games, sleepovers...it needs to be a fun place where they can just be themselves

Really hoping to get to the painting this Summer...one of these blues on the wall....I want this loft to be relaxed and reminiscent of my dream life growing up in Florida and my time spent on the beach like an old Florida cracker beach house of which I wish I had grown up in but while we had the Florida floor plan and windows of one of these houses it was a half hour drive to the beach.

This couch has been in our family since the oldest was born and has definitely seen better days but since it's bones are still good I am going to get some blue mattress ticking and recover it...for now I just recovered the many pillows in random fabric scraps I had laying around

I had one small piece of vintage red strip mattress ticking...

the girls insisted on this soft wool plaid piece....

both girls being born in Texas they loved finding this handkerchief so I threw it on a squishy pillow-not that Texans are squishy by any means lol-they just knew they would be using it a lot and wanted to put it on a comfy pillow

2 pillows that were already recovered, this wool felt 'Liberty and Freedom' and in the back a silky blue stripe

this vintage hand embroidered pillowcase written in German (if you speak German and know what it says can you let me know? ya know so I can impress people who come over lol)

UPDATE TRANSLATION: The early bird catches the worm <--thanks Mel, very cool

This one little scrap I had that actually had Florida and California on it-both places I have lived--one day I hope to find a real touristy handkerchief like this in my thrifting adventures

And that quilt in the back is from the girl's great (great?) grandmother and they use it all the time so it is perfect here...won't this room look great with the couch recovered and the walls painted and (fingers crossed) some faux wood floors eventually......like a room in my imaginary beach house that is my Summer home lol

Here is the cabinet under the TV which used to be open, exposed, ugly, jumbled....games, controllers, movies, wires every which way.....so I covered it with the only scrap of blue stripe mattress ticking I had (this is what will be used to cover the couch) and I hot glued vintage ric rac across the top over the staples (I totally luv my staple gun)

btw those are some of my huge collection of fossilized (over 1million years old) and modern shells collected in my years on the beach and in my pre-life as a budding paleontologist/geologist/archaeologist

Art on the stairs and beach on the stair rail-hub plans on building some more book shelves for the books along these walls this Summer-we love books in this house

random shell groupings

in an effort to decorate with what we have I dug these 2 aquariums out of the garage and filled them will most of my shell collection--the shelf on the left my hub built for some of our collection of favorite books

Today we plan on starting the downstairs Spring cleaning efforts...making homemade applesauce....the girls are creating their own Pokemon felt creatures (more on that tomorrow)...and I have 3 curtains to sew......what will you create today?

Rocking some serious well thought gifts: Tshirt Blanket #3 and Memory Pillows

Day 131

Finished up another Tshirt blanket and this one is double sided with shirt squares which makes it awkward when sewing the whole thing together. My goal is to one day have a quilting machine so I can do some really cool designs but for now I work with what I got....

This particular blanket was for a local youth pastor and it included some really neat blocks like from where he went to seminary and one with children's signatures all over it that I had to cut into 4 squares to get most of them onto the block.

This is the back side, not much different but since there were so many shirts it worked to cover both sides to include as many memories as possible! In between is a simple queen sized flat sheet to add strength and weight to the blanket since the knit of the shirts can get stretchy and pull at the stitches.

In order to sew these together I picked a simple cross design and had I to do it over again I would have shifted the design so it was tilted corner to corner over the squares instead I just followed along the square design in the center of the blanket. But live, learn and be creative and grow eh?! I am pretty happy with this because it was the first one I had done with shirts on both sides.

And apparently I forgot to take pictures of the fleece backs and simple grid designs on the first two blankets but I will take pictures of the next one I have which should be within the week I promise! Basically the blankets with the plain backs are simple grids sewn in straight lines vertically and horizontally, starting from the middle and working out.

And here are some Tshirt memory pillows I just completed that will be Christmas gifts for family members of the beloved Mother, Wife and Grandmother who passed on. Her family could not bear to part with her clothes and had been storing them until they found me! I can just see the tears flowing as these are opened on Christmas morning surrounded by all those happy memories.

The request for each pillow was that they had to include a Harley-Davidson shirt and a Winnie the Pooh. She also wore a lot of button downs so I made sure to include squares of those as well.

I really, really love the ways these all turned out different but unique. The ones made from the button down shirts are my favorites, so crisp!

These are 12"x16" pillows covered in 4" squares. Can't wait to do more of these they were a lot of fun and so simple to create.