happy father's day!

ok maybe i'm just 9 days late, but no matter since the rents are back in town this weekend to renovate the apartment! 1 small and fitted laptop sleeve for dad: complete!the back:and a view of the inside:

they might be giants...

but i'm certainly not. and neither is my friend lori. at 5', she and i are not just shorter than average, but we're even shorter than what is generally considered short. but that's ok. we live our short lives proudly and pay lots of money to get our pants hemmed...

but no more! i convinced lori that i was capable of hemming her newly acquired jeans, even reusing the original hem. i mean sure, i've paid for this for 3 pairs of my jeans in my lifetime, and at $18 a pop, that's a whole lot of money. but once i got them back and inspected the legs, i realized, heck, that's so easy! but maybe i hadn't actually tried this before. but maybe my sewing machine couldn't sew something so thick... hehe but, but, but... so lori trusted me. brave soul! and guess what! i did an even better job than the tailors did on my jeans!!! here's theirs: notice the side seam through the middle of the leg doesn't necessarily match up with the side seam of the hem. come on! for $18?!? here's the worst of the 2 legs that i did:hey, at least it's close! and here's the better leg:booyah! almost exactly matched. that's the last time i get my jeans professionally hemmed! i'm even more professional! don't pity me for my height. i'll still be carded when i'm 40 and you won't!

quilting: complete!

construction: not complete! we're now at 3 days overdue. not shocked, huh? look closely. you'll see the black zig zags sewn into the dark sections! yup, zig zag quilting lines for a zig zag quilt. black binding has been sewn in. 2 rows of velcros have been sewn in for the body part. tonight, i construct. sigh. this project is wearing on me. i want to make dresses now!

and with a new font

fontdinerdotcom sparkly font! much better than that blah "arial" font that blogger made me choose before. check it out here: drbunkinsapothecary.blogspot.com

ok. i'll focus on sewing, baking, and bunnies now. and not necessarily all together.

new header for the bloggy

jimmy and the rents were in town this weekend for father's day and jimmy helped me do a photoshoot of the bunks to make a new header for the bloggy. what could be better than a pic of the little demon frolicking in my piles of fabric.

ok, fine. i'll admit that i staged the pic by placing lots of pellets on a pile of fabric to get him to stay on it long enough. bunkins is currently lamenting his lack of the pellets portion of his dinner because he got them earlier for his photoshoot. hehe. he did get a full weekend of fruit treats, so i do not pity him one bit!

check out the new layout with the new header here: drbunkinsapothecary.blogspot.com

basted, like a turkey

completed quilt top! or so i thought until i realized i'd need one more row to make 14, so that the case would have more overlap, thus allowing for the later velcro flap to be useful:and the batting is basted in! the quilt bottom is just a sheet of the gold and silver stripe fabric that make up the zigzags. i used 4 ply of thin quilt batting because laptop sleeves have to be padded! and might i note that quilting safety pins are an amazing invention. they are really just very bent safety pins. however, when you try to force a pin through that much batting, it is amazing to have the pin direct itself back up to the surface effortlessly!

there is hope!

so apparently i don't hate quilting anymore. yes, i still find it tedious. however, the end results are amazing when you see all those teeny pieces fit together!

strips of squares have been made. 13 total. of course i had 2 squares missing from the last post and when i tried to sew a replacement, i sewed the diagonal the wrong way. hehe. no worries. all is fixed.

the bottom 2 strips have been sewn together already. look how neat the points of the zig zag are!even the grey/black spaces consist of squares with 2 triangles of fabric. a closeup:ok, maybe one day i will make a giant bed quilt. just maybe.

quilting is NOT my thing

i don't know who thought up of quilting. it is so tedious. the idea of sewing up little squares, to then sew together in strips, to then sew together into a top layer, to sew to a bottom layer, and finally to sew on binding is just silly. this person must have had a lot of time. sigh.

well here are my early attempts. the spiffy new roller cutter, mat, and see-through ruler did me well. here are my stacks of squares. but don't think this was what made up my quilt. oh no! zigzag quilts are made up of even smaller squares made from sewing 2 squares together diagonally through the middle, cutting them apart, and then ironing each flat. they end up smaller than the original squares. tedious? oh yes!however, since every seam is .25", the quilt always ends up smaller than anticipated, especially since the sewing through the diagonal step shrank them unexpectedly! notice my 1st layout involved 7 squares along the short end. in the end, i needed it to be 8 squares wide! the last 2 rows have been sewn together already. see how much smaller they are?

and did you notice the better quality of my pics? i have finally started trying to learn the slr camera that dad gave me. sigh. point and shoot is just so much easier. bunks was a reluctant target of my next photo shoot. he preferred to lick the lens than to sit still. apparently i need to work on the shutter speed, according to jimmy. hello, cutie pie! (bunks, not jimmy. hahaha)

ym ht001 tsop!

usually my posts document my relative successes, but this time, on what is my 100th post(!!!), my failure at fabric cutting was epic:

1) the roller cutter gifted to me turned out to be dull and rusty.

2) i have no clue how to square away the fabric to ensure that all lines are straight.

3) the ruler i was using was an architect's metal straight edge... i can't see through it to check my cutting.

4) my cutting mat, the purple self-healing one that i bought for cutting stencils for freezer paper stenciling, is so small that i have to keep moving the fabric, thus messing up my alignment.

so, i called up trusty erin and she pointed me to the quilting basics tutorials on the sew mama sew blog. tomorrow i hit up ac moore and michaels after my hair trimming appointment, with coupons in tow! (all this quilting gear is ridiculously pricy!) tonight, since i've already read up on fabric cutting, i think i'll go to bed early for once!

fabrics for dad's quilted laptop sleeve: picked!

although these were the original fabrics i picked for this project, i called my mom to double check her opinion. dad is a consultant and must be professional. he's also not wildly hip. so, we agreeded that muted greys, blacks, silvers, and golds would be best for him. the grey herringbone has alternating skinny grey and black v's. my other option for the main fabric of the sleeve was black with skinny white pin stripes. however, i think this herringbone has more visual interest. i had originally bought it to make a skirt, but trust me, i have other options for skirt projects. here's a closeup of the herringbone pattern. the coloring is more like in the 1st photo though. the white, gold, and silver fabric will be for the 2 zig zag stripes travelling up the length of the sleeve.i'm thinking of using this zig zag pattern from purlbee.com. however, i'm going to do 2 vertical zigzags equally spaced from the ends. tonight i cut lots of squares! on my tiny purple self-healing cutting mat. attempting to use my roller cutter that maureen gifted to my sewing club back when i taught ages ago. this could be interesting...

last orange juicy couture jacket

the last one, for which lan cut out the fabric with me ages ago, is finally finished. i'm not a fan of repeat projects, so this really loomed over my head. like a dark stormy cloud, reminiscent of the dark stormy clouds that loomed over nikki and my heads while we trekked for 2 hours in the bahamas! (yes, that's where i disappeared to last week. no worries, i'm alive despite the numerous travails we faced!) i'll eventually snap a cute pic of lan in it, when i see her in 2 weekends. but for now, my skinny minnie mannequin will have to do.for this jacket, i decided to do 4 buttons instead of 3, but i put them closer together so that the range of the buttons remains the same. the left panel is a little longer than the right. GAH! unfortunately there's not much I can do. oh well. it's not really all that noticeable. the side has an even worse problem: puckering at the bottom hem. DOUBLE GAH! people at work to whom i showed the finished product claim it's not noticeable at all. however, i may bite the bullet tonight and take out the bottom part of the hem just at the side to redo it. (and thus i'll have to do the same to the other side... TRIPLE GAH!) do note the perfect cross at the armpits. *victory dance, victory dance*on the back, i sewed down the box pleat, as mom's jacket ended up being too wide on her. lan and her are similarly built, so i figured lan's jacket would have to be slimmed down too. i took in the sleeves lengthwise and widthwise so they wouldn't be so baggy. mom is going to bring hers back to me when she's in town for father's day so that i can take in her sleeves and sides as well!

and speaking of father's day... next project: quilted laptop case for dad's small laptop! (his current one is too big for his tiny laptop.) don't tell dad! shh!! oh, and might i note that i've never made a quilt before. this might be interesting...