happy bday julia!

julia, my former roomie, celebrated a bday july 31st! julia's bf, marcus (he's absolutely hilarious), lives in brooklyn and she misses him lots. also, she has NO wall hangings in her new place. so, i took it upon myself to help her out with her decorating and her missing her bf situations. enter the ork poster... ork posters are these hipster maps of cities where the different neighborhoods are delineated, with the names typed in goofy font. i've been dying for an excuse to get one, but haven't had any good excuses (isn't that usually the case for all my purchases?). i cut out a heart from a paint chip swatch (which i hoard from hardware stores for my gift tag craft punch!), and rubber cemented it onto the glass right where marcus lives. i used rubber cement so that julia could move the heart if marcus ever moves in brooklyn again (he's in his 2nd brooklyn neighborhood). if he leaves brooklyn, they're on their own for mapping out his new location, hehe. of course i got myself a dc one (grey background with white font), now that i'm moving! happy bday julia! i'll miss you when you're off to haiti to do relief work!

isn't she noble?

lan's heidi bday dress

friday was lan's bday. she had been hinting to me (and not to subtly at that!) that she would love a garment sewed by me for her bday. now lan's a serious girly girl and loves yellow, so i had to go on the hunt for fabric that would make the cut. jcarolinecreative.com had just what i was looking for! yellow fabric with white flowers by robert kaufman (a decently cool fabric designer!), and it was on sale! unfortunately they had only 1 yard, but no matter, i'd make it work. i chose the simplicity 2965 pattern (2nd from left along the bottom) because it was more modest and work-appropriate. i used a light blue stretchy cotton on the top, so that the dress wouldn't be all yellow. the inside was completely lined, which was no small feat! notice how in the picture below the lining in the skirt part was inside out! so yes, i had to snip the skirt lining out and reattach it by hand. sigh. i'm not so great with spatial reasoning. then, i ran into my next problem: the dipping pockets in the front puckered along the curves and corners! also, the yellow fabric was so thin that you could see the seams along the pockets. after digging around in my trim box for a bit, i pulled out this fancy vintage rickrack that a former student had donated to my sewing club back when i taught. it was perfect! here the left side has trim already sewed on, but not the right. isn't it so much better with the trim? here is a final picture of the whole dress. in the back, there is an invisible zipper. i'm quite pleased with how i turned out. it kind of reminds me of heidi, the little swiss girl who lived with her grandpa! and for dessert, i baked lan red velvet cupcakes! these were the first that i had ever made with the red food coloring. they were delicious! here's a pic of the last one, with shredded coconut on top! the poor thing was smooshed into a tupperware with the other 5 that i had saved for my parents this weekend. and this is after i ate half! happy bday dear friend!

sojourn to beantown and weston

no worries, i'm still alive. 2 weeks ago i was in boston visiting the sarah. THE sarah. and last week i was chilling in good ole weston with the momski.
in beantown, sarah put me to work. 1st she demanded chicken pot pie. dough was made from scratch, although with her whole wheat flour, so the consistency was dry and a little grainy. thankfully, the flavor of the chicken filling was tasty. i used small ramekins to make us personal sized pot pies:next up, she wanted a pizza for dinner. i didn't take pics of it, since i've made a million pizzas by now, and it was really nothing special. just spinach, broccoli, and chicken on top, with her mom's red pasta sauce (the best feature of the whole pizza) and some shredded 4 cheese mix. then, she wanted red velvet cupcakes, STAT. her local supermarket ran out of the red food coloring, so really i ended up making brown velvet cupcakes. however, to make up for the lack of red, i used sarah's pink cupcake wrappers. so perhaps we shall call these the pink velvet cupcakes! 1 of the 2 trays filled with cupcakes:and finally, on my last last night, sarah had the nerve to request another batch of chicken pot pie! she bought regular unbleached flour, so this time the dough came out nice and flaky. this time i made a big pie and carved her initials into the top for steam vents, hehe: however, when the "joy of cooking" (my present to sarah for her bday!!!) said to use 2 cans of cream of chicken soup, i learned the hard way that this doesn't mean 2 cans of condensed cream of chicken soup. hehe. the filling was rather thick this time, although still tasty! and no worries, sarah isn't all that bossy and didn't demand any of these food items. well maybe just the pink velvet cupcakes. usually she asks and bats her long curly eyelashes at me and i'm a sucker. see, we're still friends: at home, mom suggested i make food for our road trip back to dc. i had successfully avoided preparing food at home all week until the very last morning. she suggested i use all the leftovers and concoct a meal. note: i hate cooking and really am useless unless an oven is involved. so, i did what my people do best: i took out the wok and stirred everything together. it tasted just ok but looked horrendous. and while in weston, i dug up the 2nd beaded project i made, 5 years ago, to snap pics. (the 1st was a cardigan i made for my grandma, but i have since lost the pics.) i used a black long sleeve shirt and beaded the front in the style of those victorian bib shirts (way before the bib shirt trend of 2 years ago). the 3 swirly chains have a gold eagle button in the middle and are meant to resemble necklaces, in a way. this was a mother's day gift for my mom that year.the back has a continuation of the scalloped trim from the front. you'll have to look closely, as the black beads on the black shirt are hard to see.

a new use for a shrunken sweater

really i prefer to think that i grew and that's why the sweater doesn't fit. however, a more likely scenario is that my stellar laundering skills shrank this grey scallop-knit sweater. i've been working on downsizing my STUFF so that i have less things to move to philly, which means that stuff i no longer wear or use must be sold to a consignment store, donated, refashioned, or tossed. this was on its way to being tossed.until monday morning, when instead of helping mom and dad pack the car for the trip back to ct for the week, i decided that my bed lacked throw pillows and that i needed one in a neutral color to go with the new vintage white bedspread (is that an oxymoron?) that i got for my bed for philly! grey is neutral! so, i took a cheapy ikea pillow that was too big for how little stuffing it had (and thus it was super flat and lumpy) and sewed the pillow shut down the middle. then, i sewed the sweater shut across the armpits and zigzag-stitched right next to that to prevent fraying. along the bottom ribbing of the sweater i sewed an invisible grey zipper leftover from one of my numerous ambitious sewing projects that never got started (since my list of MUST SEW items is longer than my list of completed to-do items)! i stuffed the newly poofy ikea pillow into my new sweater pillowcase, and voila, one pretty scalloped throw pillow for the bed! it's still a little lumpy. mom claims that after some tossing around, it'll be flatter... we'll see about that. ikea pillows suck. never buy pillows from ikea unless they're of the memory foam kind! note: this is not my new old white bedspread. i'm saving it for philly. oh, and did i mention that i painted this bedframe from ikea? i decided i NEEDED a bedframe and it came in natural untreated pine. however, i decided it should be white. HAD to be white. so now it's white. add that to my list of random apt crafts and completed to-do items!

this weekend, for 4th of july, i baked blueberry muffins with fresh blueberries! i doubled the recipe, and we probably had 40 or so muffins! i used minimal butter and sugar since mom and dad are freaky health nuts. bunks benefited from many blueberry treats! no worries, i didn't spill any "soft scrub" into the muffins. mom was cleaning my stovetop. apparently i'm a "filthy filthy girl," in mom's own words! *blush*

chickens!

when jimmy was in middle school, he was obsessed with chickens. instead of saying "cool!", he'd say "chickens!" (don't ask. i don't get it either.) so, as soon as my job finished on june 30th (!!!!), the end of the fiscal year (i do work in a finance office and all), the first thing i thought of sewing was a dress with this african chicken fabric that i got at the school's rummage sale last october. you may remember it from the christmas birdies post; it was the fabric that was turquoise with dark red chickens. (NOTE: i met up with some friends for a farewell happy hour and it was pointed out to me that said chickens are really quails. but i'm not satisfied with calling this a quail dress, since i've been calling it my chicken dress for a week already. so sorry friends, but CHICKEN DRESS it is!)

i'd been eying the mila dress pattern from burdastyle.com, an online shop with tons of free and cheap sewing patterns. i love how crisp this looks! not a fan of how the front flaps open like that, though. it sort of looks like a boob offering!!! hehei ripped apart this black jumper that i never wore for the coordinating fabric. it's really more black than grey... the coloring here is just a little off and i forgot to take a pic of it before i ripped the skirt section to shreds! (ew, what was i thinking with this dress!)and made this: yes that's me midsentence! notice how the chicken right in the middle under the button placket is complete! i meticulously calculated how to cut the fabric despite the 5/8" seams on both front skirt panels to make sure the fabric continued exactly once i sewed them back together. ditto for the back: it pays to be slightly ocd, huh? (however, i'm not a fan of how i look like a linebacker in these pics. i've been swimming laps at my pool fairly regularly to stay in shape and it's making me broad!) mom and dad are in the town for the nation's bday, so to celebrate i baked banana bread and gingersnaps! mom has a weakness for gingersnaps and often buys them, so i baked her some to prove that i could make them better. and, they were! so she swore to never purchase gingersnaps ever again. ah, unemployment is so sweet! tomorrow i'm going to bake a blueberry pie! however, once next monday hits, i am going to hit the books to lesson plan for next year. lesson planning will be my day job for 8 hrs (ugh!), and of course i will continue sewing at night as my regular hobby!

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...