Made in America

Made in America. A book. By Bill Bryson.

And I've just read it. It may sound as a cliche, but I think that the book has... too many words. Too many words following each other... If you know what I mean - but you probably don't.

The book is about the development of American English, from the first settlers to 1990s. It includes plenty of interesting facts - that are probably even more interesting if you know American history in detail. If you don't, you'll probably struggle through the first few chapters, but enjoy it afterwards. There are plenty of random things that I've learned reading this book. If you find them at least a bit interesting, I strongly recommend reading this book. I've learned that

Greenland's southern fringes are further south than Oslo. Which is obvious once you look at a map.

There was no standard time in the US until 1883. When it was midnight in New York, it was 11:47 in Washington, and 11:55 in Philadelphia. Oh, dear!

Revolving doors are necessary to avoid uncontrollable draughts in large buildings. Again, pretty obvious once you think about it.

Chutzpah is best defined by the old joke about the boy who kills his parents, then begs mercy form the court because he has only recently been orphaned. My favourite!

The New York Times predicted in 1939 that television would never be a serious competitor for radio because people must sit and keep their eyes glued on a screen; the average American family hasn't time for it. And then came Internet!

The word caucus dates from the early seventeenth century. As you probably guessed it, I only know the word because I'm watching Project Runway.

DOS originated as Q-DOS (a play on kudos) and stood for Quick and Dirty Operating . YAIJ (yet another inside joke).

Curtains

A pretty simple challenge this week: curtains.

I used three different (but matching) fabrics in beige, blue, and dark red. Since I used most of the fabric for pillows, I didn't have much fabric left for the curtains, so I had to combine the different fabrics. I think the combination creates a nice double curtain illusion.





As you can see, they still have to be ironed!

Soft-sole baby shoes

Coming back from the holidays (Italy, Lago di Garda), I don't have anything new to write about, so again I'll dig up some of the old stuff.

Baby shoes.

So far, I have made 7 pairs and probably will make some more when his feet grow. All my more experienced friends recommended Robeez shoes but they are so ridiculously expensive that I decided to make my own. Googling "how to make baby shoes" lead me to this pattern by Tanya Brown, www.tackyliving.com.

I always use leather for the sole and leather or polar fleece for the vamp. For lighter shoes, I use linen and for warmer shoes I use fleece lining. Yes, I have made all possible cominations. I don't have all of them documented, here just a few:

New design.. finally!

Now you must have noticed. No more Patrick's green, no more pastel colours, no, this time it's for real. It took me ages and plenty of different colour schemes to get to this one - that I not only like but can identify myself with it.

I can show you one version - the boring one, which was just too pale.


I tried to add a bit of contrast colours - but ended up with this ice-cream coloured pattern. It was just too... girly for me. Yeah, and that comes from someone who writes a blog about sewing, reading and card making!

Notice the safety pins and the needle?

Anyway. As much as I liked this version, it was just not me. I don't have any pastels in my closet, most of my clothes are either black, red or in earth tones. I love contrasts, edginess (is this a word?) and strong colours. So I took this into account - and the next version was this one:



But again, I can't say what I didn't like about it, but it didn't seem right. So, I changed it again. I'm still not happy but getting closer.

A Long Way Down

I mentioned two weeks ago I was reading A Long Way Down by Nick Hornby and now that I finished reading it - I might as well write something about it. And no, I didn't do much sewing this week, mostly because the weather was too nice and I wasn't spending much time inside. But back to the book.

Well, it's not the best of Hornby. It starts pretty good and promising - as far as four suicidal characters on top of a high building can be promising - but it becomes very mediocre in the second chapter and predictable in the third. It hardly has any good one-liners but has some good passages worth mentioning. So I'll mention a few of them.

The trouble with my generations is that we all think we're f***king geniuses. Making something isn't good enough for us, and neither is selling something, or teaching something, or even just doing something; we have to be something.
Ha! This blog proves he's wrong. This blog is all about making and doing something :-)

It was like finding a door that you'd never seen before in your own house. Would you want to know what was behind it?
I can help it, but this quote reminds me so much of the television series IT Crowd, you know, when suddenly a door appears. Would you want to meet Richmond, the Goth? Well, I would!

"Don't" was a concise way of expressing a profound solution to all my problems.
Probably almost everyone's.

An one last more: Ex-wives: really, everybody should have at least one.

Now you've read some of the best parts (IMO) of the book. If you want the random quotations to make sense, go ahead and read the whole book. Or you can wait a bit - I'm sure they will make a film based on the book. They always do it, don't they?

A vest for the boy

One of the projects started last week and finished this week was a vest for the boy. It's made of a very light green fleece. I avoided any zippers in the front in case he sleeps in the vest so I used snap buttons on the shoulder. First the fabric


then the side seam


and the almost finished vest



This is a detail of the shoulder with the buttons


PS. I'm still working on the design of the blog. In the meantime, I finished reading one of the books, but this deserves a separate post.

Pop-up (Christmas) cards

I didn't have much spare time this week, so I decided to write about something I did a few months ago - six months ago, to be precise. This brings us to the beginning of December and that means - Christmas cards! (Bet you didn't expect this, did you?)

This year I made some multi-layer pop-up cards that are never really out of season. To give you an idea what I'm talking about, it's probably best to start with a photo of a finished card.


As you can see, I bought pearl-coloured blank cards and some coloured heavier paper (for some reason I took the slightly transparent one). All you have to do, is to draw a pattern, cut it with a utility cutter (Stanley, Olfa) and glue it to the card. Simple, ha?


Well, you have to cut it pretty accurately and carefully fold it, otherwise it doesn't fold into the card properly. Also gluing this semi-transparent paper to the card was rather tricky, but a double-sided Scotch tape did the job perfectly.

If you want to make exactly the same card, here's the pattern I used. The black lines have to be cut, the red and the blue just folded. The horizontal dashed line denotes the folding line of the card. As you can see on the photos, I didn't always manage to match the two, so I also cut the sides (the snow on the tree).


Here are some of the cards, made in different colours.