I use bleach. I know I shouldn’t, but it just gets things so damn white. I do clean just about everything else with baking soda or vinegar, because they clean just about everything else. But when you have been potty training a certain little boy for over a year (there’s something that’s not so much fun to celebrate) bleach it is. Also, I’m a little sloppy and tend to splash the damn bleach on my shirt, only of course when I am wearing one that is A.) new or B.) my favorite. So after seeing all of Amy’s fabulous bleach pen projects in her new book, I thought I’d rescue a couple of my shirts.

Here is the before picture of the first shirt I did. It looks a little weird because I ironed some freezer paper on the inside before I remembered to take the before shot. I know is just a cheapy target shirt (that describes 80% of my wardrobe) but it fit me well. So of course I had to splash bleach on it.

And here is the after. Yes, I am trying too hard to look cool, but it’s not easy to take a picture of yourself without trying a little. I read the directions for this project after I actually did the project (smart), so I didn’t realize that Amy uses a smaller tip over the bleach pen to get a thinner line. That would make your design look a little crisper, I think, and better overall, because really I’m not fooling anyone: it looks like I drew on this shirt with bleach. But it is a slight improvement over the before and I can leave the house in it without feeling like a total slob.

This is the second shirt I did. I know it’s hard to see the spots, but they were smack dab in the middle and very hard to disguise.  I wanted to do a color wheel shirt, much like this one modeled by the lovely Martha (I could not find another photo of it on the internets anywhere). I’m pretty crazy for the color wheel right now (like this print I love). I feel like it’s a grown up version of the rainbow, which is very big in our house at the moment. I was never one for rainbows, but they are growing on me.  Anyway, the shirt. I wanted the circle to be wonky and off center and partly off the shirt, but the bleach spot dictated where it would go and it ended up just a tiny bit off, which makes it look more like a mistake. Really there are tons more mistakes, but I don’t care, I love it.

I borrowed this stuff from a friend of mine that turns all acrylic paint into fabric paint when you mix it in. It’s made by Golden and called GAC 900 fabric  medium. It works pretty well as far as I can tell. You just mix it 1:1 with the paint and you’re good to go. I think I should have used a little less paint and more of the fabric medium stuff because the shirt is a little stiff in parts, but it’s been through the wash a few times already and looks great. Though with all that bleach on it (the pinky color was made with a bleach pen) I’m sure I’ll wear a hole in it quickly, but i don’t mind really, I’d like a reason to make another shirt like this.

On Friday all my kids’ friends came over for a valentines making party–yes all! have you ever had a party where every person you invited could come and then think holy crap! everyone is coming?  At the last minute a few kids couldn’t make it, so it wasn’t quite as chaotic as I thought it would be, but we are still picking glitter out of our hair (four days later).  The kids are still pretty young, so there weren’t any projects proper, it was a how many different things can you glue to one card sort of deal. My son’s inner glitter lover came out and he used up most of what we had.  Actually after the party was over my kids worked on their valentines almost until dinner time. They would get up from the table every once and a while and help themselves to the leftovers at the buffet. It was a rare day in motherhood where I was aloud to sit back, cuddle with the baby, and crochet as I please.

I got kinda themey with the food. It was supposed to be all heart shaped and red, but ended up rather brown and carby.  I made tomato focaccia from my bakery days and it was pretty good, at least the two dogs who finished it off thought so. These financiers were a total bust: they didn’t taste very good–and financiers are usually super delicious–and the heart effect was fussy as hell and didn’t work in the end.  Everything else was pretty run of the mill: heart shaped pb&js, red vegetables, trail mix. Martha’s raisin heart pockets were my favorite and I squirreled a few away to have with tea later.  I know valentines day is all about chocolateness, but these were nice and wintery, not too sweet and perfect with tea. I used golden raisins in the filling, but I think dried apricots with a little cardamom would be even better.  So go set up a little buffet for your kiddo’s lunch and open the glitter and savor some quiet time, or make some valentines yourself.  Next year we might skip the christmas cards all together and just send out valentines.

1. gingham dress, 2. stripey dining room, 3. hat, 4. warren, 5. adele, 6. leaf crown, 7. one quilt: march, 8. summer girl, 9. corduroy coat, 10. earrings, 11. pointy hat, 12. patch on

We welcomed the new year with a big pot of fondue, the everyone promptly got the flu (not from the fondue). So I sort of missed  the first few days of this new year. I’m happy it’s here though, flu and all. Last year was a little rough (me and pregnancy don’t really like each other much) still a few things got made and some good ones at that. I put my favorites up there–that baby being the best thing I made by far. I hope to rework this little blog in the new year and maybe even get going on some patterns I’ve been meaning to work on. We’ll see. This little baby just learned to roll over and crawling comes quickly to my boys, so I’m guessing all sewing time will soon be gone.  I have ambitions though, three days in to 2010 and my list is already long.

Happy New Year to you and yours!

Well after that last post I went for a little walk to gather leaves. There was one lonely tree left with leaves on it, but they were huge and yellow and perfect. The boy and I snipped off their stems and folded them a bit, then I sewed them together one by one with a simple whip stitch. He picked yellow thread to match the leaves, so you can’t see it. But I have plans to stitch something on them in blue. This was such a simple and beautiful project. I think making these will be part of our fall for years to come.

I’ve been meaning to write about this little project for a while now.  It wasn’t much work, practically none at all really, but it has been awesome. I got the idea from an old issue of Cookie magazine (well they are all old now– damn you, tanking magazine industry!).  I just slapped some chalkcloth–oil cloth that works like a chalk board–that I got on etsy, cut it to fit, and because I couldn’t be bothered to take it off again I just mitered the corners with some glue.  Done and done.  Now it’s someone’s job to draw the place settings for dinner (sometimes mine) which makes those 15 minutes before dinner enjoyable rather than the low blood sugar hell they usually are.