This may look like a quilt, but it’s really only like a quilt.  It’s two vintage sheets stitched together and bound it quilt-like.  Most of the summer my kids were using their winter duvet covers as light blankets and it was bothering me to no end. So the quilt-like idea came about.

After too many trips to the thrift store, I finally found two quilts that would work.  I cut them to fit the weird ikea bed we have and pinned them together. I knew I wanted to quilt it in long slightly uneven lines–actually just like this beautiful quilt. So I contacted the maker and grilled on her quilting techniques and thread choices.

Then I picked up two different spools of variegated thread (wow, that stuff is expensive): a blue, magenta, and purple one for the flowery side and a more rainbowy one for the purple side. After what seemed like 400 hours of sewing straight lines, I moved onto the binding. I found this awesome Japanese polka dot bias tape in Frances’ beautiful shop, miss matatabi.

I sewed the binding on at the beach (and got many weird looks) and ta! da! Quilt-like thing! Now to start the next like-a-quilt for my son…

My kids wore their winter pajamas most of the chilly spring, but then it got hot all of a sudden (then disgustingly hot) so I had to whip up some summer pajamas super fast.

So I made one from a pink stripey pillowcase…

and one from a yellow stripey pillowcase. There is a stripey green one in a thrift store somewhere waiting for me, I know it. So no trifecta of cuteness.  But the baby did get some little man pjs from an old sheet.

For a while there my children were barely clothed during the day, much less at night, so the pajamas were forgotten. But now that the heat has stopped being so punishing (at least for the moment) the pillowcase pjs are back in rotation.  Speaking of summer, Mary Frances has a lovely post about midsummer, go see…

-a wooden serving tray with a lovely yellow cottage on it. My daughter said, “Is that where Laura [of Little House in the Prarie] lives?”

-a fantastic wool blanket. I got this a while back, but hey! it’s 50 degrees, so we’re still using it! I’m not complaining–this is my kind of summer. Awesome things to do everywhere, but none of that hot ass weather that goes a long with it.

-a ridiculously analog computer. It’s hilarious, how could I pass it up?

-and this bad boy came off the curb. A metal basket for who know what, but it fits our books perfectly. And it’s awesome.

Get anything good from the thrift store recently?

I went back and forth about buying it, because it was ten bucks, but in the end I got it and I’m glad I did. I duct taped some batteries in (why do we have a thousand C batteries on hand?) and the sucker works! Push the green button and the conveyor belt moves, slide something across the scanner and it beeps, and if you push the yellow numbers a bunch of times the receipt pops up.

On the conveyor belt: bananas, a calorie counter book (really, why?), gouda, asprin, toothpaste, cookies and shoe polish. This is definitely an old man’s shopping list–a slightly overweight old man, in the eighties with a hangover. Meet the toy designers of the past.

All my kids have odd size beds. Our bedrooms are quite small, so to fit all the kids in them we got two extendable beds from Ikea. My son has the leksvik and my daughter has the super cute minnen.  They start out about toddler size and then you can make them longer as the children get, well, longer.  The baby has a wooden travel crib, sort of like this, that I got off craigslist for next to nothing. He is just about to outgrow it, which sucks because it fits perfectly in the corner of our room.

The Ikea beds are kind of awesome and kind of annoying (that pretty much describes everything at Ikea, doesn’t it?).  The only sheets that fit them are of course at Ikea and they are uncharacteristically boring: I think the options were red or blue. This past week I finally got around to making some fitted sheets for everyone. I made them out of vintage sheets I picked up at the thrift store:  sheet from sheets–not my most creative moment.

There are a bunch of tutorials out there on how to make fitted sheets, so I won’t bore you with how I did it (though, if there are a lot of you out there with these Ikea beds I could rustle up the measurements I used).  Between these sheets and the thousand pairs of elastic waist pants I’ve made, I am done with the whole pushing the safety pin through the casing crap. I know there is a tool out there that makes this bearable, isn’t there? When I find it I’m going to retire my extra large, sad, bent up safety pin.