Sewing for Baby Elizabeth

Above are 3 little outfits for Elizabeth.  2 pair of the pants are made from flannel scraps, the last pair started out as a pair of sleep pants that were too small for Nina.  

 Little baby pants sew up very quickly and use very little fabric.

The tops are just a pack of $6 onesies.  I decorated all 3 with rick rack, and used some of the pants scraps on 2 of them. 

Of course Elizabeth needed some Thanksgiving outfits.
I decorated this little onesie with a turkey made from some fall themed fabric scraps.  I sort of copied a design from another blog, then used HeatNBond to iron the pieces to the shirt, then machine stitched around them for a little more stability. 

Nina did this shirt.  She used brown Rit dye to change the white onesie.  She made the slice of pie from my scraps.  The "cutie pie" embroidery was done by some home-ec students practicing with a sewing machine that does monograming. 

Bobby's altered hoodie

This is my son, Bobby, the very helpful floor tiler.  He will try to do just about anything.  Right now, his wife is the singer for a hard rock band and they are doing lots of concerts and shows, not my first choice but their dream is to  make it big some day and maybe they will.....

Anyway, he grew up watching me sew and trying to do just about anything.  He showed me some very expensive rock-type clothing made by a company called Road Bone - I tried to link to them but their sites seem to be for friends only. They sell alter jeans, jackets and hoodies for $200+ 

Their clothes are regular clothing items that they just alter, by dying, adding patches from old jeans or leather clothing or fabric,  some ripping and fraying. 
I showed Bobby and Bridgette how it seemed to be made. They got a few fabric scraps and rubber stamps from me. 

Here is Bobby modeling his first original jacket, it started out as a plain black sweatshirt hoodie. 



a sleeve - he made the sleeve more fitted by taking in the inside seam, cutting off the knit cuff.  The design is made using a star stencil and spray bleach.



back of hoodie
he sewed stars and strips fabric inside the hood

front side - he added some brocade fabric and pockets from old jeans. 
very simple sewing - see the frayed edges?  that is how the expensive items at Road Bone are done too.



this is the bottom front. Bobby sewed on a jeans pocket but he left the top part unsewn so it still works like a pocket. 



If you have some young adults needing gifts,  you might want to be like Bobby and try making some altered clothing. 

One way to spend a weekend....

Friday evening,  move all the furniture out of living room.  Then rip up the "white" carpet, tack strip and pads.  

Buy a big pile of supplies - many boxes of tiles, a saw. things to measure with, buckets, rags. sponges. grout, mortar, spacers, gloves, knee pads -



take all your furniture and smush it into other rooms -

more displaced furniture...

Be very happy and thankful that your hardworking son comes to help -I think "help" does not even describe how much work he did, he was so willing and did everything he could

We started just before 8 a.m. Saturday morning,  this end of the room has straight sides and it went pretty fast.

That end of the room has several angles and nooks and took lots more measuring and cutting.

The last tile was laid in place just about 3 Saturday  afternoon. 


The mortar dried overnight.
Then today,  we grouted it and cleaned the grout.  Later this evening,  we moved some the furniture back in.

Sorry, there are not "after" pictures.  We've put some things back but this house is no way ready for pictures.

Tiling is hard and messy,  not difficult though and no prior experience is really necessary.  However, we are sore and tired after completing this job.  Having the house in disarray is uncomfortable too
But we all feel really satisfied we accomplished this.

and NO MORE big jobs that involve any major effort will be going on at this house for quite some time.   

editted.....

Edited -I just don't have the time to blog right now. Maybe I'll be back later but I may not.


I hope to keep visiting you all at your blogs when possible. 

If you need to contact me,  just email me
stwoliver3@yahoo.com 

See you all in CyberSpace.     bye for now!



Granddaugher Elizabeth



Grandson Gavin

October is just about over and  it was mostly painless - here is how I did on what I planned at the first of the month.

•The windows are open and letting in fresh cool air - I can still hear my neighbors A/Cs cycling on and off when I am out walking
October was mostly mild as far as Oklahoma weather goes.  We did run the A/C  a few days for very short periods.  The heater never had to be fired up.  I should get a utility bill in about a week and think it will be very small.

•our dishwasher is not getting the dishes clean so I will be hand washing as I don't want to buy a new DW right now. I know some studies say that dishwashers cost less and use less water than hand washing but I disagree. I even did it and watched my bill for a month and it went down about $11 that month.
I like the idea of washing by hand but most days I was just so busy with grandbabies or other house things that I did not do much handwashing.  I bought a different brand of dw det and it seems to do a better job of cleaning too - Cascade with bleach, it is a powder in a big green box

•cooking and eating all meals at home unless there is a really good reason to eat out
we ate "out" a total of 5 times,  we had takeout doughnuts for breakfast twice,  ate at Chipotle twice and had delivery pizza from Hideaway once.  All other meals were cooked and eaten at home.

•continue to shop sales and use coupons wisely  Yes!

•get started on Christmas gifts.  well, sort of but just barely!  I do have some ideas in the planning stage

•Stay home! this is no sacrifice at all for me. I like to stay home. Hubby likes to do errands on weekends anyway so I will try to do my shopping and errands with him. That will save gas and wear and tear on my vehicle.   I did this one.  I bought a tank of gas at the very first of October and did not buy anymore gas until Oct. 27th.  My vehicle was not really empty, just starting to get low and I don't like it to be too low.

•re-read my TightWad Gazette Complete - I've got it out and leafed through a few pages last night  - No, I still have this book out but have not re-read it all the way,  maybe 75 pages or so.  It has lots of good ideas but many of them just don't seem to apply to me right now. 

•my kitchen and household supplies are pretty well stocked. I don't want to totally deplete them because I think it is good idea if possible to keep a reasonable stockpile. But I will I use things on hand for meals and hopefully still continue to keep things bought on sale.      I did use a lot of on hand ingredients and the pantry is a little more empty but still pretty full.   My goal was to spend $100 or less per week,  I did go over that a little but I did some stocking up that I did not have to do.

•baking bread at home   Yep,  baked all our bread except for a few loaves I bought this week at Dollar Tree for $1 a loaf,  3 of them went in the freezer. 

•my stepson and his wife got 2 milk cows last week. They brought us a gallon of their fresh milk on Tuesday, fresh farm milk with a thick layer of cream on top. Very good stuff!  -  we've had 5 gallons of this "real" milk and I've used it for chocolate pudding, coconut pudding, cream gravy, pancakes, home made ice cream.  It is really nice.  I have not yet been successful making butter from the cream even though I have tried 5 times. 


•and the big "sacrifice" for me will be no or very little soda. I do love diet soda but I am only drinking one a day now and don't plan on increasing that and may even give them up all together. Iced Tea will just have to satisfy.     Really big FAIL on this one,  diet dr. pepper has been my almost constant companion.  Maybe I will do better next month.


 We've been talking about re-doing our floors for quite some time and we're undecided about buying new carpet and trying to get hardwood or a Pergo type floor.  All those options would of been at least $2500, probably quite a bit more.
Well,  if you have been reading my other posts,  you know we are laying ceramic tile all by ourselves!  It has been some trial and error,  there is still the (big) living room and the a hall way to do.  But we finished the dining room and other hall way today. 
I think laying tile could be done by most anyone but it is messy, takes lots of figuring and some patience. 
Our DIY option of laying the tile should cost less than $1000.  We are having to work for it but the significant savings is worth it. 

November is a new month but I expect to continue on and hopefully complete some of the undone tasks from October.  How about you?   

Tightwad October - do it yourself - we hope!

Remember just a couple of weeks ago that I posted this dining room's makeover was done?
well, not quite!  Our house has white carpet in most all the rooms and after 8 years of hard living on it with messy adults, dogs and now grandbabies,  it was not as fresh as I would prefer.
I've never much liked carpet anyway because of how hard it is to clean and to know if it is clean. 

So - after 3 trips to Lowes this weekend, one trip was just to look, second trip was to buy one box of the tiles we thought we liked to see if they would coordinate with our current tile and the 3rd trip was to buy 32 boxes of tiles, borders, etc. 
We plan on replacing the carpet in our dining room, living room and one hall.
Jeff ripped up the carpet in the dining room and it came up easy with no glue holding it down. 

So, if all goes well,  I guess we will start tiling soon.  Nope, we have never done it before except for some peel and stick tiles we put in our old house. 
And if it goes badly when we try to do it,  I guess we will do all the prep work and then hire someone to do the tiling.