Except I’m not giving away my blog! I’m giving away lots of fun stuff though!

Today is the SewMamaSew blog giveaway day and since I love getting free crap, I thought I’d offer lots of free crap to you instead (cause I have never won anything, seriously, except the husband-lottery. Maybe the baby lottery. Maybe).

There are three prizes in my giveaway today and you can enter for just one or all three! How sweet am I? Though if you by some random chance win all three, you will have to endure the wrath of all the other participants!

The first prize is my “handmade” gift that is not about cloth menstrual pads (haha!). I wanted to give something away that would have larger appeal, so I’m offering this hand-stitched cathedral window pincushion I made. I have been really drawn to these batik colors lately, so I went with this color scheme for the whole theme of my give-away. This prize also includes some yoyo hairpins with tiny silver moons and two very random fabric sheep 1.5″ pinback buttons (what can I say, I’m getting little random craft things ready for the farmers markets!).

This is giveaway #1!

My second gift is a set of cloth pantyliners. If you’re interested in making the switch from disposable menstrual products to cloth, check out the links in my sidebar for more information! This is a set of four — two 6″ liners and two 8″ liners. One set is organic cotton and raw silk and the other is organic cotton and organic bamboo velour! I hand-dyed the cotton myself. Raw silk is a fiber that helps reduce irritation and it just feels really cool on hot summer days. Bamboo velour is almost buttery soft. These are perfect for light days, spotting, discharge (OMG I just said discharge on the internet!) and are great if you already use a cup or sponge and want some additional leak protection. I’m happy to answer any/all questions about my products and believe me, I’ve been at this for years  — nothing is TMI!

This is giveaway #2!

Finally I have a kit of vintage notions and sewing stuff. This has a cute pajama pattern, a bit of vintage fabric, some lace and trim and a few zips. Enough to keep you busy for awhile. I used to have these kits in my etsy shop, but have discontinued them (look for them in a new incarnation soon though)! You’ll love this. Seriously, it’s so much fun!

This is giveaway #3!

To enter, pick which one(s) you want to win and answer the corresponding questions in my comments:

For #1: I really got lost in these batik colors! And I love dying fabric too. What is your dream fabric color combo? If you could find hand-dyed or hand-batiked fabric in any color combo, what would it be?

For #2: Help me improve my ever-evolving cloth-pad FAQ. What info would be most helpful to you? To your friend you’re trying to convert?

For #3: What’s been your luckiest or favorite vintage find? I go thrifting once a week. How often do you go?

If you want more than one prize, you’ll have to answer more than one question! For extra points, post about my giveaway on your blog or in a message board and then comment the link! I’ll enter your name twice!

My giveaway will close on May 31st at Noon EST. The winner of each prize will be picked randomly. International folks are welcome to play along! Hopefully this all made sense! Let me know if you have any questions!
Good luck!

When my husband and I bought the house we live in, we were just two crazy single kids in love. We had been living in an apartment downtown over the city’s Republican headquarters (we weren’t spying, I swear!) and were shopping for a house because it was in the middle of that housing market thing where everyone and their dog was getting mortgages. We saw this house and thought it was just perfect for the two of us — two bedrooms, just enough space to be cozy but not cramped, tiny backyard we could put a garden in, monthly payments lower than our rent.

I remember the day we went to sign the papers. I had a gig that night at a local bar (in my past life I was a singer/songwriter with the guitar) and I dedicated my performance to Aaron because he “bought me a house” (I remember saying that in the mic to the bar and being really proud of him). After we got home though I didn’t feel so hot and got this weird sinking feeling. We stopped off at CVS and I picked up a pregnancy test. Surprise!!

Anyway, we’ve lived here for three years and we’ve made TONS of progress on the house, but it’s really tiny for our soon-to-be family of four. I find that I spend almost 90% of my home-time in one of two places and I thought I’d write a little about them both: my creative space/sewing area and my garden.

I share a sewing studio with my husband who uses the room as an office and all of this actually happens in our dining room. We’re in the process of finishing the attic for a studio but I honestly don’t know if it’ll happen. In the meanwhile, I make do with one bookshelf and have to keep most of my fabric and all of my bolts up in closets and wrapped up in storage.

I got my sewing desk at a thrift shop for $2, changed the hardware and painted it blue. It’s *just* big enough to fit my sewing machine and serger, but nothing else. Next to it, I have a shelf where I keep fabrics larger than half a yard that have been pre-washed.

The bookshelf opposite holds my inkpads, tape, the wraps that I use when I package orders, buttons and notions for yoyos. The second shelf is fat quarters and scraps and the third shelf has unwashed yardage and embroidery notions. In my dream world, this shelf is replaced by an Expedit shelf from Ikea (maybe this weekend cause they’re going to be on sale). The unfortunate thing about the dining room is that there isn’t a lot of wall space to put shelves.I’d love to have some place I can keep all my fabric and notions readily available, but that will not be my dining room for sure! One of the nice features of my dining room though is that our table has two extra leafs that pull out and it makes a nice cutting table (I just have to keep the rotary cutter off the tabletop).

My second sanctuary in this house is the garden, which I’ve blogged about before. In the last few weeks we’ve gotten a lot of progress done in the garden. We’ve installed rain barrels to collect the run-off water from our roof and that’s been AWESOME for watering our plots. Here’s our garden as of today:

We do square foot gardening and I’ve got three boxes. Two are veggies and one is just a wild herb bed. We also have a pepper patch, a strawberry patch, rhubarb (you can’t have strawberries without rhubarb!), some random eggplants and cabbage planted throughout our yard, and a big plot for garlic. This week we’re going to dig three trenches to try trench gardening some zucchini, squash and melons.

I think our garlic plot is my favorite so far this year because we did all the hard work for it last fall and it’s grown as if by magic (I’ve totally forgotten all the work we put in to it). I also like it because it’s along the side of our house next to the alley and I wonder what people think of it when they walk by! The elephant garlic plants are near the end and they are HUGE already! They probably stand nearly three feet tall at this point. We need to mulch it down again before it gets too hot, but I’m pretty stoked about all the garlic that is going to come up from this.

I probably spend as much time outside gardening this time of year as I do sewing. It helps that Sullivan is totally happy to be outside as much as possible (me sewing doesn’t seem to entertain him as much). It seems that we’re going to be living here for the next several years anyway and we’re both of the opinion that we need to make the most of it.

What is your creative space like? Do you have a sanctuary in your home? Blog about it and let me know the link!

Over the weekend I got my long-coveted Clover millinery patterns in the mail. The orange and green ones you see here. I saw these in an issue of Cotton Time from last spring and I searched and searched and couldn’t find them anywhere. So finally I contacted this lovely etsy seller and she tracked them down for me and sent them from Singapore. I was pretty thrilled to get the package, I must say, since I looked everywhere and even contacted Clover’s US division and they wouldn’t sell them to me!

So on Mother’s Day I made a hat:

I had a really fantastic Mother’s Day actually. My lovely husband took me to the quilt shop and I picked out four fat quarters, a charm pack and two different sized yo-yo makers. Fabric yo-yos sort of confuse me, but they’re rediculously addictive and a really awesome way to go through a scrap basket. I haven’t figured out what I’m going to do with them, so I’ve been filling mason jars in the meanwhile.

And using them as accessories:

And THEN he got me an Oreo Frozen Custard cake from Ritters! OMG which is seriously like a little bit of frozen heaven let me tell you!

If the fabric, the ice cream cake and the alone time to make a hat weren’t enough, he made breakfast and dinner (pancakes for breakfast and sloppy fauxs for dinner) and we got a whole bunch of flowers to plant in the front yard (mostly impatiens and those little red flowers I can’t remember the name of). Have I ever mentioned how lucky I am?

But the best part of this past weekend was that I turned in my thesis and I took my last final on Saturday morning! Well, not my last-last final, because I still need to take Spanish classes if I want to graduate. But until August I am a free woman! Woo! I just imagine all the time I’ll have to garden, make hats and sew yo-yos!

Except that pesky having-a-baby thing that’s coming up soon.

I think I’ve got a new obsession. I’ve been totally inspired by the underwear posts on Angry Chicken and finally worked up the nerve to cut apart a pair of panties that were too small for me. I traced them bigger to make a pattern. I have a few scraps of bamboo interlock left from my tie-dying adventures last summer and I bought 10 yards of underwear elastic from Wazoodle the last time I ordered fabric.

They actually sewed together really easy and it probably only took me 20-30 minutes to put these together. I did add a waist band because, well, I’m pregnant and the last thing anyone wants to see is the coin slot on an enormously pregnant lady. I don’t even know if “coin slot” is the right word. I’ve just heard my husband use it a few times recently (he is telling me it has something to do with Saturday Night Live and Lindsay Lohan).

The interlock is a bit too thick for underpants, in my opinion, but they’ll be nice and cushy this winter!

So now I’m going to cut apart a different style of underpants and try again with some old t-shirts I have lying around. The whole project has definitely given me the confidence that I can make my own dream underpants and not have to spend $20 for skivvies at Victoria’s Secret anymore.

Oh I like the word “skivvies”.

I was going to blog on Friday and then I fell asleep. I was going to blog yesterday, but I fell asleep while writing a blog (never a good sign! That post was obviously scrapped!). I’ve really overworked myself this week. Last night I had swollen feet and ankles and my back hurt in places I didn’t know it could hurt. I finally finished the big order I had pending and we got to visit with my parents and brother so Aaron could do their taxes (did you know my husband has a degree in accounting? That’s so funny if you know him. Maybe not if you don’t…).

Mother’s birthday is this week and she left me some very subtle notes in a few of my Japanese sewing books, so that’s my next project (I might have to make two of those bags at once though… er, yeah). I’ve got the linen, but I might need to dig through my stash to find some longer scraps to use for the handles. Mother left a note that a matching hat would be fancy too. Sheesh! I’ll post some WIP pictures on my flickr and here perhaps too. Such an adorable bag. I can understand why mother likes it (really!).

And I was quite pleased with how my new packaging ideas have turned out. I have long loathed the idea of including business cards and buying new ribbons and yarns and tissue paper just to make packages look pretty when I send them out. I mean, I make reusable menstrual pads. Out of organic hemp. How hippie-dippy can you get? And here I am trying to make them look like they came from Hallmark? No thanks. So I’m going to use up the biz cards I have left and then start making my own on recycled papers. Here’s the first bit of packaging change I’m making. The stamp came from a swap with twocheeseplease (check out her etsy shop here!) and it’s one of my absolute favorite handmade possessions (along with a stamp she made of my etsy banner).

I’ve got some other shop news too, but I need to really sit down and put my thoughts into a journal before I type them up here. Basically, I have to raise my prices a bit and change some of the materials I use. It makes me cranky to think about it and I’m not in the mood to be cranky right now.

Today will be for cleaning up all the mess I’ve made overworking myself the past few days and finally getting something done on my thesis (maybe). Oh, and relaxing. I’m supposed to be doing that, right? Me being obnoxiously pregnant and all… Happy Sunday peaches!

Thursdays and Fridays are either my days to get stuff DONE or to rest. Today I am kicking stuff’s butt and taking stuff’s names…

So last night I spent a few hours digging through my pillowcases of vintage sewing supplies and I stuffed six envelopes FULL of stuff. Those were the “fun packages” I blogged about last night. This morning I photographed my little kits and put them up on my etsy shop. Fun, right? Here’s a peek:

More are in my shop!

The kits were fun to put together, but bittersweet. I’ve done a lot of soul searching about crafting lately — after really trying to figure out whether or not to buy that Yudu. I need to just do crafts that I love, and not try to do ALL the crafts — just because I potentially can. I have such a hard time buying things that I know I could make myself, but honestly, I will just never get around to learning how to make everything! Like hand-knitted stuff. I LOVE hand-knitted stuff, but I have no idea how to knit and I need to stop buying knitting needles thinking it will somehow magically convince me to pick it up.

I have a huge box of craft supplies that I’m going to take back to the thrift store even!

This morning I made a gallon of sweet tea for my kombucha mother and when she’s all settled in I might bake a loaf of bread. The rest of the day I plan to sew, sew, sew and get around to snapping those pocket pads that are sitting around. Still haven’t seen the cat this morning. It will be harder to get a daily picture of him when it gets warmer and he goes AWL.

I’m pretty tired already, but I don’t think Sullivan is anywhere near taking a nap. If only he had an off switch!

On Saturday we drove to Ohio to a Joanns Superstore to look at a Yudu. I’d seen videos but I wanted to see it in-person before I bought it. It was a really cool little machine. Much cooler than I expected, actually. But I didn’t get it. All I would use it for is personal use, really, and the whole process takes a lot of time that I really don’t have just to print a few onsies and tshirts. After seeing it though, I would recommend it to anyone looking for a home screen-printer though. The accessories are kind of expensive, but since Joanns is carrying it, you can get 40% off coupons pretty reguarly to use on it I bet.

I actually got to do a bit of extraneous crafting this weekend!

I made this sock monkey for Aaron and I made Sullivan a monster stuffie (that I can’t find to take photos of). I’m really just getting into stuffie making — probably late in the game considering the CPSIA stuff. The monkey’s from the book Sock and Glove by Miyako Kanamori. It’s a really cute book (written in English) and the illustrations are pretty clear. The hardest part was doing the embroidery on a 3 dimensional surface. Obviously I need more practice!

Today’s agenda mostly involves research for my thesis and writing for my poetry class. Blek. Happy Monday peoples!