Plastic bag holders and the truth about younger sewers

I decided to make a plastic bag holder for my Mom as part of her birthday present this year.  She had said that she liked the last bag holder I made, and I can recall many instances in which the plastic bags would have to be held into the pantry closet while closing the door while I was growing up.  This time, I chose to follow a pattern and use enough fabric, as the bag holder I made for myself doesn't actually fit a whole lot of bags.  I found the tutorial for a 20 minute grocery bag holder on the Craftiness is not Optional blog.  This tutorial was very detailed and easy to follow.

Fabric trued up, cut to size, pinned, sewed, and pressed.

  

While sewing the first seam, I realized that I was just using my standard seam allowance instead of the allowance called for in the pattern. Since this is supposed to have a French seam, I'm guessing that the called for seam allowance is set that way for a reason.

This awareness of fudging the pattern made me chuckle to myself.  In one discussion during a recent machine owners class at the Smith Owen Sewing Center this exact topic came up.  One of the participants was asking if there was a foot or marking on the plate that would make it easy to get a consistent 5/8" seam allowance for sewing clothes.  This digressed into a conversation about how younger sewers don't necessarily play by the old sewing rules when it comes to seam allowances and the like. Being relatively new to sewing, I didn't really have an opinion on the subject. And here I am, less than 24 hours later, basically just winging it and only loosely following the pattern. I guess they were right.

So I measured my normal stitch, where I just line up the edge of the fabric with the side of the foot, and amazingly enough, it's 3/8". Since I managed to do this right so far, I decided to continue and actually try to follow the directions.

5/8" seam measured and sewed.  That is a huge seam allowance!  First French seam complete.

Next up, the bottom and top edges are folded and pressed to create a casing for the elastic.

A piece of ribbon is attached to one edge to create a loop for hanging the finished holder.

Then these casings are sewn, leaving a small opening to pull the elastic through.

I used a safety pin to pull the elastic, with a pin on the other end of the elastic so that the whole piece did not get pulled through.

I did find that it is easier to pull the elastic through so that it would go past the side seam in the same direction the seam was pressed down.  When I tried to pull the elastic through the bulk of the seam first, the pin had to be adjusted several times to get around all of the layers, as it wanted to go into the middle of the seam and would then have nowhere to go.

Once the elastic was pulled through, I sewed the two ends together.  This was a horribly fiddly step.  Any suggestions on how to do this more efficiently?

The opening for the elastic was then sewed closed and the bag was turned right-side out.  

Ta-da!  Finished plastic bag holder.  Happy Birthday Mom!

Crocheted dishcloths and towels

One of my lovely cousins got married this November.  As we travelled a fair distance to attend her wedding, I wanted to give a gift that falls further into the thoughtful category than the expensive category.  After reviewing her gift registry, I think I came up with an idea for a great gift.  Her wish list contains quite a few awesome pieces of purple cookware and small appliances.  Since she seems to be aiming for purple additions to her kitchen, a beautiful set of purple cotton dishcloths and towels should be well received.

I used Bernat Handicrafter Cotton DeLux yarn in the 78320 Purple colorway to make the Alwine's Dishcloth pattern by Melinda Miller.  I must say that I am in love with this pattern.  The border row and the recommended invisible join make the perfect end to this project.

I originally planned to make a variety of dishcloths, but after trying several other patterns that were not written well or had instructions that were far too complicated for the simple look of the design, I decided to make a set from this pattern, and then increase the pattern repeats to add some kitchen towels to the set.

I hope they like this set.  (Don't mind the color, the lights were very yellow in the cabin.  The pictures above are truer in color.)

To see more pictures or notes I took while crocheting these towels, check out my project page on Ravelry.

Book House

My wife reads a lot of books. How many is a lot? Well, she wanted to read 52 last year and finished that many in about 5 months. I have seen wooden book rests in the past made out of wood, here is a link to a few, and I figured it would be a nice thing to make for my wife. I didn't want to just make a simple triangle that served no purpose when not in use though. So I thought building a book house rather than a book rest would be better.

I had been wanting to use some of the pallet wood I had taken apart, but until I got a planer I didn't really have a way to make these boards nice and usable. So this project has been floating around in my head for about 5 or 6 months. Once I got the planer, these were the first boards planed to make the 5 sides of the book house.

Here are the rough boards before I planed them. They had quite a few imperfections and the large board had a slight cupping to it.

 Here are the 3 boards after being planed down and jointed on the sides that are going to be glued together. You can see here that the middle board lost that red tint that it had. One step that I missed here and didn't realize until it was to late was to rip one of the side boards using the jointed side as a reference edge. So after the board was glued together, I had to just kind of wing it to get everything squared up.

The next step was to glue the boards together. I'm sure I probably overkilled it here a bit with the clamps, but I didn't want any of them to feel left out.

And here is what the board looked like after it was glued, cut down to size, and planed again. 

There was a bit of planer snipe at the end of the board, you can kind of see the lines at the top of the board in this picture. I plan to make a better in-feed and out-feed table for the planer to address this.

On a side note, if anyone knows what kind of board the center one is leave a comment. I'm pretty confident that the right and left side pieces are Oak. 

I cut the bottom and sides out of the board above on my table saw with my crosscut sled, then went over to the bandsaw to cut out the finger joints. I wasn't entirely happy with how the finger joints came out, as they are a bit loose. For the next set of joints I used a dado blade on my table saw.

Here are the rough boards I am going to plane and glue up to use for the top piece. It is going to be longer than I need, but I wont complain about having some left overs.

The board looks pretty good after being cut to length and planed down a bit. 

The roof section here is cut a tad bit wide since I figured I would cut to the exact length after I had all of the pieces ready. Doing it this way will give me a bit of scrap that I can use to test finishing options as well as saving me the time of doing the math.

On the left you can see the base section being glued together and on the right is a closer shot of the top sides of the base. I ended up making a couple 45 degree angled cuts to give the roof somewhere to sit. 

I don't have any pictures of gluing together the roof but it was a pretty simple clamp up being a 90 degree angle. The next step was to attach the roof to the house. Since I didn't have a good way to clamp this together, I ended up using ratchet straps. This seemed to work very good. As you can see on the left side where the roof meets the base its not quite square. I think this is partially due to my finger joints being a little sloppy. 

After unstrapping the house and giving it a good sanding from 80 grit to 220 grit this is what it looks like. I intentionally put the knot and hole on the outside of the piece, my wife likes the look of those parts of the wood.

I tested some Tung and Danish Oil on a couple of the scraps from this project to see which would look better. They were pretty close in finish to be honest but the Tung Oil won out in the end.

This is what the finished product looks like after 2 coats of Tung Oil and a bit of sanding with some steel wool.

I took a few of my wife's books and threw them in the book house. I think this turned out pretty well.
The shot on the right is my favorite. I love the way the fingers look dark at the seam on top.

Toddler Step Stool

My niece's birthday is quickly approaching, she is going to be 3. When I spoke with my brother to see what she would like he suggested that I make her a step stool for the kitchen so she can reach the counter and help cook.

The step stool is going to be painted so I'm not planning on being to picky about the wood. I wanted something about 12 inches wide to cut the sides of the stool out of. When shopping at Menards they had a board that was 1x12 inches at 4 feet long for $17. It seemed a bit expensive considering they sell 1x6 at 4 feet long for $3. Since I have a planer and need some practice I just picked up a few of the 6 inch boards and glued 2 of them together.

Here you can see the (almost) 12 inch board after being glued up and planed down, there's also a picture of our shop helper Chewie.

I cut all of the pieces out of the 1x12 @ 4ft board and 2 1x6 @ 4ft boards.  Two of the smaller boards are for the steps and the other two are for kick plates to make sure my niece doesn't lose her footing. 

The kick plates were ripped down a bit and the excess pieces are going to be used to keep the stool sturdy in the back. You will understand a bit better as we go along if you can't visualize it yet.

To make sure the left and right side were the same size, I used double sided sticky tape and put them together. Then I took them to my spindle sander (drill press attachment) and sanded them down to the same size. They were already pretty close but after cutting them out on my band saw they were just a little bit off in some places.

Before assembly I rounded over the front and back edges of the top step and the front of the bottom step as well as both sides of the handles. I countersunk all of the screw heads far enough to plug with a dowel and predrilled all of the holes to make sure there was no cracking when tightening up the screws. You can see here on the top step that there is a lip on both sides, this is to again make sure that my niece doesn't lose her footing and have a spill.

Here I have plugged all of the holes with a dowel, I cut the dowel pieces down to a manageable size with my band saw. It took some elbow grease and a rubber mallet to tap in the dowels with a bit of glue.

I used my random orbit sander with 80 grit paper to grind down the dowels. After that I switched up to 120 grit. At this point we are ready for paint.

I used a green paint that matches my brothers kitchen cabinets and a pink paint that he had lying around. They go together better than I thought they were going to. 

And here is the final product. I used a stencil for the flower and printed one for her name. 

University of Michigan Themed Heat Therapy Rice Bags

There's been a fair bit of crafting going on in the house the past few weeks, but most projects are still works in progress that should be done in the next two weeks.  The one completed project so far is a set of rice bags I made by request from one of my coworkers.  His three year old dog has a recent leg injury and needs to have heat and cold applied each day after his walk.  My coworker had a similar bag filled with beans, but it quickly became a destroyed cat toy and a replacement was needed.  He selected a University of Michigan print and provided 10 pounds of rice.  10 pounds!  I gave one of the 5 pound bags back.

In order to make it easier to switch from hot to cold, I made three bags.  One can be kept in the freezer when not in use, the other can be warmed in the microwave.  The third is a backup in case one of the first two somehow become a cat toy.

The finished bags are 6"x6" squares.  There is about two cups of dried rice in each bag.  I trued up the fabric, and while the fabric was folded into four layers I cut the fabric 6.5" from the squared edge.  I opened the cut fabric by one fold, so there were just two layers.  From this, I cut off the selvage edge and cut three 6.5" sections.  I used the top and bottom layers of each cut for the same bag, so the size and shape would match up perfectly.

I pinned the corners of the two pieces for each bag together, right sides together.  Then I began sewing from the middle of one side all the way around with a 1/4" seam allowance, leaving about 1" of space to flip the bag inside out and fill with rice.  I attempted to clip the edges with some cheap pinking shears from a beginners sewing kit I purchased a few years back, but gave up and pulled out my Fiskars shears.  Good cutting tools are worth every penny.   Once the edges were trimmed, I pressed the seams to set them and to make it a bit easier to turn the bag and get the corners to pull out properly.  The 1" opening was a bit tight to flip the bag right side out, but it was doable and minimized the amount of whip stitching I had to do to close the bag.  I used a handy paper plate that has been rolled and taped into a cone shape by Lee to fill the bag with rice.  Once filled, I whip stitched the gap closed.  I strongly recommend listening to "Whip It" by Devo whenever whip stitching is required.  It makes the experience so much more entertaining.

The bags were completed pretty quickly as I made about a dozen hand sized bags to keep all of my Uncles hands warm last winter.  My cutting, sewing, hand-sewing skills, and sewing machine have all improved since then, which I would guess helped this project go as smoothly as it did.  I sure hope the recipients recovery goes just as smoothly.