Category: Crafts

Sewing a Stroller

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Bebe, the soft doll the boys have, came in a stroller. It matched his pajamas and was perfectly sized for a small child to push around the house/neighborhood. What it wasn’t perfectly sized for was a four-year-old plopping his rear in it and pulling himself around the house. So it has needed some surgery for a couple years.

I had some green cotton left over from fixing up the balance bike, and I had some random remnant bin finds. I salvaged the hardware from the original seat and used what was left of the seat pieces as a pattern for the new one.

I made the main portions of the seat from the green material, then made bias binding for the edges. Actually, I first tried to reuse the original edging, but somehow it wasn’t long enough despite the fact that I used the original seat as the pattern. Go figure.

I also changed how the top attached to the stroller. It originally had a couple elastic pieces that went around the handle. I chose to do button straps instead. That way the whole thing is easily removable in case it needs to be washed. And there’s no chance of the elastic breaking down as the old ones did.

Bottlecap Magnets

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Previously meant to be necklaces, as evidenced by this four-year-old post. Like I mentioned a couple weeks ago, these were started for that shared shop. But I didn’t know about making things with resin back then, and couldn’t figure out what it was I didn’t exactly like about them.

Recently, I decided I would like them much better as magnets than necklaces. I also decided to fill them in with resin, which made them look more like I originally wanted.

I also redid the pictures for the centers. Originally, I had cut out the picture with an X-acto knife, but the pictures got a bit lost against the background color. So this time I decided to leave the white background.

I’ve put them into these sets, which you can find on my Etsy shop. The April20 coupon code is still good through April 30, 2016, for 20% off.

Ignoring the directions

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I’ve done a lot of fabric dying over the past few years. Most specifically starting in college when one of my instructors mentioned we could just dye our muslin for our final pieces instead of having to buy different fabric. The muslin came with our supplies paid for by our tuition, and I didn’t have a job so it was a welcome revelation.

Since then I’ve dyed many t-shirts and more muslin for other projects, so when I was asked if I could fix a shirt I knew that was definitely on the list of things I can do.

Unfortunately, I forgot to take a picture of what it looked like before. So here is a picture of it after applying the dye.

  

And this is what it looked like after washing.

  

As for ignoring the directions, well, see that bottle of dye in the top picture? It’s Tulip Permanent Dye, meant for dying large batches of fabric in hot water with salt. They have other dye specifically for tie dye. But I’m going to share my secret: it works just as well mixed with cold/warm water. As long as you wet the piece first and let it set overnight, you can use it just the same as the “one step” dye.