Our hearts to out to the many tornado victims in Oklahoma, and I know many of you would like to do something to help. In addition to any financial assistance you can offer to the Red Cross, etc., I thought you might like to do something with your hands to help, too. (Somehow, making things also helps us to feel more useful, doesn’t it? Even if we can’t be there in person.) Here are a few links that might help you with sewing donations:
If you’re a quilter (or want to become a quilter in short order!) you can send quilts or blankets here.
This is a nice story about an 83-year-old woman who sews and donates clothing to causes like this one. If you’d like to sew clothing for children who were effected, you might consider making a Lazy Days Skirt or a Popover Sundress and sending them to Sewing to Rebuild.
Project Linus is also contributing to the effort! Here is a story with links.
If you’re aware of any other services, please feel free to leave them in the comments of this post. And thanks for helping out!
One of our easiest patterns to sew, the Music Box Jumper, is this week’s new digital release.
This simple, empire-waist jumper designed especially for beginning sewists can be worn alone or layered over a blouse or shirt in cooler weather. View A presents a softly pleated, mid-calf-length skirt, while View B gives an A-line skirt with a single, inverted box pleat at center back. Both views button up the back.
OK, so Tool Tuesday is happening on Wednesday this week. With Quilt Market last weekend, I’m still playing catch up….
So here we go. As long as we’re talking about favorite sewing tools, let’s add a sleeve board to our list!
Sleeve boards are like mini ironing boards. They’re officially made for pressing sleeves (hence the name), since a sleeve fits right over the board and can be ironed without a crease. But sleeve boards are also really useful when you’re sewing, since the surface is just the right size for pressing a seam. I keep my sleeve board and my iron right next to me when I sew, and that way I’m not constantly getting up to press at the ironing board. It saves lots of time. Then I can continue right along with my sewing, pressing each seam as I go. And since children’s clothes are so small, sleeve boards are also useful for pressing kids’ clothing.
We don’t carry sleeve boards in the shop, but if you’re looking for one you can find them almost anywhere (including Target, I just noticed). I prefer the double-sided boards with a sturdy wood or metal frame like the one shown above, but you can also find collapsible boards if space is a concern. I have a feeling you’ll really like this tool once you start using it.
One of our most popular patterns for boys is the Sketchbook Shirt + Shorts pattern. This week we’re releasing it as a digital pattern.
The Sketchbook pattern features a shirt in two versions: a cuffed, long-sleeve option with a one-piece collar and chest pocket or a band collar and short sleeve option. Both styles include button front placket and shirt-tail hem. Also included is a pattern for below-the-knee length elastic-waist shorts which include front pockets and a mock fly.
This pattern is now available for purchase and download in the shop.
We’ve just gotten another report on Flat S’s adventures. It seems that she’s still in the state of California, having a good time in Long Beach with Janice Harris and her family.
Now we’ll turn it over to Janice and her report on what Flat S has been up to lately.
After Flat S had such a nice visit seeing all the sights of Los Angeles with the Chan family, she made a brief stop with us in Long Beach. We were happy to show her around our neighborhood after the Chans showed her around Los Angeles. As Sarvi mentioned, Los Angeles is really lots of small neighborhoods making up one huge metropolitan area.
Long Beach is part of the greater metropolitan Los Angeles area, and has over 450,000 inhabitants. The city is 51 square miles–a big city by any measure. If you look in Wikipedia, we found that there are almost 50 distinct neighborhoods in Long Beach!
We live in a little part of Long Beach, and we were happy to show Flat S our neighborhood. We live in Belmont Heights. Our neighborhood is right near the water, so most of our family activities are water-related.
Belmont Heights is famous for a colony of feral parrots that live in the trees. We hear them squawking all the time. Apparently, there was a fire in a shop in Pasadena (35 miles away) in the 1980’s and the parrots escaped, and somehow nested in our neighborhood. There are hundreds of them!
I love these clear plastic graph rulers. I first started using them in design school when we needed to be constantly adding seam allowances to our paper patterns and muslins. I’ve been using them ever since.
These rulers are great because they’re so easy to read, especially when you need to measure or mark anything with eighths or even sixteenths of an inch.
