Homemade Chenille Spit-Up Cloths

Well, I made it into the next round of Every Creative Endevour's Creative Bloggers Got Talent contest! And the project that got me into the next round was these beautiful homemade chenille spit-up cloths.

A dear friend of mine is having a baby girl in May. She asked me to make some spit-up cloths and I took it upon myself to make her some of the most beautiful, soft spit-up cloths I could. :)

Before our baby boy was born, I learned about homemade chenille. I decided to experiment with it a bit on a small scale, so I sewed some small pieces up and attached it to some cloth diapers to make spit-up cloths. It turned out that these spit-up cloths are the best spit-up catchers in our house. Besides looking really interesting, they also have a great texture that our baby loves to feel. So, of course, I had to make some for my friend, but I didn't want them to just be boring straight lines. Nope, I decided to be crazy and do spirals and ripples. The ripples were pretty easy, but the spirals were definitely more ambitious. Ready see how I made them?

I like to use flannel for my chenille, but any looser-woven cloth will do well. Choose colors that blend well together and match the other side of what will become your spit-up cloth. I chose to use only 3 layers of flannel since I was going to make the chenille ridges pretty short. Cut the fabrics and a base layer to sew them onto to size. These cloths were cut to be 17x17 inches. Choose your color order and it's time to really begin! I have found that having the lightest color on top gives the design the most definition, as you will see in the following pictures.

I decided that I would be stitching with the base layer up so that I could see my stitches, so I laid all the fabrics on top of each other in opposite order. Then secure them. If you have some of that sticky fabric spray, then that would work best. If not, use lots and lots of pins. You can use quilt-basting safety pins, but I prefer to use straight pins so that I can remove them easily. I also marked the quadrants of the cloth on the back to help me arrange my designs.

 To make the spirals, I marked my center and then marked dots like so at 1/4 and 1/2 inches from the center. I recommend doing slightly wider channels than 1/4 inches--the channels were close to too small for cutting on curves. Straight channels would be a different story.

 Then I connected the dots to give me my first several spirals.

 Once you have your spiral going, you can just approximate your way around or use your presser foot at a guide.

 I sewed this spiral until I ran off the edge.

 I filled in the corner and expanded the spiral a bit before moving onto the second spiral.

 Two spirals!

 I filled in the rest of the spit-up cloth with little Vs following the curves of the two spirals.

 All done with the sewing!

 I love my Olfa chenille cutter, it makes cutting the channels so much easier! But you still have to be careful that you don't cut too close to the lines of stitching. I also had some channels that were too narrow for my cutter to get through, so I used my seam ripper.

 Unfortunately, I had a few accidents in the cutting. To fix the gaps, I whip stitched the raw edges together...

 Ironed a patch on using sewable fusible web...

 And then stitched on each edge and the middle, following the stitching above, to secure the patch. Good as new!

 Add the backing and binding before washing! Here's the front, ready to wash...

 And the back! I love these colors.

 Now the ripples....I decided to just do kind of organic, free form ripples. I had tried something more exact, but that didn't work out and I ended up having to tear out 6 lines of stitching, which was super annoying. I made this ripple cloth as a back-up in case the spiral one failed.

 I sewed one initial line and then just kind of followed it the rest of the time. Sometimes I had to stray from the original line to make more ripples because it started smoothing out over time. I enjoyed how it felt kind of spontaneous. :)

 This is the spiral one, freshly washed. If you click on the picture, it should get bigger. You will see that it's a bit shaggy. Those shaggy parts are where I failed to keep the spiral curved enough to stay on the bias. I ended up having to give it a hair cut. Then I washed it again and it got a little bit shaggy again, so it got a second hair cut. I'm pretty sure that it won't be too shaggy with subsequent washings...I hope. The ripple cloth had some very minor shagginess, but nothing that was a big deal.

 Our little guy LOVED looking at the spirals--I may have to make one of these for him.

 Sweet little hands.

 Ripples! I like how the colors on this one turned out better. I just inverted the colors. The spiral cloth's colors are: light pink, dark pink, then orange; the ripple's colors are: orange, dark pink, then light pink.

 And, finally, a fully shot because it drives me crazy when blog posts don't include a picture of the full project. :)

And there you go! Feel free to ask any questions!

~Regina

Homemade Paints!

I've been trying out lots of fun activities with our little girl this summer. She loved painting with watercolor so much, that I decided to try more traditional paints.

Recipe here (scroll to the bottom)

Flour Fingerpaint

1 cup flour
2 tablespoons salt
1 1/2 cups cold water
1 1/4 cups hot water
Food coloring or tempera paint

Directions

1. Put flour and salt in saucepan.
2. Add cold water and beat with whisk or eggbeater until smooth.
3. Add hot water and boil until mixture is thick.
4. Beat again until smooth.
5. Color as desired with food coloring or powdered tempera paint.
6. Store covered in refrigerator.

My little girl watched me while I cooked the paint, then she got to help make the colors!

 She LOVED mixing the food colorings in.

 Finally, it was time to paint!

 She had to make sure that each paint brush matched the paint it was in as closely as possible...

 Finally, we got around to some painting. I had to show her "how" to paint.

 The paint didn't cover the paper quite as nicely as I would have liked. My daughter also wasn't as thrilled with this type of paint as she was with the water colors. I tried thinning out the paint the next time, but it didn't help her want to do it more. So the paints sat in our fridge for 6 weeks until I realized that they had started to grow mold. Yuck. I guess we need to buy non-perishable paint if we want to keep it around...

~Regina

Strawberry Jam Using Apples and Citrus for Pectin

A good friend of mine found this recipe and inspired me to try it. It was a great recipe, but I had a really hard time figuring out some of the nuances (specifically the "mounding up") because there weren't any pictures! Oh pictures, how I love thee! ;)

However, please read the recipe and its post first before going through my post about it. She knows a lot more about canning and making this jam than I do. I pretty much just say the same thing she did, but with pictures. :)

So, for 8 cups (approximately) of strawberry jam, you need:
-5 tart apples (the tarter the more pectin they contain)
-1 lemon or lime
-8 cups strawberries, after removing the ends and roughly chopping them
-5 1/2 cups sugar

Remove the stem and blossom ends of the apples. Chop the rest of the apple coarsely (including the core and seeds!). Finely chop the entire lemon or lime, doing nothing but rinsing it off (yes, you want the peel and seeds!). Toss these into a pot and add just enough water to keep them from sticking to the pot. Don't stress about adding "too much" water because you can boil off any extra.

 Boil for about 20 minutes or until everything is nice and soft. (While you're boiling the apples and lemon, you'll want to prepare your strawberries, but I'll include those pictures later to keep the post less confusing.)

Once they're nice and soft and starting to look like applesauce, dump the apple mixture into a fine-mesh sieve and force the mixture into a bowl. All the peels and seeds and rough stuff should stay in the sieve. You should get about 2 cups of puree.

Now, while you're cooking the apple mixture, prep your jars and strawberries. I boiled my jars and lids since it had been a while since I had washed my jars.

 I took the tops off the strawberries, cut them into chunks...

 And threw them into the blender. I did this because I cannot stand chunks of fruit in my jam. I like smooth jam. If you don't mind chunks, then just roughly chop the strawberries.

Throw your strawberries, apple puree, and sugar into a large (deep is recommended) pot. The original post says that the mixture will foam a lot, but I haven't found that to be true. Maybe because I puree the strawberries? (Note: I've only made the recipe twice.)

 Turn your stove onto medium heat and stir the mixture frequently. Once it reaches boiling, let it boil for about 20 minutes, still stirring frequently (if not more frequently!). Be careful of splashing jam! That stuff is like hot lava! :-/ The mixture should thicken and "mound up" on a spoon. That was the hard part for me to figure out.

 Does this count as mounding up? I think it does. Both times I have made the jam, I let it get to this point (second time I let it go a bit longer) and they seem equally set to me.

 Once I liked what I saw, I took the jam off the stove and poured it into my now dry, but still hot, jars (this is half the recipe pictured).

 Now you're going to process the jars in a water bath. I'm no canning expert, trust me, but it's pretty simple: put the lids on the jars and tighten them (but not super tight!), put them in a deep pot on a rack (or something to keep them off of the bottom of the pot), cover with water to at least 1 inch deeper than the lids of the jars, and bring the water to a boil. Let them boil for 10 minutes and then sit for another 5 (this last bit is not necessary, but prevents any hot jam from "spitting" out of an over-filled jar--I've never had it happen, but it sounds like a good idea to keep it from happening).

 Pull your jars out and let them sit undisturbed in a cool, dark place (or at least out of direct sunlight) for 24 hrs. If after 24 hrs, one or more of the lids hasn't "popped in" then you'll need to keep that jar in the fridge. Enjoy!

We went through 4 8oz jars of jam in about 5 weeks. Our little 3 person family. Yeah, we love this stuff. The second time I made the jam, I used a lime rather than a lemon and the jam seems to have a bitter after-taste to me. It's not bad, it just makes the jam not quite as wonderful as the first time. I doubt that this would be the case with every lime, we must have just gotten a bitter one. :-/

~Regina