Speed Sewing

It's beach time! Woohoo! Friday I'll be driving 12 hours, that's right, 12 hours to Oak Island, NC with my 2 1/2 year old son to spend 10 days at the beach with my parents. Did I mention I'll be in the car, alone with a toddler for 12 hours? Oy. I'm not sure how that's gonna go, I'm a bit nervous but I'm hoping for the best. When I get nervous, I do frenzied last minute sewing. While at Joann's last week, I found some great lightweight shirting fabric on sale and decided Jack needed a "beach" shirt. I started looking around online for a good pattern, when I remembered that I had this book:

Unfortunately, we've been packing up the house for the big move and the books are already in boxes. After opening up a few boxes, I dug it out and found the Easy Linen Shirt - exactly what I had been picturing. This is what I came up with:

It fits perfectly, a little bit big for growing into, but he's not swimming in it. Yay! While I was sewing this, I was flipping through the book and found a pattern for the "To Go Artist" and decided this would be perfect for the looooooong trip down. So I dipped into the fabric stash for my "Outside Oslo" canvas and whipped one up.

I love how this turned out - I wasn't convinced at first. But after finding a sketch pad at Target that fit into it p-e-r-f-e-c-t-l-y and setting it in front of Jack, I'm a convert. He drew in it for over half an hour! That's forever in toddler time. And long enough for me to finish this:

 

I've been wanting to make Jack a Toddler Backback from the Made By Rae pattern, like this one. I was eyeing the Happy Drawing fabric line from Cloud9 and the Dragons fabric especially was  calling me. Not only is it a bit of an inside joke (don't wake the dragon!) but if Jack eventually goes to the local high school, their mascot is the Green Dragons! Pretty perfect, right? I needed a zipper and some piping, and luckily my local Walmart actually had the almost exact shade of green - which I found in the clearance bin. It was fate. Now Jack can shove whatever he wants to take with us in there and carry his own stuff!

And as if all of this wasn't enough, I made up this little blanket and a couple of burp cloths for a friend about to have her second baby. They aren't finding out the sex, so I tried to be a bit gender neutral. Her husband is a French professor - believe me, I quadruple checked the accent marks on the hand embroidery!

Not bad for 8 days work, eh?