Door Stopped

It has been hot hot hot here lately and we only have air conditioners in the two bedrooms. The rest of the house is unbearable, especially my craft room, which has an entire wall of windows that face the morning sun. The heat gets trapped in there and stays into the wee hours of the night. So last night I grabbed my sewing machine, my iron and my small ironing board and holed up in the bedroom.
We like to have our cats join us at night in our "family bed" but they need to be able to come and go as they please because, well, they're cats. When it's air conditioner weather we try to keep the door as close to shut as possible to keep the cool in while still letting the pusses out. Up until now our doorstop of choice has been a Minnesota Northstars water bottle filled with change. Not ideal. So last night I made the perfect cool air keeper-inner, this doorstop from Lotta Jansdotter's Simple Sewing.
I followed the pattern and even went out to Ralph's at 11 'o clock to buy five pounds of beans. This is how it turned out.
Pretty cute and definitely functional but kind of a droopy sad sack. So this morning I ripped open one of the top seams and stuffed some fiber fill in on top of the beans.
Much better!

Sleepy Time

Before our recent whirlwind trip to Minnesota and Wisconsin I whipped up this travel neck pillow. Right before the trip, actually. Like I was stuffing and sewing the seam closed in the car on the way to the airport.It was totally worth it though. We took a red eye to Minnesota on Friday night, arrived and drove two hours to the reunion (camp) site in Wisconsin, then drove back the next day to get on a plane back to CA that night, then work on Monday. With this baby I slept all the way through both flights and both car rides!

It's Over

Harv's chance of one day becoming an American Idol is officially ZERO. Yes that's right, as of today he's thirty years old! It's nice being married to an older man and I'm excited to spend the next two and a half years in my twenties while he braves the next decade and makes sure it's safe. He's quite a guy.Happy birthday Bee, love Liz.

No time to talk

Hello friends. Harv and I had quite a busy and tiring yet fun weekend, going to Minnesota and Wisconsin for the annual Harvatine Rendezvous. More on that later though. I am tired and busy planning for somebody's 30th birthday this Friday. I just wanted to say hello and give you another peek at my progress on the quilt I started last week.
I hope you all had a wonderful weekend!

That's better.

The molds are poured. There is no work to be done on Harv's maquette but wait for the silicone to cure. I think you know what that means!
Despite having a couple of quilts in the works and several other projects I could be working on, I was too excited about a new idea I had to not dive right into yet another quilt.
I'm not very familiar with many piecing tricks or techniques. I came up with a fun and simple way to execute this new design but for all I know it could already be out there in the universe. I don't know. I do know that I snuck a half hour this morning before work and made a little more progress on this puppy. I sewed for 30 minutes then got ready to leave and Harv said "I need two more minutes" so I thought "Perfect! I can make a couple more cuts!" Silly. Trying to cut a 21 in wide piece into three parts, I lined the edge up at the one inch mark. "Cut at 8 inches!" I thought. Done. "Okay, two times eight is 16! Cut there!" Done. "Why are my pieces all different sizes?" Wah-wah. So, I messed up. But that's okay! I will adjust and adapt and forge ahead. And then I'll make another quilt with this new pattern because, I'll be honest, I was planning on doing that anyway! Practice makes perfect. Despite this set back, it feels oh so good to put the clay and other messy stuff away and restore my sewing machine to it's place of honor. Ah.

Something Different

There hasn't been any sewing going on around here in the past few days. I've been working on a maquette for a stop-motion series that Harv is developing.
I'm hoping to finish sculpting and cast it this weekend so I can paint it this week before we head out to Wisconsin for this year's Harvatine Rendezvous.

In the spirit of this post, why don't you go check out some of the shorts that Harv has been working on. This is what he does while I sew. Look here here and here. And if you really feel like watching more stop-motion, I just found some of the stuff I animated on the Robot Chicken Star Wars special. Unlike Harv, I only do this stuff at work.

Ladies and Gentlemen

Two months ago, our friend Ethan (seen here playing Pac-Man in 1983) gave me this totally amazing Pac-Man fabric that he had been hording for years on the condition that I make him something with some of it. I like making things for friends and was happy to oblige.
Ethan and I brainstormed, trying to come up with an item that was not only worthy of the fabric but would be well used and loved. Ethan and his wife Cindy are not the type of people to fill their home with video game decor and I had already made Ethan some coasters so it was a real dilemma.
Weeks later, we still hadn't come up with the perfect, awe-inspiring object that we were hoping for. Then Ethan came into work with one of these, a miniature paper model of a Pac-Man machine. It didn't take long for that little machine to inspire this:
I call him Pac-y.
His screen is a perfect gameboardesque piece of the Pac-Man fabric.
His body is made of courderoy and some super soft snuggle fabric.
He has a joystick AND two actual working coin slots with a zipper in the back so you can reach in and get your loot!
Pac-y is the charter game at what will from here on be known as "The Harvacade".

Pac-y is quick to make friends.
He's very popular with the ladies.
And he's even a friend to dogs!
Pac-y is also enormous. I don't know that I will make another machine that quite reaches his grandeur but the Harvacade will soon be populated with more Pac-ettes than you can shake a stick at so stay tuned!