City Girl Goes Camping

I'm city girl...DH is a country boy. I grew up about an hour outside of Boston. He grew up in Milwaukee. My family vacations were to Disney World. His family vacations were camping 'Up North'. He loves hunting, fishing, and hiking. I love sewing, reading and shopping.

When we first got married I avoided going 'Up North' if at all possible. Why? Well ... it's full of nature, bugs, dirt and ticks...and did I mention bugs and dirt?

Then DH bought an ATV. He suggest we go trail riding 'Up North'. Okay, fine. So we put our ATV on a trailer, drove 3 hours, crated the dogs in his Uncle's cabin and hit the trails. It was fun. A few hours in, DH turned to me and asked "wanna drive?" Sure. 30 minutes later I was hooked. By the end of the day it was obvious that we were going to have to buy an additional ATV.

Two ATVs and a few years later we are ready to try out some new trails. So we did what any sane and logical couple (where one person doesn't like camping) would do...we bought an RV. Well technically it's a toy hauler, which means that the back end is a door that opens up and we can drive the ATVs inside. There are hooks on the floor so that we can strap the ATVs down. 

The first thing my good friend Erika said when I told her that we bought an RV was "Kat, you realize that nature will still be there when you open the door right?"  HA HA HA she knows me too well. 

 

Regardless, I'm excited about the idea of driving around the country with our dogs and our ATVs...trying out new trails, seeing new beautiful places, meeting new people. We are going on our first trip soon. I'll be sure to post all about our first adventure.

Running Shirt

Back in Nov, I started running again. It's been about 6 or 7 years since I had last been running on a regular basis. I bought a pair of Newton running sneakers and joined the Y.  I'm loving it there. Did I mention their pool has a water slide? What's not to love? I've been running on their indoor track...it works really well for me...except that I'm HOT. Even with a tank top on.  So I went to a few different chain stores to buy tank top with mesh on the sides. But I couldn't find one.

Then I got the bright idea..why don't I take one of the many dri-fit shirts that DH has, and modify it for me? I can cut off the sleeves and then add mesh on the sides and on the back. It'll save me $$ and I'll have fun re-purposing an old shirt.

It turned out DH had a dri-fit tank top that had accidentally gone through the dryer, and shrank. No longer fitting him. I quickly claimed it as mine.

 I had some left over mesh from a pair of running pants that I had shortened into shorts.

At this point, I should mention that other than hemming pants, I don't have a lot of experience sewing garments. But I was determined to make myself a shirt that was cooler.

I folded the mesh over on itself so that I had two layers of mesh and I cut out two pieces that were 4 inches wide and 12 inches long.

 

Next I pinned the mesh to the shirt, approx 3 inches down from the ummmm...arm pit hole (is there a technical term for that?) I also cut a triangle piece of mesh and pinned that on the back of the shirt, 3 inches down from the collar.

Using a zig-zag stitch I sewed the mesh panels onto the right side of the shirt.

I used purple bobbin thread  because I was too lazy to fill up a black one so that you could see the stitches better.

The next step was my favorite one, turning the shirt inside out, I carefully cut away the shirt behind the mesh panels.

When I was done, I was left with exactly what I wanted!! A dri-fit shirt with mesh sides. Not to shabby.

This has quickly become one of my favorite running shirts.  Maybe I should have laundry 'accidents' more often.  :)

Ironing Board Envy

I'm not gonna lie..I've spent some time drooling over those large ironing boards that I've seen at various quilt shows. I may have even stopped in the middle of the aisle to stare at them. Drool may or may not have reached the floor. But their price tag has always kept them out of my reach.

Recently while ironing a yard of fabric fresh from the dryer, I had an idea. Why not transform my cutting table into an ironing board!! It would be perfect for ironing yards of fabric after pre-washing, and just right for fusing batting to any size quilt.

My cutting table.

My plan was to create and ironing board cover out of Therma-Flec that I could plop down on my cutting table when I wasn't cutting fabric. Of course this would also mean cleaning off the cutting table which is home to many misc items. But I figured a little cleaning would be worth it.

After measuring my cutting table I bought two yards of pre-quilted Therma-Flec. What I didn't realize was that the edges were raw, with batting sticking out.

I thought about serging them, but in the end, I decided to bind them with pre-made bias tape from my stash.

I didn't have any of those fancy wonder clips, so I used office binder clips to "pin" the binding in place. They worked out okay. But honestly, I had a hard time getting both sides of the binding to stitch down at the same time. And I had to flip the entire cover over and re-stitch the binding from the back catching all the spots that I had missed.

Office binder clips holding the bias tape in place.

I usually sew the front of my binding on by machine and then hand sew the back on....I like my usual method better...but I was interested in trying to machine sew both sides of binding at once. I'm sure with a bit more practice I could get the machine method down pat.  I would like to try the wonder clips and compare them to the binder clips to see if they work better/easier.  The one thing that I really did like about using the office binder clips was that they were super easy to remove. Easier than pulling pins out. I might try using the clips on other projects and see what happens.

After I had the edges bound, I was going to sew material onto the sides so that the cover would spill over the edges of my cutting table on all four sides. I had decided that I would just use clamps to hold the cover in place while ironing. But then my MIL walked in....she looked at it and said..'Why do extra work? I bet the weight of that cover would keep it in place, you can probably get away with only clamping down the two ends.' hmmmmm. Less work. I love this idea.

Completed cover!!!!

So I went with it. So far soo good. I love the cover, it makes ironing so much easier when I can really spread the fabric out. And the best part....it was super inexpensive. Which of course leaves me with more $$$ to put toward fabric!!!  :)