Dottie Box #2

You may remember me telling you last month about a subscription box I signed up for called Dottie Box. I received my second box this month and, to be honest, I was less than enamored. I think the concept is pretty neat--each month you get a box of things from different Etsy shops. It's a great way to support handmade and to find some products that you may never otherwise have tried. But the thing is...it's a bit pricey per month, and if the stuff inside isn't your thing at all you feel a bit...I don't want to say cheated or ripped off, but you definitely feel a little disappointed.

Here's what my second box looked like--

OK, cute little packages looking like presents. I can get behind that. Here's what was in those packages--

Homemade laundry soap, which I'll probably never use (but it does smell good); some shimmery fold-over elastic hair ties; earrings that I won't wear (I can't wear earrings--gross things happen to my lobes); a very strongly scented soy candle that I can't burn because soy candles make me cough terribly for some reason); and a bit of soap that is about a third of the size of the tin that it comes in.

I wasn't majorly in love with the first month, but I have used most of the products. Everything was packaged really cute, they included coupons for certain shops, and other little things. This month I feel fell short of even that, especially as I'm probably not going to use any of the stuff. I signed onto my account and cancelled my subscription. Hey, I'm all for supporting handmade. But I'm also for feeling like I got my money's worth. So far I feel like I have paid for a lot of cute packaging. They do have a blog that I'll check out to see what was included in that month's box, and if there's something that catches my eye I'll just buy that particular product.

BUT I do still really love the idea of a surprise box of who knows what each month, so I researched the other boxes that are out there a little more and picked a new one to try. This one is about the same price but has free shipping, and is craft-oriented. The past projects are all things I would have made, so I'm excited and curious (and wondering how I missed this one the first time around).

Sitting and Staring

We had a visitor this weekend. And unlike the houseguest that is similar to fish (they both stink in three days, according to Poor Richard's Almanack) this one was quite welcome (though he did stink a few times a day, hahahaha).

Here is what Aiden played with this weekend: a piece of a broken balloon as the 'snap' sound it makes is apparently hysterical; two empty Sunny D bottles (I tried to teach him to clink and say "Cheers!" but he just smashes them and laughs; an empty box with a rope tied to it (it was the indoor sled that Zach pulled him around in); and the packaging from his little baby ravioli dinner. He has oodles of toys and he plays with trash.

He's a very good listener--you say his name firmly and he stops and looks at you. Then he does what all kids do--he holds your gaze while he does that thing you told him not to do because apparently staring at you makes his actions invisible. When you tell him to not go near the steps, he stops and comes back. But he's a little stinker too--you tell him to stop, he does, takes a little baby step just to be a bugger, and looks back at you to see if you saw. Apparently smart-assery starts around the age of one.

I remember when Zach was this age--I could just stare and watch and observe every single thing he did, and I do the same with Aiden (and any other wee 'uns, to be honest). How their little dimply hands manipulate toys, how they giggle to themselves for no reason, making you wonder what is going on in their little brains, how they stare at you to try and mimic your facial expression or to try and say the word you're saying. It is endlessly fascinating to me.

I also just want to say that I think it's highly unfair that a disproportionate number of boys get thick, long eyelashes, and girls get the lashes that have them waving a hairy stick with black goop on it near their eyes to give the illusion of such.

This post serves as my excuse note as to why I don't have anything to share with you (anything finished, anyway). You would think I don't have piles of fabric and scraps of paper with 'orders' scribbled on them littering my sewing area... But stumpy baby teeth and little giggles beat the whirr of a sewing machine any day.

A Few for Friday - #32

You know what irks me? Activia commercials. All I can think about now when I see Jamie Lee Curtis is...number two. I refuse to eat the stuff because she bugs me so much. It's a very simple principle to stick to because I don't like yogurt anyway. Wanna know what I did the other night? I hemmed five pairs of pants in under an hour. That's twelve minutes a pair. Granted, they were khakis and one of the easiest things to hem, but still. I was proud. I was in the store the other day and wanted a Hershey bar. You know what they wanted for it? A dollar and change. How old am I that candy bars used to be fifty cents, and the bump to sixty cents was considered robbery? I remember when postage stamps were a quarter and now they're almost twice that. I. Am. Getting old. Pretty soon I'll have to start acting like a grown-up. But not yet. Because first I have to show you some pictures.

I like red berries. They make me think of Christmas. Especially when I'm sweating while taking the picture. I'm pretty certain these are poisonous, but I have no idea what they are.

I took this of Alicia and Aiden up the mountains. I was snapping deer and there these two were in the window. I love this photo, though if I look at it too long I feel like it's a picture of a weird hostage situation. 

 A criminal act was committed in my house this week. SOMEone decided to mix the Skittles and the M&Ms in the same candy jar. What a terrible snacking experience that is. Thankfully they've been separated and put in their rightful places (the chocolate in our tummies and the Skittles in the jar).

That's great, but where?

 What? How did YOU make soup when you were one? The old adage still rings true--you can buy the kid an expensive toy but he's just going to play with the box.

I am now going to figure out where I'm going since I'm apparently almost there :)

A Jaunt Up North: Part Two

(See Part One here).

Sunday morning dawned clear and sunny. There had been plans to hit up a water park, but it was a lot farther away than we had realized,  and we would have lost at least two hours just driving. So we headed over to Bushkill Falls billed as the Niagara of Pennsylvania. I guess if you take that to mean the biggest waterfalls in PA, then yes, you could call it that. Otherwise, if you're thinking the falls would be just as big and grand as Niagara you would be disappointed.

We had come here years ago during a drought--the park was almost empty and the falls were mere trickles. We have had record rainfall this summer, so the falls were roaring this time. And the paths were crowded. The day was fairly warm and I was tempted to throw on jeans but I'm glad I didn't. There was a fair bit of exercise involved. There are four different marked trails, varying in difficulty and length that you could walk. We went for the second trail (about forty-five minutes) as did everyone else in existence, it seems.

You do get a map that shows where you are and which particular waterfall you're looking at, but the further you go, and the more you climb the hotter you get. And when I get hot I don't really care where the hell I am--I just want to not be hot anymore. Zach, in his infinite eloquence, declared that the falls "look like bird crap on a car window." After a second look I couldn't really argue, LOL.

Isn't that sky so stinkin' blue it's criminal? Down under the trees amongst the falls it was dim, unless you were in a spot where the sun was hitting. But when you looked straight up it reminded you that was indeed bright and sunny.

All of the paths are dirt paths, but to climb through the park you have to go up and down various sets of steps of differing heights and widths (and levelness, in certain instances). I don't think I would have wanted to be the one who had to build all of those (although in my mind they were built by industrious little gnomes :)

Some of the areas looked like the exact sort of spot that fairies would congregate for meetings and festivals--

Other areas look like they could be part of the little wading pond where Mary and Laura splashed and played in On the Banks of Plum Creek.

 
I do not remember there being this many steps the last time we were there (which was about sixteen years ago), so I can't be entirely sure if it's age that made me forget the steps or age that made me feel them much more than before.

Wishing on pennies is obviously quite a popular activity here--look at the light reflecting off all of them! It almost looks like fire in the water. Zach threw his penny high and hard, hoping for a ricochet effect. Instead, his penny got stuck on a wee crag in the wall. He was not perturbed that his wish might not come true, because "eventually the water will erode the wall all the way over here and my penny will then fall in the water." If only he had that much patience when it came to everything else in the world.

I couldn't find any interesting creatures (which is fine as they tend to freak me out more than intrigue me--I'm such a city girl), but time has some interesting effects on the more stationary bits of nature:

My mom took a couple pictures of me and Zach. In the first I didn't realize he was being goofy so I'm giving the big cheese:

In this one I'm telling him that we need to give very serious faces to the camera as though we aren't having any fun at all. You can see how well that went over--

I do like when he thinks he's not being watched and lets his guard down, jumping from rock to rock.

On the way out of the Falls was a paddle boat spot. Rachel, Matt, Zach and I all wanted to go, but Rachel and I did not want to paddle--we fell for that when we were kids and it was not easy, fun, or relaxing. So Matt and Zach sat up front and paddled, and Rachel and I sat in the back and ordered them around. They didn't listen to us, and kept trying to steer into the floating piles of...crap...looking....stuff to try and see what it was but it wouldn't "cooperate" (which was fine with us).

At one point a duck fluttered out of the trees and flew away and I sat there pointing and yelling "A bird! A bird!" like a two year old. When what I really meant to say was "I wish I had seen that sooner so I could have taken a picture." I just simply did not have time to say all that.

When our time was up they decided to paddle in backwards, because boys will always find a way to make things more interesting to themselves when they think the standard way is too boring. Hey, as long as I didn't have to paddle the thing they could go in any way but upside down for all I care.

We went out to dinner, but my stomach got the wigglies on the twisty mountain roads, so pictures were the furthest thing from my mind. Back at the house we all just retreated to doing our own thing. It was a perfectly perfect mix of doing and not doing, of relaxing, snuggly weather and get up and get going weather. I think an extra day would have been nice, but I always love to come home.

A Jaunt Up North: Part One

That title is kind of misleading as 'up north' is really just about 100 miles and not so far as it implies, but this past weekend we all trotted off up to the Poconos for a long weekend away. It was just us--me, my parents, my nephews, my sisters, and my brother in law (my brother had to work and so couldn't come). We rented a house in an area that we don't usually stay when we head north (it's pretty much smack dab against PA's eastern border instead of further west) so we weren't too familiar with anything. We headed up Friday afternoon, and just vegged for the first evening. Saturday dawned gloomy and rainy and we thought the day would be a total wash, but eventually the sun broke through. If it wasn't for some humidity you would never know that it was pouring earlier.

Our plans were weather-dependent so we kept switching things around. We got a late start on Saturday so our options were limited. We were all very excited to head to what sounded like this absolutely marvelous bazaar and flea market that promised everything you could think of. It was decidedly not that way and short work was made of it. We decided to just drive and see what was around. What we saw was a go-kart place. It was kind of creepy. It looked like the kind of place where a serial killer would work, or that would be the haunted place in a horror movie. My guess would be that this rabbit that looks like it has to use the men's room and is holding it in comes to life after dark and wields a hatchet against anyone who tries to get extra kartin' time.

My overactive imagination was not helped by this image of an insane clown. Sincerely--why would you put this on a children's ride? No wonder people have clown issues. I might have them now too; I'm not sure yet.

The fuel smell and the juddery engines would have worked their way into my brain and given me a migraine for sure so I stayed track-side and snapped photos while the others went scooting.

 Aiden and his daddy (my BIL Matt). He kept that expression the whole time, as though he was trying to decide if this was fun or weird (Aiden, not his dad. His dad had a good old time).

Classic Rachel. If there's a camera she will give a little pose. Always has. As opposed to me, who tries to dive behind the nearest obstacle while screaming "I will break your thumb if you take my picture!"

I love this pic. They both look so serious, getting ready to race. My dad is 6'5, so he looked quite crammed into his car. He had more fun than anybody, though.

Zach didn't want to go. He decided to take advantage of me going to bed early to see how late he could stay up the night before, so he was a little cranky and not in the mood for much. The place where we stayed had a swimming pool within the development, so he went swimming Saturday night with everyone. He was absolutely exhausted afterwards, and slept longer than I've ever known him to.

We had passed a few antique shops so we stopped at those on the way back to the house. They had some pretty neat things, but I was very focused on this print that caught my eye--

It's actually quite small. There's something about this that had me staring and staring, and thinking of which house I'd live in and what the rooms would be decorated like and how cozy the lamp-lit windows look. It was priced a little too high for my taste, but after my third stop-and-stare the shop owner told me that she could tell I wanted it and she needed to make room for new things so she knocked off a third of the price. Sold! I just have to find a place for it.

The house we stayed in was by far the nicest vacation home we've ever gone to. You can definitely tell when people buy a property just to rent it out, and when people stay at the property and rent it out as well. This was definitely the latter--so nice, so comfortable, with everything you could possibly need. The master bath had a jacuzzi in it. The only person who used it was Zach. And he usually prefaced this by saying something like "Do I have time to get in the jacuzzi? I need to relax." 

It was a very quiet area, with tons of trees and shade out back. After the rain that morning the droplets glistened so brightly in the sunshine filtering through--

And the deer! My goodness, the deer! Little groups would wander through eating leaves and grass. They weren't afraid of us being out there taking pictures, but they were very aware of our presence. So glad I brought my better camera with the wicked zoom--I never would have been able to get close enough to get decent pics otherwise.

My mom almost got close enough to feed them, and I imagine the older ones would have eaten out of her hand, but their protective instincts were up due to the presence of the fawns. When they finally scampered away it was so adorable--their little butts going up and down under their long skinny legs. Too pretty.

I've got one more day to share with you. I got a little camera happy :)

Two Patterns, Two Wristlets, One Finished Product

Howdy! I am loving this weather today--blue skies and perfect temps. It feels like September almost--it's quite reminiscent of the days when summer comes to a close and the air has that decidedly "back-to-school" feeling about it. But of course it's early August, and I expect it to be sweltering again in no time.

Anyhow, we went away for a nice long weekend (still sorting out my pics) and I just remembered to snap some pics of my latest make (along with a fail) this afternoon. You know those little zip around wristlets that Vera Bradley makes? That type of zipper insertion has always stymied me. Even when I would stand there in a store and examine one in a way that a casual shopper would never do (but a drug smuggler looking for a hiding spot might, prompting several instances of edge-to-one's voice "Can I help you?!") it left me scratching my head. The only reason I would ever attempt one would be if I was asked to. Which I was. And as I usually do with things I consider quite challenging, I put it off until a quarter til the last minute.

My brain could just not get itself around it, and I'll be damned if I could find a tutorial online (I finally found one after a looooong search that ended on page twenty of my search results--after I needed it, of course. I just had to keep looking as I couldn't believe there wasn't something out there). I found a pattern on Craftsy that was almost an exact knock-off of the Vera Bradley one I had been looking at. So let's start there. With the fail.

For starters, this version used very little interfacing but used cotton duck to give it stability. And bulk. Oy, the bulk. I wasn't in love with it but went with it anyway as that's what the pattern called for (and I had never used it so I didn't know any differently). Some sections are quite structured, and others (like the pockets) are very floppy and weak feeling. The method of construction also added a lot of bulk to the seams. 

I usually make my own piping with bias tape. I don't believe the packaged stuff is cut on the bias which makes it very much not fun for applying to curves. 

 Just so you know, it's not supposed to be that shape. It's supposed to be a rectangle.

 I didn't even finish the turning gaps on the inside. I'm only showing you this so that you can see the inside layout. Credit card pockets and a slip pocket on the left, and a zip and  slip on the right. Though bulky they felt very flimsy.

One of my pet peeves is when something is fairly critical to the success of something but is left out of or unstressed in the instructions. Some of you may know (or all of you may) that zippers come in different sizes--size 3 is the norm, size 5 is a bit larger and is frequently used in handbags or couch cushions. I almost use size 3 strictly. The pattern-writer said she "used a size 5" but didn't indicate that the wider zipper tape on a size 5 would be necessary to keep it from getting caught up in all that bulk.

So that happened. Which made this completely kaput. But is interesting if you were ever curious about the nitty-gritty of a zipper.

This one was constructed in lots of bits. Two inside pieces, two outside pieces, and a spine attached to the zipper. The zipper and spine are sewn together to form a ring of sorts. And this gets stitched to the perimeter of the insides and outsides with gaps left for turning. If your stitching is off the slightest bit it won't work. I let out my seams a bit and it still didn't work. Between the bulk and the tightness it just wasn't meant to be, hence the split zipper above.

It may come as a surprise but I didn't get angry, I didn't curse, I didn't whine. I simply figured that I would have to come up with something else. But I had one last search, found a very similar pattern that became available after I had bought this one and done an extensive search, and went with that. And now here's the successful version.

It's not crooked. I just have an insanely fine-tuned knack for making things look that way in photos.

The cell phone pocket has folds to it so it can expand a bit, and it's held shut by a velcro tab (which I changed from the original drawstring version). It will fit an iPhone very comfortably, but not my Galaxy S3 (it's waaayyy too tall--but it would be an easy pattern adjustment).

 

This zipper goes in completely differently and allows a little wiggle room. It wasnt a whooosh! kind of thing, but it was not difficult at all. This one has credit card pockets on the left, and a zip on the right. The main difference is that there isn't a slip pocket, but I do believe I could easily add one just under that zip (which I'll give a crack if I try it again).

This version uses fusible fleece and ends up feeling sturdy without the cumbersome bulk that the duck had. I used a standard zipper as well--there was so much less bulk for it to get caught up in that it worked perfectly.

I really should have d-rings in multiple sizes but I don't. But this little gap left in the spine of the wristlet works perfectly for the hook. I even managed to sew my strap on an angle (like bias tape strips) so there is hardly any bulk in it.

For a first shot at this (let's forget about the fail for a moment, shall we?) I am in no way displeased. There are a few spots that could be a touch neater (and I forgot to replace the pull on the zip pocket) but that's to my eye and not the casual observer (hopefully).

I'm not one for throwing down a name and telling you to avoid that person's wares, unless their practices are unethical or they're selling a shoddy product or something to that effect. So I will not tell you which pattern I failed at, but I will tell you that if you're interested in making the second version that I used this pattern. There's nothing wrong with the first--it's well-written, but it is extremely fiddly and the ultimate in precision is needed (which is not how I usually fly so that may have something to do with the rough time I had of it). I was asked about a tutorial for this one but I won't be offering one--I would essentially be taking someone's hard work and rewriting it in my own words which just wouldn't be right (especially since a fair amount of work must have gone into figuring out the zipper). Sorry kids, but I just wouldn't feel right about it (especially since I didn't contribute any brain cells to it on any level--I simply searched and bought).

OH! And can I just tell you that Vera Bradley charges $50 for one of these? That's insane!!!! You can make one yourself for a fraction of the cost in fabrics that you love for a little bit of effort and some time. The holidays are fast approaching--you could make the cost of the pattern go quite far in providing some unique gifts. But that's all I'm going to say about Christmas. That and it's never too soon to stitch. OK, now I'm done :)