One more pillowcase!

Dear reader, please indulge me. I have one more pillowcase to show you.

This one is a little different from the others, in that I started out with a regular boring pink pillowcase that came with the pink sheets. It is a nice soft cotton pillowcase, and it is a pretty color of pink, but I really wanted to fluff it up a little, so I added a wide eyelet edge and now I'm in love with it.

It gives me so much more pleasure, and it was very easy to make:

• Just measure around the edge of your pillowcase and cut a piece of the eyelet edging the same length plus one inch for a seam. Sew the seam, which will be a 1/2 inch seam, and press it to one side.
• Then press under a 1/4 inch fold on the straight edge of the eyelet. Pin the straight edge of the eyelet to the hem seam of the pillowcase with the fold to the inside, matching the fold of the eyelet with the seam of the pillowcase. Machine sew very close to the fold.
• Pin and machine sew a second line of stitch where the original pillowcase ends, catching the edge of the pillowcase in the stitching.

Here's the finished product. Isn't it pretty?

Animal fabric

Much Life has come between me and my blog, dear readers. But I am back! Of course, Life goes on thankfully, and in force. Some of Life is work and for the past few months I've been working as a bartender slingin' drinks at the pool bar of a nearby luxurious resort. What fun! What a lot of work! Now summer is waning, although the best weather of the year still remains here in northern California. I'll be working fewer hours but still (wo)manning the pool bar until at least mid-October. Perfect. It leaves me more time for all those other things I love.

Like pillowcases. Honestly, I have a passion for cute pillowcases. Here's another one I made...can you see the little monkeys on the blue part? Love them.

And then there's the Ant Skirt. It started out to be a pair of crop pants, but I seriously over-estimated my girth when it came to alterations to the pattern. Yes, it happens to all of us! When I got these pants put together, they were ginormous. Seriously. After a good laugh with my boyfriend Wayne over huge pants with ants, I cut off the legs and the crotch pieces, and sewed up the front and back. Voila! An adorable Ant Skirt. Here it is:

And here are the ants!

Isn't that about as cute as it gets? Now I'm working on a giraffe skirt, which I'll show you soon.

Sewing Pillowcases

One of my many passions is sewing. My mom taught me how to sew when I was 6 (for my dolls) and I've been doing it ever since. When I was in high school, I sewed most of my own clothes. It was normal for me to start a skirt in the morning (say, Saturday) and wear it on a date that night. To give my mom credit, she was cool enough to hem the almost-finished skirt for me while I showered and got gorgeous before the Guy-of-the-Day arrived.

Now I sew curtains and table napkins and things like that. I'm getting back into tailoring clothes for myself...slowly, slowly. Here's a blog I love about sewing, incidentally. http://www.blogforbettersewing.com/

So last week I was visiting my son and his family in Portland OR, and my daughter-in-law The Wonderful Allie took me to a fabric shop called Cool Cottons. Obviously they carry only cottons, and tons of them. What a great shop! On the wall, among the hand-sewn skirts and jackets and baby sleepers and little-kid backpacks was a pillowcase, done up in spaceships or something.

All of a sudden I had a brainstorm...I could make pillowcases from any fabric I wanted! Why I hadn't known this before, I can't think. I must have been brain dead. I am always looking (in stores) for cute pillowcases and never finding what I want. Anyway, I bought some cool fabric, trying to remember the colors of my duvet cover and bedroom walls and all that and here is the result below. So easy - it took about an hour from start to finish - and so cute, I think! Don't you think it's cute?

On to more new pillowcases!