Burp Cloths

So I finally found some tiny speck of energy, and made a burp cloth. Or 23. Either one.

I used this tutorial from Homemade By Jill to cut out my fabric. After cutting out a couple by hand, I decided that was too much like hardwork, and stacked them and cut them in one big pile with a rotary cutter.

Stack of fabric and template.

For the backs I was originally going to use minkey fabric, but I decided to be economical and use a heap of terry toweling flat nappies I had brought at some point. I gave them a wash and dry to make them softer (and to pre-shrink them) and gave them a quick iron so they sat flat.

It turned out that I got two burp cloths to one terry flat, so I cut all the terry flats in half.

Now I am the worlds lasiest sewing, and am willing to admit it. So I didn't bother cutting the flats to the required shape, I just sewed the fabric wrong side up directly onto the rectangle, making sure I left an opening at some point to turn it the right side out later on.

When finished I ended up with this. Don't stress too much if the fabric bubbles a bit, as long as it is somewhat flat it is all good.

Then came the horrible task of cutting off the excess. My poor little hands were so sore by the end of it - really do need to invest in proper sewing scissors and not use the kitchen scissors.

Then came the fun (and messy) part of turning them all the right way out. My floor was covered in white fluff!

After one I was left with this - hmmm, not overly pretty, but you get the drift.

Once they were all flipped I gave them a quick press with the iron to flatten the seams

I forgot to photograph a step in here, but I then decided to re-run another seam around the outside to keep them from puffing up in the wash, and hopefully avoiding the iron after washing them. Lets face it, who wants to iron something that is going to be spewed on?

Several hours later I ended up with 23 of these beauties

It was quite an easy thing to make, and considering I used things I already had at home (fabric from my stash and terry flats that I was going to use a spew rags anyway), I was quite happy with the outcome. I even made a few gender specific ones for gifts for friends.
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Sausage Dogs

I think sausage dogs are the cutest things ever, and always get the giggles when I see them down the street, so I couldn't resist this cushion from Persnickety Pelican

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Stripey Goodness

How utterly cute! The Daisy Box Girls

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MOMA Toast

MoMA Store

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Artwork Gifts

I have quite a number of pregnant friends, all of whom I am most excited for, as we are becoming mummies are the same time. And because it means that I have more people to buy baby things for :D

I am currently eyeing off these prints from Galerie Anais. I just need a certain friend to let me know if she is expecting a baby girl or boy.
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Cards

I have a thing for cards, figuring that a single card can say so much. Thus I have quite a large collection of various occasion cards in our wrapping paper box. I am loving these ones from Winfred Studios currently and have even managed to purchase a few.

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I had a moment recently...

Where I threw the worlds most massive tantrum known to man. Seriously, there were screams, bodies being flung on the floor, and tears. Oh so many tears. And it took me about 3 hours to gain any sort of composure back.

It all started a few years back where an electrical storm fried my mothers computer hard-drive. It was dead, and nothing could be retrieved. She even went to the extreme of paying someone to get it back, but it was long gone. 6 years of photos, documents and internet links gone. Just like that. The photos were the most devastating one, as my mum has sewn many quilts and photographed them all. And now she has nothing but her memories of them.

So, me being the awesome daughter that I am (I am her favourite child - possibly because I am ONLY child), I lectured her about how she was a stupid idiot for having not backed all this up onto disks, and how in addition to having disks, she really should have an external hard-drive that she backs things up onto as well. Just to be double sure. What can I say, I love getting on my technological high horse about things, especially when it comes to my mum.

Anyway, fast forward to a month or so back, and I was needing to write a resume for my current position. I haven't always been religious in doing backups of our laptops, but I do try to do them at least once a month onto an external hard-drive. I have it set up so that it backs up the files on our computer, and all the photos are stored on another external drive (I have three now). If anything was to happen to either of our laptops least I could do a system restore and have all my programs and settings on my machine reasonably quickly.

Back to the resume. So I went to my little black drive, and it made a noise. Not a good noise either. So I unplugged it, and tried again. And it made an even worse noise. Cue tears.

Three hours later, I was throwing myself on the floor screaming - my hard-drive have failed. And just to add a little bit more insult to the injury, I have never quite got around to burning the files to disk.

ANYWAY, the point of this story is that everyone should have at least their most essential documents backed up online on a service like Dropbox. Dropbox is a free service, and allows you to store up to 2GB of data online. Best of all, it works on Windows, Mac and the penguin one.
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