Seeing as I am eight plus months pregnant, you can imagine that I am nesting just a little bit. Through a circuitous chain of events, this nesting instinct  caused me to spend a few hours this morning making cloth napkins. Here’s how it happened:

1. I’ve been feeling the need to stock-pile frozen dinners so we can easily fix food when the baby is born.
2. Since our regular freezer is pretty full already, I decided we needed our deep freeze back so we have a place to put the dinners I’m going to make.
3. Erin and Bryan helped us move our deep freeze from their house to ours yesterday. We decided to put it in the storage room downstairs.
4. To get the freezer into the storage room, we had to move a shelf with a bunch of boxes of stored crap on it.
5. Once I saw all the boxes of stored crap, my nesting instinct kicked in and I wanted to get rid of it all.
6. I made Zach carry a bunch of the boxes upstairs so I could go through it and post stuff to Freecycle.
7. One of the boxes was labeled “Quilting Fabric”. I figured it would be funky stuff that I’d never use because it wasn’t packed in with my regular fabric stash. But to my surprise, it was all awesome-ness manifested in cloth from top to bottom.
8. Seeing all that awesome-ness made me want to make something right away and I decided that cloth napkins were the way to go.

Because if there’s one thing that will make life easier once a newborn is in the house, it’s cloth napkins.

Anywhoo, this is how I made them:

Step 1: Cut four 16 1/2 inch squares from each of two coordinating fabrics.

Step 2: Line up two squares of fabric, right sides together.

Step 3: Sew the two pieces of fabric together with a 1/4 inch seam allowance. This particular picture was a bad choice because one of my squares wasn’t exactly square and so I couldn’t match the edges up precisely. (You will probably be more careful than I was though and your edges will all match up.) No matter, I just sewed a 1/4 inch from the inner edge of the smaller piece and it all worked out OK.

Important! Don’t sew the seams all around the edges.  You will need to leave a 2-3 inch gap on one side so that you can turn the napkins right side out.

Step 4: OK, now turn the napkins right side out by pulling them through the gap you left. Try to make the corners as sharp and pointy as you can. I clipped a little of the excess fabric of the corners of mine and that helped.

Step 5: Once you have a nice square of pretty fabric turned right side out, iron the seams flat. You will also want to turn under the edges of the fabric at the gap and iron it as flat as you can with a nice sharp crease.

Step 6: Sew a neat hem about 1/8 inch from the seam. Be especially careful as you go over the gap. If you stay 1/8 inch from the edge, that will close the hole up and your napkin will look real pretty there.

Step 7: Sit back and admire your lovely new napkins. Attractive, environmentally friendly and perfect for use when there is a new baby in the house!

My latest craft project was to make a bunch of swaddling blankets for the new baby. When Wyatt was teeny-tiny, the only way he would sleep was if he was being held, and even then he never slept more than three hours at a time.  I’m all for attachment parenting and co-sleeping, but sitting up in bed all night holding a baby is not exactly conducive to getting a good night’s sleep. Swaddling saved me from going insane. The very first time I swaddled Wyatt properly, he slept for five hours straight in his co-sleeper which meant that I slept for five hours straight lying down in bed. When I woke up, I thought I’d died and gone to heaven. It was the most sleep I’d had in a month. I was so energized, I felt like I could run a marathon.

Hmmmm…OK…maybe not a marathon.

I felt like I could walk around the block.

Anyway, I wanted to be sure we had a good supply of swaddling blankets for the new baby, so the other day I went over to the new fabric store by our house and I bought three 42 inch squares of flannel. I know I could have just washed the fabric and used the blankets without doing anything to them, but I wanted a finished edge to keep the cloth from fraying.

I didn’t do anything complicated at all to finish up the edges. I just finger folded each edge over by a quarter of an inch and stitched along all four sides. Then I folded each edge over again and did another pass over them with the sewing machine. Easy peasy.

I’ve been collecting some good links lately and thought I would share them with you, Internet.

Craft Blog — I feel pretty neutral about Craft magazine — don’t love it, don’t hate it — but I looooove their blog. They always have great, interesting, amusing projects and post a bunch every day.

Bembo’s Zoo — Great site for kids. Animals and letters combine in a cool visual tool.

This Tom Selleck Cake — I’d like a hunk of cake like this!

Where the Hell is Matt — his videos rock. I find it very difficult to watch these without tearing up at the thought of how amazing this world is. And we’re going to vacation in Vallejo this summer….

Japanese Paper Dioramas — I keep telling myself, “I don’t have time for another hobby. I don’t have time for another hobby.” So far I’ve resisted.

The Big Picture — amazing photos updated every few days.

Classic Photos recreated in Legos — click through to the photo page to get links to the originals.

I’ve been looking for some crafty, fun ways to be a little greener over the last few months and here is one of my recent projects.

I am super bad about creating and printing Excel documents at work. No matter how careful I am, I frequently insert a bunch of extra rows and columns beyond the area of the spreadsheet I’m actually using so when I print a document it comes out with a bunch of extra pages that only have grid lines on them. I’m working on fixing these ridiculous errors, but recently I printed several copies of a document where I’d royally screwed up and I ended up printing about 200 pages with no actual data on them. Ugh.

I brought the paper home with me and put most of it right onto Wyatt’s coloring shelf so he could use it to create some masterpieces before it got recycled. I reserved a smaller chunk for myself to make a few little notepads. (By the way, I’d like to point out that you don’t have to be an Excel loser to do recycle paper like this — I also bring home other documents that are printed single-sided when I’m tossing stuff from my files at work.)

To make them, I started off by cutting the paper into uniform pieces. The one on the left was 4 x 4 inches. The notepad on the right was made from paper that had been cut into quarters, so it was 4 1/4 x 5 1/2 inches.

I then cut slightly larger pieces of a cardboard package insert to match the size of the printer paper. The package insert I used was from a pack of photo sleeves. I also save the inserts from page protectors, craft supplies, etc. You could even just use a piece of cardboard cut from an Amazon box, cereal box or anything else you can find in your recycling bin that is fairly stiff.

Once I’d cut the cardboard, I decorated it with pretty paper and punches. I kept the one with the boat on it pretty simple because it was for Wyatt and he doesn’t care. I put a little more effort into the the swirly one because it was for my purse.

Once I had everything decorated, I stacked the paper and the covers and put them together with my Bind-It-All machine. Most people won’t have one of those, of course, so other ways you could bind them would be to punch two or three holes through the stack and connect them with binder rings. You could also try threading a string or ribbon through, leaving a little slack and tying very tight knots in them. I bet twist ties would work too and that would be another great way to recycle something.

This photo shows a fanned out version of one of the books looking sort of from the back. You can see the grids lines on the paper.

I keep this notebook in my purse and I use it for making quick grocery lists, mostly. I also whip it out in restaurants and give it to Wyatt to draw on.

We walked over to the store with the wagon to get a few groceries, but Wyatt started acting a little bored almost even before we left our front yard.

To distract him, I handed him my point and shoot and asked him if he could take pictures of things as we walked along. His first assignment? Take a picture of something blue:

Take a picture of something red:

Take a picture of something purple:

Take a picture of some garbage:

I did not instruct him to take a picture of my booty, but that’s one of the hazards of handing your child a camera when you’re pulling him in the wagon. Of course, a normal person wouldn’t have posted this picture on the internet….

My new camera is so damn cute, I just had to make it it’s own little camera cozy. I used to think these things were called “camera cases” but a quick look around Google showed me I was just wrong. They are in fact called camera cozies. The idea behind this camera is that it’s small enough that I can carry it anywhere, but I don’t want it to get all banged up in my bag so that’s why it needs its own little case cozy.

I got this awesome polka-dot fabric and some fleece to match at the fabric store the other day, so I was all ready to dive into this project today. I started off by drafting a pattern based on my camera’s dimensions. I kept forgetting to add in one side of the camera or another though, so I had to make a gazillion drafts. Then I had to figure out the seam allowances which was hard because I didn’t know how much the fleece was going to bulk up the case. I ended up just guessing, but it turns out I guessed wrong. More on that later.

Cutting the fabric out went pretty smoothly.

Next up came the sewing. I don’t even remember the last time I had my sewing machine out and I was making this project up as I went along. This picture pretty much sums up the process because I spent the next two hours sewing impulsively, realizing I’d screwed up, ripping seams out, thinking really hard, sewing again, finding another screw-up, ripping a seam out, and so on and so forth.

But then finally I was done and it had all worked out! Here is a picture with my camera in the cozy:

And here it is all fastened shut:

My camera is all tucked away inside, well-padded and no longer getting scratched. Yay!