Actually it is Grandma’s sweater. Re-purposed.

Remember how my mom gave me two entire trash bags full of sweaters?

What is a girl to do with all of these sweaters? Well, make sweater puppets, stuffed animals, Pottery Barn Knock-off pillows, and hats, of course.

And today I learned something even more awesome from the blog Smashed Peas and Carrots when I was Googling for more ideas about what to do with these sweaters. You can make toddler dresses out of them! Genius, that is, pure genius. Had to try it.

I made mine without the sleeves, though, because I liked the jumper concept and the sleeves seemed a little beyond my limited seamstress capabilities.

Start by tracing a dress your daughter already owns onto the sweater. This dress is shorter than I wanted the jumper to be, so I placed it up a little higher. Give yourself some wiggle room on the outside for a seam allowance. I don’t measure, I’m a really sloppy sewer, but Smashed Peas and Carrots says to leave 1/4 of an inch.

Cut along the line, I did both sides of the sweater at once to make things as easy as possible for myself.

Put the two pieces right-sides-together and sew from the arm hole (Where my finger is) down on both sides. Then sew the shoulder straps together, making sure to go back and forth a few times for stability.

My mom gave me a Serger for my birthday, but I don’t know how to use it yet, so I zig-zaged around the outside of the arm holes to prevent the sweater from unraveling. This gave a pretty cool ruffled effect, but it wasn’t what I was going for so eventually I decided to hem the arm holes. It’s not necessary to do both, just pick one or the other. (The arm holes also stretched quite a bit, so at the very end I sewed them shut a bit more.)

The neck is sort of hard to explain, but I’ll do the best I can. I cut the neck off of the sweater and pined it to the wrong side of the jumper. Then I zig-zag stiched to attach the two piece together. (Again, I wish I knew how to use that Serger that is sitting in its box on the kitchen table.)

Then turn the sweater right-side-out (Ignore the fact that it is still wrong-side-out in the picture below and just focus on the way the collar is folded. I was still experimenting at the point when I took this picture.) and fold the collar over the front. If your collar is cooperative it should stay like this, but mine wasn’t, so I stitched it in place.

At this point I also decided to hem the sleeves because I was going for a clean, classic look.

I made another sweater hat to match it. (That’s the 6th one this week!)

Now to wait for the little one to wake up in the morning so we can play dress up…
How stinkin’ cute would this be with some white tights and maybe a white long-sleeved shirt underneath?

Answer: This cute!

(The arm holes don’t really stick out like the pic on the right, but this was the best picture I could get to show the length)

It would have cost about $30 to buy this sweater jumper & hat on sale at Gymboree, but in this case I actually like my free ones better anyway. Not bad for an hour’s work after the kids were in bed.

Time for me to go do my happy dance. 🙂

Later this month Fireflies and Jellybeans is having an Iron Crafter competition. Just like the tv show Iron Chef, she gives a secret ingredient and then you have to make something out of it. I don’t know if I’m going to enter this (it’s just one of those projects that seems too easy to be impressive to anyone) but that’s why I decided to make something out of a cardboard box.

I started with a cardboard box, some markers, and scissors. I felt like a third grader.

I looked at some pictures of dinosaur coloring pages on the internet to get the shape of my dinosaur’s head, then I sketched it onto a piece of paper. You can see it in the picture if you look really closely.

I cut out the shape and traced it onto the back side of the box and cut it out. Then I sketched in a face based on the coloring book pages I found online (just Google “dinosaur coloring pages”)

I colored it orange because I am on a Halloween kick and I needed a light color so that you would be able to see the detail. Then I traced the face and added the letters in each of the spikes to represent the days of the week.

I wrote different chores onto clothes pins and clipped one onto each spike. In theory that will be one chore that Nicholas would be responsible for doing on that day of the week. 

I taped it to the front of one of our refrigerator magnets. There you have it, my Din-o-Chore

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Recently I’ve been seeing tons of really cute trick or treat bags. While it’s tempting to buy some adorable Halloween fabric and make bags for the kids, I’m not doing it this year. I just can’t bring myself to spend the time, money, and effort to make bags they are only going to carry around to 5 houses on our street to collect candy. After that they would just sit around in a closet for an entire year. No thanks.

I’m also not a huge fan of the plastic pumpkin candy carriers. Last year the handle broke off of the one we were using more than once causing spilled candy and unnecessary tears.

I decided to make trick or treat bags that we could re-use for a few years, wouldn’t cost any money, and could be re-purposed for other things, like our trips to the Farmer’s market, throughout the rest of the year.

I used an old pair of jean shorts and a thin sweater.
The jean shorts give it structure and provide a pocket and the sweater allows it to stretch. Plus, I just like to make things reversible.

To make 2 bags:

Cut the back side of the shorts in half.

Trace each half onto a sweater.
(I was planning on keeping this sweater in tact and adding it to my closet, but it had a hole in the back )

Pin the denim and sweater right sides togther on three sides with the finished edges at the top.

Leave the top open.

Sew it together on three sides and then cut off a piece of the hem from the shorts to use as a handle.

Sew on the handle and turn it right-side-out and you’re done. One pair of shorts and one sweater is enough to make 2 bags.

Yay! Free trick or treat bags…or purses…or farmer’s market bags…or diaper totes…or…

Abby’s already putting hers to good use.

Remember how I told you I was on a sweater re-purposing kick? Still on it.

My mom dropped off two huge bags of sweaters she no longer wears. Score! After I raided them and took a few to add to my wardrobe I started using the rest to make stuff. I made another sweater puppet and a teddy bear. Sadly the teddy bear came out, well, just plain sad. He is not destined to be blogged about, but my newest creation is.

I made the easiest toddler sweater hat ever. Seriously. Gymboree has several sweater hats in their fall line that are super cute, but why buy one for Little Diva when I can make one for free in 5 minutes?

Yes, 5 minutes. It would be just as easy to make one for an adult.

First you need a sweater.

I traced a bowl to get a perfect circle, then I cut it out. If you are making this adult sized, use a dinner plate.

Then I cut a strip of the band from the bottom of the sweater the same size as the circumference around my daughter’s head. (You can measure if you want to, but I just cut a long strip, wrapped it around her head, and cut it off to size)

(See the band at the bottom of the sweater? Cut that off for the band of the hat.)

Ok, now you should have a circle and a long strip.

Pin them, right sides together. (put the side you cut toward the outside, that way when you sew the finished edge from the sweater will be left alone and there is no need to re-finish the bottom of the band.)

Sew along the outside edge and sew the band closed.

Turn it right-side-out.

Done!

When I do this again (and I’m so doing this again) I think I’ll use a bigger plate or bowl to get a bigger circle.

I’m totally going to use this technique to make a chef hat (just use a really big circle) and a pumpkin hat out of an orange sweater with a green felt leaf on the top.

UPDATE:
Mr. Ham Bone got jealous and wanted his own hat, so we made a boy version:

To add a little flower detail to the girl’s version, just take a thin strip of the sweater material, roll it into a circle, and hand stitch it in place.

There is no such thing as a new idea, but there is such a thing as blatantly copying other people’s awesome ideas and using them to create even more awesome stuff for yourself.

That’s what we’re doing.

I’ve seen several other bloggers create kitchen islands out of dressers and I wanted to do it too.

My inspiration came from House of Johns. I L.O.V.E. their island, but when I showed Eddie the picture and raved about the brilliance of this idea he was not quite so inspired. He thought it still looked like a dresser in the middle of the kitchen. (Sorry House of Johns!!)

I knew I was going to have to find the perfect dresser in order for him to buy into my idea and we were going to have to complicate things a bit to make it look more “island” than “dresser.”

The good news is that I found the dresser at ReSource while Eddie was away on his business trip. The bad news is that I had to pay more than I wanted to AND shell out for the delivery fee since I was sans husband at the time.

Here she is:

“Why is this so perfect?” you might ask. First of all, it’s taller than your average dresser so it will be the perfect counter height. Second, it has that door on the right that makes it look more like a piece of kitchen cabinetry than a dresser. And finally, I am in love with all of the drawer space. It has four small drawers and 3 long drawers, perfect for storing all of my Pampered Chef gadgets and table linens. What I did not love so much was that I had to pay $50 for it plus a $25 delivery charge. Yes (gulp) I paid $75 for this thing. Actually, that’s a pretty fair price because it’s a nice solid piece of furniture, but my extremely frugal self was not happy about that price knowing that we were going to be investing a lot more money in this project.

Here’s the plan a.k.a. Eddie’s “honey do this as my birthday present” list:
1. Liquid nails 2 wood panels from Lowes together to get a thickness similar to butcher block for the top (The panels are $35 a piece, whereas a real butcher block this size was quoted to us at $300)
2. Attach the top
3. Attach bead board to the back of the dresser because the back was unfinished
4. Attach decorative legs to the back
5. Trim out the corners and the bottom of the back.
7. Stain the top
6. Prime and paint the dresser
7. Install trim around the top
8. Touch up everything
9. Install new hardware
10. Move one awesome kitchen island from the garage into the kitchen

All-in-all we are estimating that it is going to cost us $300 to do this island. That just about gave me a heart attack, but I guess when you consider that just the top was quoted to us for that much it’s still a pretty good deal.

For comparison, JCPenny’s sells this kitchen island for $900. Ours will actually have more storage space and be a better scale for our space once it’s finished. Not bad for 1/3 of the price.

So far we have all of the materials except for the new hardware. I’m debating getting stainless steel to match what we currently have in the kitchen or getting decorative glass hardware. The island is not going to match the cabinets. Our cabinets are cherry and the island is going to be painted a very dark charcoal gray with a cherry stained top. Thoughts?