Sewing Requires Patience

Sewing requires patience and if you know me at all, you know that I have pretty much none of that!
Before I get into my sewing saga, let me give a quick update on my non-sewing Pinterest project, the Santa bucket.  Per Matthew, I am not allowed to spray paint and even though the weather is nice today, I don't really want to make Matthew spray paint my bucket outside when it is cold, so this project has been pushed back to the spring or summer when I can complete it myself. 

I actually make a LOT of the recipes that I find on Pinterest, but never mention them on this blog.  Considering I actually enjoy cooking and baking, I find this to be incredibly odd.  In the future, I promise to include more posts about the yummy food we make here at the Siuta house!  Below are links to two of the recipes that I have tagged on Pinterest that we tried in the slow cooker and absolutely loved! 

Easy Crockpot Potato Soup - This is one of the easiest recipes I have ever made and it allowed me to use up some of my Kraft Cream Cheese supply (Thanks Chadwicks!)
Tomato-Basil Parmesan Soup - I misread the recipe for this one and forgot to add the broth at the beginning so we ended up adding just one can of broth at the very end, but it still turned out amazing.  Seriously, one of our favorite meals ever!

Ok, on to my sewing disaster experience.  After not buying enough fabric for the pillow cover, I decided to start on the minky blanket.  I cut out all of the pieces and pinned the cotton fabric and minky fabric together.  Obviously, I did not use nearly enough pins because the next step, the actual sewing step, was a DISASTER!  I finished 1 1/2 sides and realized that the minky was practically diagonal across the cotton.  I am too embarassed to even take a picture, so I will just let you know that I stopped.  I will be ripping out the seams that have been sewn (my seam ripper and I are best friends), will probably do a big hand stitch around the blanket and try again.  The hand stitch idea was actually given to me by a friend who sewed her first minky blanket this past weekend.  She is also a beginner sewer and thought this may work better than using pins.  I promise I will take pictures for my  next post. 

After a night off from sewing and a stop at the fabric store to pick up not only more fabric for my original pillow cover but also a different fabric so I could make a 2nd pillow cover, I started on this "super easy" project.  I was able to cut out all of the material pretty easily, got everything pinned and sewed everything up in about an hour.  That's pretty good for my first time with everything.  Of course after I completed all of my seams, I found out that instead of pinning the right sides together so the wrong sides were facing out, I actually pinned the right side to the wrong side so when I turn the pillow cover inside out it looks funky and not in a good way!

After another hour of ripping out the seams on each of the four sides, then pinning it correctly, and sewing it all up again, the "super easy" pillow cover actually came out pretty well!  The picture below shows the finished pillow on the chair in our family room.  I actually planned to put this in my office, but after I got home I reazlied the twigs in the design are brown and the accents in my office are black.  Not really sure what I'm going to do with the pillow now.  Oh well!

Since I felt like I got the hang of the pillow cover and I wanted to get one more successful project under my belt before going back to the minky blanket, I decided to make another pillow cover.  From start to finish, it only took me 30 minutes (I double checked the right sides were together when pinning).  The finished pillow looks really great in my office, but now I'm thinking I need to get a throw or another pillow with more color.

Geesh!  This picture does not look good, but to be fair my office doesn't look that good either.  I really need to work on this before my parents come down next weekend.  I would really like if I could get all of the pictures hung and all of my craft supplies put away!  I would LOVE if I could get it all done before our siblings and their significant others come down for a night on the town Saturday, but since that is only a day away and I still need to clean one bathroom and make 2 beds, I don't see it happening.  Here's hoping next week is more productive!