Sewing mamma

I finally got some sewing done this week.  I made this dress out of an old shirt, some 2" black elastic and a yard of fabric.  I made a first attempt at it last week, but I didn't like the shirt and fabric combo once I got it together, and the bottom half was a bit snug as I hadn't measured my booty very well.  So I unpicked the bottom half from the elastic and replaced it with this version that was made to fit over my huge hips.  The girls at church thought it was fantastic, and I think this will be one of our weeknight activities coming up soon.  Really, really an easy first sewing project.

I got the idea from this cute blog post at mommybydaycrafterbynight.com.

The success of this dress made up for my sad attempt at a baby quilt last week.  My mom had very nicely cut all the pieces for me for a darling quilt--about 6 months ago!  I never got around to sewing it, and I finally got it out and sewed all the little pieces into rectangles.  When it came time to sew 2 rectangles together to made a square, I realized that one set of the rectangles was exactly 1/2" narrower than the other....

My mom had scanned and emailed the pattern to me.  Apparently when that happened, the template for the 1/2 rectangle piece shrank by 1/2".  It says it should be 5.5" long, but the pattern template itself is only 5" on the paper.  My mom has made several of these quilts for gifts, so she had no reason to stop and measure the template to make sure it was the right size--because it WAS the right size on her original.

So now I am trying to convince myself to go buy some more fabric and re-cut the 96 pieces of fabric I need to make 48 rectangles.  On the bright side, all of the other pieces were cut the right size, so half of the piecing is done and I wouldn't be entirely starting over.

What else happened this week?  Oh, yes.  Our iMac died.  It is only 1.5 years old, and it suddenly kept shutting itself off and wouldn't come back up.  I went to take it to the Mac store Wednesday, only to remember when I got to the mall that I had forgotten to bring the computer  in the car!  So I went back Thursday, remembering to bring the iMac, but it would not shut off for the guy at the Mac store!  It was acting like it was perfectly fine.  So I took it back home and started to run a backup, only to have the computer shut down mid-way through and leave me without a backup.  So I took it back to the Mac store Friday, and this time it shut itself down after about 20 seconds of being turned on, and alternated between a white and a black screen for a while before shutting off.  I figured it was a bad power supply, and left it there.  Indeed, it was a bad power supply, and we should have it back on Wednesday of this week.  Almost everyone I know has never had a problem with their Mac, but I figured that streak of luck would not extend to me.  I just have a special way with things, you know.  The queen of broken machines.