I don’t think this post needs much of an introduction. I wanted a new skirt, I had this great fabric (from budulina), I was inspired one evening – I sat down and made it.

I made an attempt to make a skirt a few months back, and it was great until I had to install the zipper. I made a crucial mistake somewhere along the road and the zipper wouldn’t close! It wasn’t my first zipper, so I’m not sure exactly what went wrong, but I was not about to make the same mistake on this skirt, and I must say I’m very proud of the result. I don’t have a serger, so I decided to go with french seams for a perfect finish.

This skirt is relatively easy to make, and apart from the zipper (which can be intimidating) and the button hole (which can be annoying) it’s all sewing in straight lines – no fuss no bother. The design is classic and sweet and can be used for little girls as well as grown ups. Choose fun and unique fabrics to get that wow effect!

If you follow my tutorials you may have seen this before – where possible I make my instructions to your size. Simply enter your waist measurement and the desired length (top of the waist band to the edge of the skirt) and I will calculate the fabric pieces you need. Go ahead, try it yourself!

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Nowadays everybody has an work island in their kitchen, or if you’re a carefree bachelor – a bar. With these pieces comes a great responsibility: bar stools. If you’re anything like me, by the time you’ve got to picking out bar stools you’re at the stage where your budget has run out and you’re looking for the cheapest option available. For me that means IKEA. Unfortunately, the simple stools are boring, and not easy on my aching tail bone either. So if IKEA it is, IKEA hack is coming up (in fact, even the fabric I used was from IKEA)!

We’ve had these bar stools for a while, and I’ve already posted their upholstered pictures when I posted about my home makeover. However, they’re so easy, cheap and fast to make – I decided that I must share.

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I’m never sure when we can officially declare “summer is here”. Even though I’ve been carelessly sunburned twice already (I should really be more careful), there have been many days when it was quite cloudy, or even worse – sand stormy (yuck!). Given that the weather hasn’t stabilized yet on “hot, humid and unbearable”, I have to check what the weather will be every day, so I can decide if it’s long pants or shorts for the kids. And there it was that inspiration struck me and I HAD to make a partly cloudy set of pillows.

As usual, I started with no specific recipient in mind, and my children took them over as soon as they possibly could. So I guess we’ll have another set of pillows to fill the kids’ beds (as if we don’t have enough junk dolls in there already).

In order to make the partly cloudy set you will need basic crochet-in-a-circle skills, so while making all the pieces might take a while, it shouldn’t be very difficult.

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I’m finally done. And it’s not even May yet, I might still have a chance to use it this year on a cold evening! Sunburst Granny Blanket – previous posts So, in conclusion: read more →

On these last couple of days I turned my attention to our kitchen. We have a convenient work island in the middle of the kitchen, which naturally turned into a junk pile. We decided, as a family, that junk was not the best use for that surface, and that it could be much nicer and cleaner. We also had these IKEA bar stools, and since I usually sit on them and they hurt my back, I decided that some padding would be nice.

To save time and money, I stopped over at IKEA and picked up some fabric and other home accessories and set out to get all the work done in a couple of hours. Well, not surprisingly, it took a little longer than that (but not much). While I was there, I decided to tackle the junk pile on our bedroom dresser as well, and got some candles and a lucky bamboo, which I hope will help keep the junk away in our entire home (and I like the way it looks and that it doesn’t need to be watered very often). It’s not particularly inspiring, just clean and neat, so I’ll spare you the pictures.

This is our kitchen before:

And here is what it looks like now:

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Over the next few weeks I plan to make some long overdue changes to my house. Today my goal was to move an unused IKEA bookcase from the kids room to my bedroom and reorganize all my fabrics in “mini bolts” on the shelves. So I did.

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I made this doll house a while ago with a pattern from one yard wonders. Later, I found the same pattern in a free online tutorial, so – you can enjoy it without buying the book (though I am a fan). Personally, I would modify the pattern not to include so much hand sewing, but otherwise, it’s an excellent idea and the result is really sweet.

I had big plans for the interior – dolls and furniture and more, but I never got around to it, You know how it is… Finally, I decided that the doll house must be put into use one way or another, and started to think about what would be the easiest way for me to make dolls. I decided on finding a cute doll design and printing on fabric. The first part turned out to be much harder than I thought, whereas the second part much easier…

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Those are all 96 circles for my granny blanket, in their final arrangement.

I made 16 groups of 6, each group included all 6 variations of 3 colors. I arranged the first two rows to include one representative of each group, in an eye pleasing manner (making sure that adjacent circles didn’t have too many colors in common). Then, for the next two rows I chose circles where the outer color was the same as the second color in the first two rows, and for the third set of two rows I chose circles where the outer color was the same as the center color in the first two rows, while keeping the same order of groups. This made the color matching much easier (I only had to do it once for the first set of rows), while still keeping a lot of variation. For the last 6 rows, I simply copied the first 6 rows. I was afraid of how long this process might take, but I was done in no time, and am quite happy with the result.

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That is my bag of finished granny-circles-ready-to-become-squares, 14 sets out of 16 that I need. The system that I used was – take 3 colors and make all 6 variations of ordering those 3 colors, that way I hoped to keep the yarn usage even between the various balls of yarn. Well, it worked. Almost. I finished 5 circles from set number 15 (remember, I need 16! I’m so close!) and I ran out of light blue yarn at the very last final circle. Then I realized that the lighter shade of yellow wouldn’t carry me through set 16 either. So, I guess it’s back to the yarn store. Oh no… #not.

Here you can see my count-down to 16 sets, and the unfinished and very sad 15th set, with my fabulous cat sayings WIP drawstring bag.

If I’m going to be sick at home, I might as well get some work done on my sunburst granny blanket. Right?