My new cutting & sewing table

While trying to come up with a space saving solution that will, well, save space in the spare bedroom and provide a work surface for the sewing machine, I came across this NORDEN  dining table from IKEA which folds down.

My DH was good enough to assemble it for me. He also added castors on the legs so it can be easily moved and turned.

A love affair with a breakfast smoothie

I wouldn't have pegged myself as a creature of habit. But that's what I've become with this smoothie, which I've had for breakfast since march 2011. That's right folks, for about one and a half years minus a month long trip to India. The assorted days I missed, I just skipped breakfast.

Here's the recipe (makes two tall glasses)

1/2 cup frozen blueberries
8 frozen strawberries (or 6 if you are using humongous ones from the big Dole bag at BJ's/Costco)
one banana
1 cup vanilla almond milk (I like Almond Breeze)
2 tbsp ground flax seeds
1 cup (or as needed) of vanilla soymilk or chocolate soymilk or vanilla almond milk

I microwave the almond milk for a minute since I'm not partial to brain freeze, but you could skip this step. Add the milk to the fruit and blend. Add the second cup of milk, blend and pour out into glasses. Add a tbsp of ground flax seed in each glass and mix really well. I could blend it with the fruit but clean-up becomes painful so I do it this way. If you have a vitamix you could probably add whole flax seed.

I'm drinking this as I post, it's truly yummy.

p.s: I have substituted a mango for the banana and that was good as well.

What else but..a dress that re-uses a t shirt

This dress has been made by everyone who sews, I think. Cut a t- shirt at the waist or wherever you want the waist to be, make a skirt out of some fabric, attach the two and voila! you have a dress.
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This t shirt fit me but was short enough to make me think twice about wearing it. I had a remnant from Joann that I thought would work well.. It was not quite as quick as 'et voila!'.. The seam ripper dealt with a zig-zag stitch multiple times!












It looks..OK at best. One of those garments that don't fit ' the way it's supposed to' but is too comfortable to stop you from thinking twice about wearing it:-). I will reach for this dress again (and again).

The 'popover sundress' assembly line

I needed to make an easy dress for my niece.. and only a vague idea of the size (she's slightly smaller than my son?) . It had to be something non-fitted around the arms, neck, waist etc.
This popular Oliver+S pattern for the popover sundress seemed to fit the bill nicely and was free (what's not to love?) .

The instructions were simple and well written. So simple that in fact, I made the same dress in sizes 8, 2T for another niece and 4T for DD. When I made a muslin in size 8, I thought the straps were not long enough and increased it to a little over 3 times the pattern piece instead of twice.

I decided to add a border, just to break up the busy tiny floral print..which led to a frustrating time trying to match up the stripe, but thankfully not a seam ripping one. I attached the border in the same way as the yoke.

The 2T and 8 side by side. DD didn't want to model hers.. wow that print *is* busy!

Gluten free Chocolate chocolate chunk sports cake

This blog is primarily meant to be a sewing blog, but cooking and baking gluten free and allergen free is very dear to my heart and necessary in my household. I have been doing it for almost 8 years now, because my son has multiple food allergies, not the least being a severe wheat allergy. He turned nine last week and this is the first time his birthday cake has included eggs (he is starting to tolerate a couple of eggs in baked goods).

Thanks to the recipe from here. I have made this bundt cake a few times as well as the cinnamon bundt cake. Both come out excellent. I made half a dozen cupcakes and used a 6" springform pan to make a bigger cake. I decorated them to look like a basketball and  soccer balls..my son plays both sports. A couple of his (non gluten-free) friends dropped by and ate the cake and really loved it!

Notes:
I used Baker's semi-sweet chocolate squares and broke them up into chunks and used Pillsbury frosting (this has been safe for my son, so I use it).

I frosted the cupcakes with vanilla frosting and used a #3 tip with dark chocolate frosting to draw the pentagons. I put on a layer of dark chocolate frosting on the cake and smoothed it out. Then I drew some curves with the same #3 tip and dark chocolate frosting, then filled in with #18 star tip and orange colored vanilla frosting. After filling in completely, I drew over the curved lines again with #5 tip to make them stand out.

A shorts to skirt refashion!

I admit it.. I've been bitten by the refashioning bug. Its hard not to, after reading all the wonderful blogs and pinterest boards. I have never been to a thrift store before this spring, for various reasons, the biggest one being not having one close by with easy parking (parallel parking is a huge deterrent, and not just for me I imagine!). So when I discovered the local church ladies running one on selected days I decided to check it out and came back with quite a number of possibilities, all for half price (score!), each was about $1-2.

I had to get these printed shorts, because I love printed anything. There are many tutorials on how to turn shorts into a skirt which mostly included a triangular piece attached in front. I felt I wouldn't need that because these were already way too big for me.

I decided to go for it and so, a date with the seam ripper! although this was not a sad one. Opened up the crotch seam and sewed a straight line down the back and about an inch in, then trimmed off the excess.

Those arrows on the picture should've been darker I guess.

Did the same with the front, but stopped at the zipper, mostly because I didn't know what else to do:-)

And here's the after! It's not too bad.. the pocket openings are a little off, I caught myself spending a couple of minutes discreetly looking for them to put my hands into, but overall quite wearable. Infact I stepped out wearing it for an afternoon of blueberry picking.