A few months ago, before dumpling#2 popped out, I got myself a new "baby"
It's a Brother Project Runway Limited Edition Sewing Machine. Quite a mouthful really. I call her "Simang". She's a worker. I love taking her out for a spin. Although I am no diva dressmaker (Just ask my classmates back in high school, and they'll tell you how I barely pass Home Economics by the skin of my teeth). A few close friends will even tell you that they've witnessed me picking a fight with the sewing machine in school, and I may have kicked it a few times too (sorry sewing machine). For me it always felt like the machine was making crappy stitches on purpose. Like it sort of "knew" that it was me kicking her, and she's giving me out crappy stitches in return.
But as they say, "necessity is the mother of all invention". I found new love for crafting and sewing when I became a mom. Giving my child something that I've made with my own hands makes me feel like I'm giving them a tangible representation of my love. Even without a sewing machine, I was making things for Adam, laboriously sewing every stitch by hand. Some were born out of necessity, like these duckie pants from two years ago...
The little dumpling's class will sing "Tatlong Bibe" for their Linggo ng Wika program, and he needed yellow pants. I didn't want to buy him something that he'll be using just once, so I found a few fabric scraps (actually to call them fabric scraps is misleading, they were just rectangular pieces of cloth on its way to being used as basahan :D), some cotton balls, a little dye, and some elastic, and made him duckie pants! (They were supposed to be pants but I forgot all about adding seam allowances so they came out looking like duckie leggings! I also made him duckie feet that fit snugly over his crocs.
I had a lot of cotton balls left, so I made him a little duckie butt pocket too! Total cost: 20 pesos! (i bought some orange dye for the duckie feet).
As a kid, I didn't like how our crayons came with a flimsy cardboard box. i've broken lots of crayons because the box's bottom gave in under all of the crayons weight. I especially hate it when my colors end up making marks on the inside of my backpack, all because the crayon's box got torn up. So when my little dumpling was to enter preschool, I wanted to give his colors a "home" that will be sturdy enough to last the whole schoolyear. So I made him these:
It's a crayon roll! I found loads of tutorials for this floating around all over the internet, and I knew I could make one of those by hand. This crayon roll was a hit. I had a lot of friends asking me to make them one, but I had like 10 million puncture wounds and a few thousand calluses just handsewing this one crayon roll, I couldn't possibly bear to endure 10 million more. Maybe now that I have Simang, I might actually make them some.
