Revamped

After a "little" move across the state, a new job for the hubby, and a lot of time on my hands, I decided to revamp the blog and begin posting again.

I have waaayy too many projects around the new place that I want to share, so I will get started tomorrow.  :)


-Sara

T-Shirt Quilt

I have always wanted to have a T-Shirt quilt made out of my old t-shirts. Since I am graduating on Saturday I thought, "hey! this could be an excellent graduation gift!" So I started to look all over the internet for companies that make them. Let me tell you -- there are a LOT. And what's worse, they start at close to $200 for a lap-size quilt! I thought to myself that I could make one cheaper, easier, and faster than any of these companies. 

My wonderful mother-in-law (weird to say!) quilts and let me borrow some of her tools! I could've never done it without them!

Here is an abbreviated step-by-step process. I kinda made it up as I went along. If you want to make one yourself, let me know and I can give you more details. 

*SIDE NOTE: I have never taken professional sewing classes or anything. Even though I have made clothes and blankets before, I always just go to the internet and figure it out on my own. 

Step 1: Collect t-shirts and figure out which sides you are going to use. Obviously, the more shirts the larger the quilt.

Step 2: Cut shirts to squares. Leave as much extra as possible because you will constantly be trimming and squaring up the shirts.

Step 3: Figure out how you want to lay out your quilt.

Step 4: Back your shirts with fusible interfacing. This is really important. Since t-shirts are a jersey material they will stretch and pull and pucker. They need to be backed and sturdy before you can start sewing.

Step 5: Cut strips of fabric to run between your shirts. I used a twin size flat sheet from Walmart (JoAnns is too far from us and in all honesty I think a single sheet was cheeper than buying fabric). Sew these to the shirts on the bottom and top. Press seams open.

Step 6: Sew these together in the layout you want. Here is an example:

Step 7: I had three columns and then I used longs strips to sew each column together, like so:

Step 8: Add boarders until your heart is content.

Step 9: Bind together (you're going to have to YouTube that one) and you got yourself a quilt!

Simple, huh? Not really. I just dumbed down the quilt-making recipe a TON. There is a lot of math involved... and I am not a math person. And it took a LONG time. There is also a ton of ironing involved; I guess this all depends on how OCD one is. I have seen a few tutorials on the internet but I still had to guess on a lot of the quilt. 

But it is wonderful. I should start making them for $200 a pop!

-Sara

DIY - $3 Fridge Organization

I would consider myself to be OCD when it comes to certain things... School work? Definitely. Closet? Not so much. Kitchen? Most assuredly. Here is a picture of my refrigerator prior to my organizing of it:

"Not so bad" you may say. Well to Josh and I (and our about 30 square foot kitchen), the clutter was starting to take over. I have never been big on the recipe card boxes... lets be real; most websites print off your recipes on an 81/2 by 11" piece of paper. I like to be able to grab my favorites right off the fridge and have the whole piece of paper handy so I can see the entire recipe at once. Regular magnets wouldn't hold these recipes up, so I was forced to use some magnetic pictures I got from the classes I interned. I was getting very annoyed very quickly about this lack of organization so I decided to come up with a solution: a DIY "letter holder" of sorts. This project cost me nothing (since I already had the supplies) but about $3 for the magnets!

Here is what I used:

When Life Gives You Peaches...

Life  gave us peaches this past week. Literally. Josh was running on campus and stumbled across a peach tree dripping with peaches ripe for the taking. I am not a huge fan of peaches, so my first reaction to his big bag full of them was "what are we going to do with all of them??"

The answer: make peach cobbler. 

Meaty Mondays -- Simmered Boston Butt

So a few months back Josh and I stocked up on a rather large boston butt that was on sale at the supermarket. We ended up using half of it for BBQ a while ago and then tucked the rest of it away deep in the freezer. We have been eating chicken for almost every meal lately, so when I uncovered the hunk of meat in the freezer, you bet we were excited! I started perusing the internet for recipes to use that were not BBQ and that I wouldn't have to go to the store for, and came across this... and it turned out wonderfully!