Eventually I Get to a Sewing Project

I'll start this post by showing you my azaleas as they looked this past week:

Let that lovely sight serve to inform you how happy, how beautifully happy, I have been this week, despite a seriously bad cold, the charge of five sick children, and an entire week without any other adult aid. I love plants, I love spring, and I swear these azaleas are getting more and more beautiful every year. (Although photographic evidence really just says that they're great every year.) Thank you, Mrs. Dorothy, for doing something right.

On that tra-la-la-springtime! note, let me show you something I've made. Well, first, let me direct you somewhere good and helpful: Raechel's most recent blog post, which features a great tutorial for a baby bib. This is essentially the same way I make my shop's baby bibs, and it's how she makes hers, and really, it's a simple pattern you can't screw up. Well, maybe you can. I don't know.

Anyway, make a bib and enjoy its usefulness!

Her post, which includes a few pictures of her new sewing machine, made me realize that I hadn't ever shown you guys my new sewing machine, a Brother PC-420 PRW. I've had it (and have been using it consistently) for a couple months now, and I can say nothing but fabulous and praiseworthy things about it. It is a truly computerized machine, and it is often much, much smarter than I.

Here it is:

I can now sew easily and without the use of swears, which proves that it was definitely worth the money.

For full disclosure (and a little tangent), here is the drawer of my sewing table:

My mom will see this and say, "Christine. Have you never heard of a $5 desk drawer organizer?" And she will have a point.

For further full disclosure, here is what my sewing room looks like at this moment:

I might be slightly embarrassed by that one.

But! (and now we arrive, albeit rather ramblingly, to the point of this post) But! Have no fear, because the powers of my mess and my new sewing machine and a leetle bit of my brain have combined to make a darling skirt for King Peter the Boy, who refused to pose in it and therefore forced me to hang it on the wall and pretend there was a girl wearing it:

The pattern can be found here, and I'll tell you now, it's a good pattern. You can choose from any number of sizes (6 months through size 8) and any number of ruffles, and let me just say, please go with as many ruffles as possible. I would have done two more had I had the fabric. Although it took me, The Slowest Seamstress in the World, a million years to make it, it's the kind of project that definitely gets easier with familiarity. It fits great on King Peter (in a size 3T), and I'm planning on buying a ruffler foot for my machine to make the whole thing that much easier for me.

I will admit that I bought this pattern with the thought of, Hey, maybe it's something I could sell in my shop in then near future, and that's still a possibility. But without a ruffler foot and with my serger out of commission for the time being, I would have to charge a million dollars per skirt and also each one would take 3 months to make. So. There's that.

I am sewing more than that. I have several Etsy orders in the process of being made or sitting in the queue, plus a dress for King Peter half-way finished, plus a few alterations, plus...I don't know, there's always too much. And let me just say this: with my new sewing machine, I actually find it all a joy.

A joy free from swears. I would just like an Amen for that.