old bedsheets saved from the bin!

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wrap around maternity top

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diy maternity pants

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from bike to bag

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refashioning a tent-shirt

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how to sew corners on a bed sheet

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clothespin apron

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a field of flowers

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i don’t want to buy any more gifts!

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100% recycled pillow

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doll diapers

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homemade gifts for the states

So I'm back in Boston and my hometown of Plymouth right now, loving how nicely things work, how civil people are, what varied food there is, how I don't have to try to get everything done before 1 pm when stores normally close in Naples. But more on all that later. First a crafty post.

Every year when I go back to the US I bring back at least a suitcase full of gifts for family and friends because I hate sending gifts overseas during the year when I don't see them. And I normally spend a good amount of money for all these gifts. So this year I cut way back on expenses and sewed a bunch of gifts for very little if no cost at all, besides the time I put in, obviously. I wanted to do more things, but I just didn't have time. So here goes:

I made five marker or colored pencil rolls. I first got the idea for this in January in the shop at the MADRE art museum in Naples. Similar rolls with Fabriano colored pencils cost at least 30 euros, ridiculous! I studied how it was made and went home and made one with some extra material I had and some cheap Auchan pencils. I've since seen them on other blogs, some very fancy ones, too. So I decided to make some of these for the kids I'd see in the United States. They roll up and are tied with ribbon. This is what they look like when they're opened up:

Then for the girls I made headbands to match their rolls and some extras. This tutorial from Between the Lines (a very cool blog) is very easy to follow.

And finally some produce bags, some from netting, some from chiffon.

And so far everything has been a big hit! I feel good and spent hardly anything (at least for these things)! Yah!

and from undies to...

God knows what in the world I was thinking when I bought these pairs of underwear a couple of years ago. Apparently I was under the delusion that my behind had miraculously gone back to what it had been maybe when I was 18, a most improbable possibility. And I obviously couldn't wear them more than once or twice thanks to the quite unpleasant sensation of.... Well, I really prefer not to be vulgar here. You know what I mean anyway.

Seeing as I'd already trasformed something into underwear, I decided to do the opposite and transform underwear into something else. However, no matter how cool the fabric of these undies is, there wasn't a whole lot of it, as you can clearly see. And so I did the only thing I could think of: to cut and dry the flowers and leaves of my lavender plant and make some nice lavender sachets for the drawers.
Though I will come clean, stretchy fabric like this (which is like t-shirt fabric) isn't really the best for this type of project because the pieces of lavender stuck to it and wouldn't go down nicely into the sack. And sometimes they sort of stick out through the fabric. Regular cotton would've been much better. Though certainly less fun and satisfying! I did this instead of the gazillions of things I really should be doing. Sunday we're leaving for a one day layover in Madrid, then 3 weeks in Boston area (where I'm from) and then 3 more weeks in Colombia (to visit friends) and I've got tons of gifts to sew, bags to pack, Spanish to try to miraculously relearn....

t-shirts into toddler's undies

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potty seat sack

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appliques

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bike helmet

Yes, a bike one. In Italy nobody uses one. Go figure, nobody even wears a helmet on scooters. But I don't care one bit and I go out and about my town with my daughter in her bike seat behind me, both of us with our helmets, and I pretend that nobody's giving us pitying looks.

Except the front inside pad had crumbled apart, leaving hideous black marks all over my forehead when I took off the helmet. So I made a new one. Two pieces of flannel, one of batting and a strip of touch tape (the resistent velcro that I use for diapers) to attach it to the helmet. And there you go! I just might make a new pad to replace the top one, just to brighten up that boring old helmet!

RIP puntino :(

Yesterday was a tough day, the due date of the baby that I lost in October at 9 weeks. Don't worry, I'm not going to bother you all with tales of the despair that a woman who miscarries feels nor how insensitive some people can be (though I should. It seems that few people realize how frequent miscarriage is. Some say up to one in three pregnancies end that way, but it often happens before the woman even realizes she was pregnant in the first place.). Instead I'll tell you a bit about what I did for a little emotional healing.

After losing a baby, many women feel the need to do something to remember it by. Some get a tattoo, others plant a tree or flowers. I've never been able to choose a tattoo that I would like to have for the rest of my days and I was worried that a plant could die on me. So I thought a bit. One of the things that I was saddest about was that I really would like for my daughter to have a sibling, someone to play with. So yesterday I sewed a doll for her. I bought the "John" pattern from the Etsy seller Bit of Whimsy Dolls, a PDF pattern, which is great because there's no need to mail it. I'd never made a doll in my life, but the instructions were really easy and it only took a few hours. I'd never embroidered either, for that matter, but I must say that I found it quite relaxing and I'd like to try more of it in the future.

paper or plastic?

I recently read an article on change.org about what type of bag you should choose at the supermarket. The author, however, write that it isn't as important what type of bag you use as what's INSIDE the bag. Condiser a bag full of meat, potatoes, tropical fruit and soda and another bag with a vegetarian diet with soy protein and produce coming from your country. It takes 113 MJ (megajoules) to get that first bag of groceries on the dinner table and 24 MJ for the second. On the other hand, it only takes 0.5 MJ to produce and dispose of a plastic bag. Therefore the energy saved by a family of four eating a diet from that second bag of groceries would be enough to manufacture 186 plastic bags or drive the average American car (meaning: big) for 15 miles (24 km). And all this backs up what I wrote a couple of weeks ago about the harm eating meat does.

Ok, so even if we just buy dry beans and local fruit and veggies, we still have the plastic vs. paper dilemma. It seems (according to that article) that it takes 20 times the amount of energy to produce a paper bag than a plastic one. But you can easily recycle paper bags while plastic ones take centuries to decompose, they're dangerous for wild animals and they create other problems, like blocking public drains. And so there's no doubt about it that reusable/washable bags win hands down.

There are all sorts of possibilities for reusable shopping bags: cloth ones, juta ones, more resistent plastic ones, etc. In the United States reusable bags are relatively popular, but Italy (or at least southern Italy) hasn't quite caught on yet. Sometimes I actually have to argue with shopkeepers or cashiers because they insist I use their plastic bag. I could understand slightly if they had a bag with their logo to give them advertising, but generally they're just anonymous plastic bags.

One problem I often run into is when I decide to buy something when I'm already out and about, without my collection of washable bags. Those who usually move around by car can just keep their reusable bags in their car, but it's a bit harder for people on foot to bring around a bunch of cloth bags. Last year I was given a very nice gift, the ChicoBag. It's a bag made from 7 recycled plastic bottles, is super light, and gets closed up inside a little pocket sewn on the inside to bring it around. You can't use it for really heavy things (I had to resew some of the seams after I put too much weight in it once), but it's really convenient to carry around in your bag all the time for when you make a spur of the moment purchase.

Those bigger plastic shopping bags are easy to reuse in other ways, like for your trash or to carry around other stuff. But my main problem were those smaller produce bags. They get dirty, and so are hard to recycle, and they're too small to really reuse for many things. And just look at all that plastic used to bag up a single cucumber! Ridiculous! Then I saw some produce bags made of organza or nylon mesh on the founder of the website Cloth Pad Shop (where I sell cloth pads and other things)'s personal website. It seemed like a great idea, so I copied it. I got some nylon mesh and added a drawstring recycled from the same pyjama pants I made my potholders from. Next time I'll use some lighter (and prettier) ribbon or something for a drawstring. They looked at me kind of funny when I asked to use these bags at the supermarket (though I'm used to this, being a "weird" foreigner who always does things "differently" than everyone else!) but they didn't have any problems with them. And just look how pretty groceries are with these bags!


There are, however, people who put plastic bags to good use. For example, there is a seller on etsy (which unfortunately is not at all used in Italy, despite the fact that there are exceptionally wonderful things there) that makes jewelry, bags, hats, etc from crocheted plastic bags, as well as other things made from recycled plastic bottles and cloth. I bought one of her bags and some jewelry, and she even sent them to me in the coolest boxes she made out of folded magazine pages. Check it out!

make your own potholders

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