DIY Superhero Cape from an Upcycled T-shirt

In this week's YouTube video, I show you how to make a superhero cape out of an old T-shirt. This is a super easy and fast project with satisfying results. All you really need is an adult-sized t-shirt and some scissors-- everything else is optional!

Two weeks in a row with projects for son. I'm about to lose my "Selfish Seamstress" cred!

Vintage sheet quilt

I finally finished a vintage sheet quilt I've been working on for ages!

Not a whole lot to say about it. It was my first *major* machine quilting project and likely my last until/unless I get a different a different machine. I've been quilting a long time, but up until now, I've mostly been hand-tying. There's some puckers and some other problems, but it's not a gift, so I'm cool with it.

Now, my base model Singer did pretty well the quilting on this Queen-sized quilt, but I just kind of feel like I was *abusing* her with this job. Plus, I like hand-tying just fine. (Speaking of abusing my machine, I need to do some maintenance on her.)

So, I like it, but I'm done with sewing vintage sheets for a while. I like 100% cotton for quilts.

Did you notice the YouTube video at the top of this post? My last post had one too. Clearly, I have a problem blogging often, and I thank you for following me despite that. Videos, on the other hand...I used to be a TV reporter. I'm used to tight deadlines, and can turn around several videos in a single day, if I want to.

The name of my channel is Spool School, and I'll be posting sewing and quilting videos, craft tutorials, quality DIYs (as in, making stuff that has a purpose, not useless crap), some home DIYs and maybe even furniture makeovers and home improvement projects. I'm looking for some other YouTube crafters to follow, so let me know if you're on there too! And I mean real crafters. All I'm seeing so far are young girls making junk just to make "DIY videos", which seems to be one of the more popular genres, just behind make-up and beauty. We're talking bedazzled flip-flops here, folks. Yikes.

How to test vintage and antique furniture for lead paint

Like anyone who loves a good furniture makeover, most of my DIYs come from thrift stores, estate sales, and other sources that leave me unfamiliar with the piece's history. So I've been making over furniture pieces, including sanding them and using paints and stains that have warning labels about the dangers of lead, but not thinking much about the potential of lead.

The One-of-a-Kind Piece
But that changed on one recent night at work as a radio newscaster. I was scheduled to play a government-produced Public Service Announcement on the dangers of lead paint, especially around small children and babies. I must've played this particular PSA dozens, if not hundreds of times before, but this time I paid attention. I was fresh off the high of one of my favorite purchases ever:

A vintage cowboy-themed toybox with bright paint colors. It was just $12 at a local thrift store and came just as we were re-doing our son's room, and could not be any cuter. But after hearing that PSA, the toy box became a big concern because it's painted (whereas many of my furniture makeovers until now have started out only stained), it clearly came from an era when they might've still been using lead paint, it's chipping in some areas, and most importantly, was destined for my two-year-old's bedroom.

The Lead Paint Ban
Lead paint was only relatively recently banned in the United States, in 1978--the year my husband was born. That date came as a shock to me; my own mom, the daughter of a housepainter, had guessed the ban at at least a decade earlier. And much like asbestos, just because lead paint was banned in a certain year doesn't mean people no longer used it...cans of the  stuff likely hung around in garages and sheds waiting to get used up. That means furniture painted as late as the 1980s could contain lead.

As for why it was banned, I'll let Wikipedia do the talking:

Lead paint is especially hazardous to children under age six, whose developing bodies are susceptible to lead poisoning. It causes nervous system damage, stunted growth, kidney damage, and delayed development. It is particularly dangerous to children because it tastes sweet, encouraging children to put lead chips and toys with lead dust in their mouths. Lead paint is also dangerous to adults and can cause reproductive problems in both men and women.

A myth regarding lead-based paint claims that children must eat lead-paint chips to develop lead poisoning. In actuality, ingestion of lead dust, which can be dislodged from deteriorating paint or can be generated during painting, also occurs when children get lead dust on their hands and then touch their mouths.

Does It or Doesn't It?
I came home from work on that night I heard the PSA and did some Internet searching on vintage furniture with lead paint, and found this awesome and helpful article from Country Living. It's a must read for parents who love vintage and antique furniture, and it's not all bad. While it said lead furniture does not belong in home with small children, it said you can keep your beloved lead furniture as long as it's where kids don't go, or if you seal the paint with a varnish (re-painting would mean sanding, which would mean releasing lead-laden dust, which isn't healthy for anyone). Those options weren't good enough for my concerns, but it again gave me hope when it said lead tester kits are available at most hardware stores.

Finding and Purchasing the Lead Paint Tester Kit
I was afraid how cost-prohibitive these tester kits might be, and we found just two options in the paint section at our local Home Depot; this $28 kit by Klean-Strip that included six tests and appeared more to be for testing walls and trim in old homes, and one from 3M for about $9 that contained about two tests. We went with the latter based on affordability and that I appeared easy to use, especially on furniture.

The Test
The tests remind me of these teeth whitening samples I once received: they're little cardboard tubes with glass inside that you break. Once broken, liquid saturates a cigarette-style filter which you rub on the paint. If it turns red, that "means lead."

Alright, I've written this entire post up until here prior to administering the test. Time for me to make a video so you can see first hand along with me whether or not the toy box has lead...
(Spoiler alert: lead free! Can't wait to clean and fix it up and get it in his bedroom.)

DIY crossbody tote: Sew Sweetness Kennedy Bag in vintage tea towels

Here's my rendition of the Kennedy Bag, a new pattern from Sara of Sew Sweetness. The pattern is free!


I made it up in vintage tea towels, you can see what they used to look like on my flickr. One was a calendar tea towel from the bicentennial, the other a souvenir tea towel from Massachusetts.


This bag marks my first serious foray into both online sewing contests and bag making, save random totes (one of my first three sewing projects as a little girl was a tote) and one "purse" I hand sewed about 15 years ago from fake cow print fur, nylon straps, and dice print flannel lining. I got lots of compliments on that monstrosity, but I think it was more like those kinda compliments you get when someone doesn't know what else to say.


I pinned this pattern as soon as it was released, as I prefer messenger bag style purses that I can wear cross-body, but hadn't really planned on sewing it up for quite a while. It took the announcement of the Sew Sweetness Bag Contest to really push me into trying it out! I thought it would be fun to start joining some online sew-alongs and competitions next year, so now seemed as good a time as any.


I knew from the get go that I wanted to use some of my vintage tea towels to make the bag and settled on two with a similar feel and color scheme, and also chose some quilting cotton for the accents and lining.


I really enjoyed sewing my first bag and would make this again if a family member asked for one, and possibly one more time for myself with leather accents. The changes I made include:

• Accent fabric on the bottom instead of using a tea towel
• No flap accents; the main reason being that I didn't want them covering up "Precious Moments Betsy Ross" as I've come to call her. Also, I wanted to get the bag done on time to enter the contest and have tons of other Christmas projects, so I left them out to save time. And all that hardware was getting a little cost-prohibitive and making the bag heavy. I may include them on any future renditions made up in a more plain "main fabric" as I do think they add something to the bag.
• I left the hardware off the side accents as well, for the same reasons as above. I didn't stitch the accents down so I can clip pens to them and to keep it from looking pieced together.
• I left out the interior zipper pocket; I never use those.

I learned a lot about bag making from this pattern. Mostly, interface the crap out of your bags and they turn out much nicer!

I only made one mistake when sewing up the pattern, a record for me: the part about sewing the side accents didn't really mention a seam allowance, so I went ahead and used the .5" called for in the rest of the pattern. I knew it was wrong as soon as I sewed up the first seam, but did the next three anyway. I finally gave up when I couldn't turn them, and cut new side accent pieces rather than bothering to unpick them. I used the quarter-inch SA mentioned a few steps back, that time they looked like the picture and I could actually turn them! Also, the pattern said to sew the divider line between the two interior pockets at 6" in, but the halfway point is actually 7.5", so either I was doing something wrong there, or it's a typo.

So that's it, wish me luck in my first online sewing contest, and good luck if you've entered one too!

Contest Update: Thanks for your kind comments! I didn't even make the top 15. :(

Baby viking hat, and a DIY Sheriff Rango costume

We're well into November, but I'm just getting around to doing a Halloween follow-up now! Such is life when you have a newborn.

Really, I wanted an excuse to make said newborn a viking hat after seeing a very cute, but very expensive (something like $30 for a fleece baby hat!) at a toy store in Mendocino, CA. What better excuse than Halloween? I starting Googling baby viking hat patterns when we got home from our trip, and mostly found ones for knitting. I just didn't want to commit that much time.

Then I found this awesome and adorable hat pattern from Fleece is Fun. We all know how I feel about fleece, but my inspiration hat was made from fleece, so this Halloween Hat Pack pattern is perfect. Also, fleece projects are so easy and fast, I may have been won over. We'll see.

Lemme start by saying, my first kid has a giant head. My second kid ended up with a tiny head? According to the delivery doctor anyway. And compared with his older brother, I guessed she was right. It was the first thing the doc said when he was crowning (#TMIalert): "he has a really small head!" He was born September 20th, so by Halloween he still had small head status. But when I chose the smallest size baby hat from this pack and used the suggested .5" seam allowance, my husband made me start to worry that the hat was turning out too small. I tried it on the baby and it fit, but barely. A word of advice about this pattern: a supposedly small-headed 1-and-a-half month old came close to not fitting into the smallest size!

I moved the horns higher on the head than in the pattern, but they were hard for him to balance, so I recommend leaving them as-is in the pattern. I added a silver band at the bottom to make it look a little more viking and a little less buffalo.

Other than that, I love this free little pattern and highly recommend it. There are now two other hat packs on the site and they fit all the way up to adult size. They'd make adorable Christmas gifts!

Meanwhile, with a new baby, I just didn't have the energy to sew an entire costume for my older son. He loves the Johnny Depp movie Rango, so we DIYed a Sheriff Rango costume. We had the suede cowboy vest and hat, I bought him a red and white Hawaiian shirt from the thrift store, and he already had a green dino hoodie to wear under it. The only thing I had to make was the green tail, and I decided to make the mask last minute on Halloween since I had so much of that green felt lying around in my stash anyway (you may recognize it from my last year's Kermit the Frog Fascinator I made for Halloween).

Good thing I didn't make the 2.5 year old a costume from scratch--he refused to wear it anyway since he doesn't "get" Halloween yet!

DIY pillowcases; pretty and vintage inspired

Welp, it's no secret that I love mismatched, vintage-style bedding so I decided to make myself some pretty pillowcases.

It feels a little silly to take apart actual vintage pillowcases for fabric, then turn around here and make vintage-inspired pillowcases from new fabric-- and I guess I don't really have a good explanation for it, haha. Other than, I've really been wanting a vintage sheet quilt and bought the pillowcases in my previous post just for that purpose. I did think twice before taking those other pillowcases apart, though.

Here, I saw this purple floral quilting cotton at JoAnn and fell in lurve with it. I put off buying it forever, until it ended up in the clearance section. I eventually bought the rest of the bolt, a little more than 2 yards, for less than two bucks a yard! The JoAnn branch in my city was relocating, so they had all of their fabric on sale on top of the regular deals and sales-- I pretty much got this stuff on triple-sale. I wasn't exactly sure what to do with it, but was kinda thinking pillowcases all along.

The mint was a remnant in my stash, and I purchased clearance rick rack for 97 cents. My first successful rick-rack application, I think. I just love it when other people use rick rack and I'm often inspired to try it whenever I see a cute project that includes it, but somehow every time I touch the stuff it turns into this corny Becky-Home-Eccy looking project. I think one reason it works here is because it's so subtle. The trim barely peeks out from the cuff, adding some vintage detail.

These are super easy if you're inspired to make your own! I know, you're thinking, well duh, how hard is a pillowcase going to be? I think a pillowcase is one of the first things I ever sewed, after all. They're made using a method that creates no exposed seams. You can find a tutorial by doing an Internet search for the burrito method, sausage pillowcases, or turn-tube or tube pillowcases. Various names for a method that accomplishes the same thing. Mine came together in well under an hour, not including pressing and cutting. I know there are more in my future!

DIY Utensil Bouquet

I plan to do a round up post in the future with all of my favorite somewhat-homemade and DIY gift ideas, so I thought I'd post one of my favorites so far.

A utensil bouquet makes a great housewarming, bridal or baby shower gift, or maybe even wedding gift if you go really over the top with it. As you can see,  it's basically a gift basket made to look like a bouquet, or in my case, a pot of flowers. It can take an inexpensive or ho-hum gift like utenstils and make it more memorable or visually appealing.

I simply purchased a flower pot, some utensils from her registry, and some dish towels to match her kitchen's color scheme. I used floral tape, shish-ka-bob skewers, and turned the dish towels into flowers. Then I just arranged everything in the flower pot to look like a bouquet. Some paper crinkle grass/gift basket filler (what is that stuff called?) holds everything up nicely. And I almost forgot; I lined it with some coordinating tissue paper first, standing it up a little around the sides. Ribbon finishes it off.

For a baby shower, you can use baby washcloths and onesies to make the flowers, and things like bottle scrubbers could also make up the bouquet... while kitchen timers and measuring cups tied to the side would look adorbs for the new bride or as a house warming gift.

What about you, do you prefer to DIY your gifts?