Happy Birthday Big Sis!

My older (oh, so much older *teehee*) sister turned 40 this past weekend. We don't always exchange gifts for birthdays in my family, but I felt that 40 definitely deserved a gift. My first idea was a key fob I found in a shop on etsy (look up SpoonerZ, her stuff rocks!), but I liked it so much and didn't think that it would come in in time that I decided to keep it.


Bad sister, I know. But instead I decided to make her a present instead. That's so much more personal than a keychain, anyway.

I had wanted to try my hand at making a clutch and settled on Noodlehead's Gathered Clutch. This is how it turned out for me:

I saw the fabric and it just screamed her name to me. She's a huge turquoise fan.

The inside:

It was my first time sewing a zipper and it wasn't quite as scary as I anticipated. The inside was a bit bunchy and one of my top corners turned out a bit wonky, but I was super impressed overall. I'm most definitely going to make another one for myself.

And the best part is that the keychain arrived the day before I was going to see my sister. OK, that's not the best part... the best part is that the seller sent me TWO. I had mentioned in a convo with her that I loved the keychain and had bought it as a gift, but wasn't sure I would be able to part with it. So she sent me an extra one. One was a smaller fork, which seemed like a good zipper pull to me, so I attached it to the clutch and gave it to my sister and the bigger one resides on my formerly boring set of keys. Maybe a really good sister would have given the bigger one as the gift, but I'm a brat like that.

In other news....

I've been making superhero costumes for my cousin's soon-to-be-4-year-old twins. I am going to attempt a tutorial because I couldn't find a cape tutorial that I liked. I'm not used to sewing for boys, so it was a nice change of pace. I learned that boyish fabric that isn't sports or transportation related is nearly impossible to find. Especially when your only opportunity to run to the fabric store alone is 15 minutes before they close and you are speed shopping to try to get the fabric to the cutting table before the employees chase you out of the store with pinking shears. It was better than chasing my 3 crazies through the aisles and trying to keep them from pulling every button off the display.