The Day Santa and Buddy the Elf Galloped Into Town

I'm not one to dress up a horse.  I think the whole costume thing at horse shows and barns is completely over the top.  It seems like people get more and more elaborate with their costumes every year and I don't see it ever ending.

But, I do think these Santa and Buddy the Elf hats are too cute not to put them on every horse out there!

I can't remember how it started. I must have been looking for a Santa hat that would fit a horse and a quick search came up with typical Santa hats with cut outs for the ears, crocheted versions that go on kind of like a fly mask and all kinds of iterations of what you'd expect when looking for a Santa hat.  

Somewhere along the way, I got the idea that maybe it should be smaller and not actually go over the ears.  First of all, I think it looks silly to have horse ears poking out of a Santa hat and second, I don't think horses love things touching their ears.  Have you noticed people spend a lot of time touching a horse's ears? Maybe because they are big and we are in awe of them. Maybe just because they are soft.  Maybe because people don't know what to do around horses so touching their ears seems reasonable.

I see a lot of horses not loving their ears being touched and I think about how some people can't wear sunglasses because they don't like them pressing on the backs of their ears.  What if horses get that same kind of nauseated feeling when something sits against their ears?

All of those thoughts led me to making something that could sit between the ears and hopefully not touch them. I took a cone shape, did some math and figured out how big the circle needed to be for the bottom and got to work.  I wish I remembered if I did some serious thinking about the size or if the first cone I tried was just the right size. 

It's pretty likely that one day, I saw something about how to make a party hat for kids and one thing led to another and when I used the dimensions, I thought "hey, this would be a great hat for a horse".  I don't usually have an idea AND the mathematical reasoning to produce said idea that easily.  I might have had to tweak the size slightly, but I know I didn't spend a lot of time figuring out the size, so it might have been pretty close on the first try.

I wish I could say that along with all of my engineering skills, I thought long and hard about the materials and actual construction but if you're looking for that kind of precision on the backend, you will not find it here. All of my ideas and subsequent renditions of those ideas are held together with duct tape and dreams and then if I end up with a successful result, I forget how I got there and I have to backward design it and write it down for the next time.  

Did you think I made those careful decisions along the way and wrote them down as I went? That would be so helpful but that's just not how I operate in real life.

I had red felt on hand, so I took that and made the cone.  Then I realized it wasn't going to be stiff enough to just sit on the head and stand upright, so I decided it should be stuffed.  Before I got to stuffing, I knew I wanted that fur trim along the bottom and I had just enough left over from the cuffs of  a Santa dress I made.  Let me tell you, putting that trim on before stuffing and closing up the hat was the best thought I ever had. Usually, this thought would come to me after it was all assembled and I'd be trying to sew it on by hand and crying.  Machine sewing it on before closing is brilliant.

I use polyfill as my stuffing agent.  It's very lightweight.  I have made some with pieces of fabric scraps as added filling but that can ge heavy pretty quickly and my main goal here is not to irritate the horse.

Humans have this weird thing about needed to put bells on horses.  Jingle Bells wasn't written by accident.  Sleighs seem to always have bells on them. Everything Christmas requires bells. I enjoy a jingly bell as much as the next person, but I also tire of the sound pretty quickly.  

Imagine being a horse and having to hear tingalingaling with every step and breath you take and the faster you move, the more jingly it gets.  

I say this because I was going to put a bell on the top and it was going to be so cute.  And then I realized that no horse wants that sound between its ears for any length of time, so I chose a pompom instead.  It's also very cute to see the little pompom bouncing along as we go!

The pompom must also be installed before stuffing and closing.  After making many of these, and worrying about the pompom pulling out, I have learned to sew the yarn ties to the felt on the inside so they stay where they belong.

How does it attach? Velcro is the best friend anyone with a horse can ever have! My first versions of this used pieces of velcro that were just big enough to loop around the top of my bridle.  Over time, I learned that bridles and halters are all different sizes, so I've made the strips longer and tell people to cut them to fit.  They easily wrap right over the top of the bridle or halter and fasten so there should be nothing scratching the top of the head.

Sewing the whole thing closed can be tricky.  With the Santa hats, the fur on around the bottom is a good decoy so when I sew the two red parts together, I can take a decent sized seam.  I do this before I stuff, leaving an opening to stuff them and then I just hand sew them closed.  Once it's finished, I fluff the white fur and make sure it's covering that seam. I always try to get a fluffy fur trim for just this reason. I thought about using white felt but it just looked cheap, to me. Once it's on the horse's head, you can't see the seam, but I like to make sure everything looks decent on or off the horse.

Once I got the Santa hat situated, I started thinking about an elf hat to sell in my Etsy shop.  And I kept finding Buddy the Elf pictures so I got to thinking and this is what I came up with. 

This one takes longer to make because of the different colors but I love the fact that I can get the red leaf from all of the red scraps left over from the Santa hat!

Many years ago, I made a Halloween costume for a friend's kid and I had to get a ton of felt.  I still had a lot of green and yellow left over, so this might have been the reason that Buddy the Elf made the most sense to me! 

There is no fur trim on the bottom of Buddy's hat, so I'm not especially thrilled with the way the seam shows.  I like have something to cover it. I made some with the seam on the inside and then sewed it closed once I stuffed it, but they always seemed perched to me, even on a horse.  They didn't sit as well as the Santa hats.

This time around, I zigzagged the bottom circles on and left that seam exposed. It doesn't look horrible, but it's not really as smooth as I'd like it to be.

I made the Buddy the Elf hat from the same pattern as the Santa hat, so the bottom circle is exactly the same.  This is helpful so I remember how to put it together! I do the same thing with the velcro and they fit the same way.

While I was getting the red velcro, I didn't even think about also getting green.  That would have been really smart!  Once the velcro wraps around the halter or bridle you can't see it, but as I might have said before, I like things to look like some thought went into them if I'm going to sell them.

I don't usually do craft fairs and the few horse things I make are so specific to horses, I don't think they would sell at a typical craft fair. I also have zero patience to sit at a craft fair and answer 50 bajillion questions and hear people tell me how they could make it cheaper.

BUT....one of the local farm and pet stores is having a vendor sale this fall so I signed up to do that one.  In anticipation of that, I actually batch sewed a bunch of both styles of hat so my sewing room looks kind of insane right now.

And that's not all of the Santa hats.  I ran out of polyfill so I have another 5 waiting to be stuffed.

If you or some one you know has a horse that needs to be Santa or Buddy the Elf, hop on over to my Etsy shop before they're gone!

The Mr. Clean Incident in 1980 Something

Did you grow up in a Mr. Clean house?  I’m not sure if it’s still around today, but in the 1980s, it was a household cleaner.  There were lots of commercials with catchy jingles.  

Somewhere along the way, they created the magic erasers and I lost track of it after that.  

It had a nice, citrusy smell that smelled like something had been cleaned, but it wasn’t overwhelming like cleaners today.  You could use it in the bathroom and kitchen.  My mother had it under the kitchen sink and used it to wash the floor and counters.  I vividly remember the color and smell.

It’s probably off the market because it’s another thing that tried to kill us.

 Why am I bringing this up?  Because I noticed I had left the dish soap open on the edge of the sink this morning, something I NEVER DO,  and whenever I see an open bottle of dish soap, I immediately close it because this story plays out in my head every time.

It’s after supper in 1980 something.  I’m old enough to bake so it’s probably 1986 or so.  I’m making a cake.  My mother isn’t home but my father is.  It’s probably a bowling night.  My mother bowled in a league for years and only later did I realize not everyone’s mother bowled.  I thought everyone’s mother did.

There is an open bottle of Mr. Clean on the edge of the sink.  This is important information. 

I’ve mixed up the batter for a yellow cake, probably from a box, and I’ve poured it into a baking dish. I’m carrying it to the oven. The oven door is open, waiting.  

Somehow, I hit the edge of the baking dish on the rack and the entire thing topples over onto the open oven door.  Cake batter goes EVERYWHERE.  Inside the oven, outside the oven, and down into the door of the oven.  Today, oven doors seem to be all window but remember how they used to have small windows in them in the 80s?  Somehow cake batter seeped into that part of the door.  

When I say it went everywhere, I’m not kidding.

Did I mention the oven was already preheated?  

Cake batter, hot oven, gigantic mess.

I can’t remember if I started crying, screaming, or just tried to clean it up myself.  At some point, my father comes in and starts to help.  And in the process of helping, he knocks over the opened bottle of Mr. Clean.

Now there is cake batter EVERYWHERE and also, Mr. Clean is EVERYWHERE.

Remember how I said it had a pleasant, citrusy smell?  You know how yellow cake batter has a smell, kind of like dirty feet, until it’s cooked?  Imagine these two smells together.  Along with a hot oven blowing out heat through the door that’s covered in batter and now some of that cake batter is starting to cook.  So a third smell is entering the room: the pleasant smell of a baked yellow cake.

What happened next is blurry but I know my father was livid.  There was a lot of  Mr. Clean in the sink and on the counters and I don’t know where else.   Things needed to be cleaned up but also, the oven was still hot.  At some point, I assume once things cooled but I don’t remember, my father took the door off the oven and unscrewed it so he could get in and clean the cake batter out.

At some point, my mother came home.  I have long forgotten whether she walked in during all of this or if everything was back to normal by the time she got home.  What would make this even more entertaining at this point would have been her arriving while my father was sitting on the floor, oven door parts all around, me standing there, cake batter dripping from everywhere. I don’t think any of that happened.  I think most of the mess had been cleaned up by the time she got home and all that was left was the now way too strong smell of Mr. Clean.

And a lesson learned to NEVER leave a bottle of any cleaners open.  

Free Dirt

When I was really young, I read a book about all kinds of crafts and for some reason, there was a section on gardening.  I read that you can throw weeds and scraps into a pile and they will break down and make new soil.  This fascinated me.  I was thrifty before I even knew I was thrifty so I knew I’d do this composting thing,  This idea of recycling and getting free dirt full of nutrients has never left my brain and I've been a big composter ever since.

For decades, I had a pile beside the garden that was mostly lawn clippings and weeds.  When I got serious about growing things, I started saving all food scraps except meat and bones, and I'd bury it in the compost to keep the critters from getting it.  I didn't have any kind of fancy bins or containment system, it was just free form.

This served me well and still does, but a few years back, I decided to try one of the tumblers.  I liked the idea of having it closer to the house than the compost pile, which means in the winter, it's much nicer to just run out back to add scraps and supposedly it breaks material down faster because it's black and heats a lot faster than the compost pile/ It's plastic, so I wrestled with my thoughts about plastic and food but in the end, I decided to try it.

My method is to add scraps all month.  At the end of the month, I leave it to sit and do its thing.  About a month after that, depending on the time of year, it's usually mostly ready for sifting and reuse.

I have a very posh system that begins with putting a tarp under the tumbler to catch all of the compost.  This is no easy feat because the compost never wants to just fall out nicely.  It's a round container with a rectangular opening, and I'm sure if I had paid attention in physics or geometry, I would know that these two shapes plus gravity make no sense.  I have to sort of rock it back and forth a bunch of times and even then, I don't usually get all of it. 

I always feel like that bit left over is the starter for the next round.

Kind of like when you make your own yogurt and you need a little starter to make it work.

Once I have as much out of there as I can get, I take it to the next part of my amazing system which is a bread crate with wood support so it fits in the wheelbarrow and stays put.  It has fairly large holes so I get some little bits of sticks and stuff but I don't care.  I'm not selling this compost so I don't feel like it has to be pressed through a fine mesh to get every last thing out of it.

Some people use a piece of wood to slide back and forth over the compost to shake it all down, but I just use my hands.  I keep sliding all of it back and forth until I'm left with whatever hasn't broken down and that goes back into the tumbler.

Then I'm left with some really nice dirt that's also really light and fluffy from all of the sifting.

I'm fairly impressed with how this system works so I use it for all of my food scraps. In the winter, it takes a couple of months for everything to break down, but it's usually good by spring. 

I bought a second one that's not as nice, so now when one is resting, I have one to put new scraps in.  I still use my pile for all lawn clippings and most weeds and in the spring, I sift it to get all of the soil for new seeds to start.

People get worked up about neighbors composting because they say it brings rats.  What doesn't bring rats?  I suppose having a contained system like the tumblers is better than just a wild pile of scraps that anyone can just help themselves to.  However you decide to do it, composting pays off.  You get your food scraps taken care of, so less trash, you get free dirt so you can start your own seeds in good soil and you get the satisfaction of keeping that circle going.

You Like to Wear Your Shorts so Short

 

I will never forget a ridiculous woman I worked with telling me that once.  My skirts and shorts were apparently too short for her liking so one day as I walked past in short similar to these, she said "Well, you like to wear your shorts and skirts so short."  Out of nowhere, no context.  I just looked and her and said "yeah, well, I'm short and my legs are my best asset, so why not?"

Anyway, I'm here to introduce the newest prints available from Waymaker Fabrics (and show off my best asset).  This whole set of prints has a nautical theme and I just love it!  

I was a strike sewist for this round and I really had a hard time choosing just one print to strike!  

Maybe because we were in the depths of weeks of snow and frozen weather, or maybe because I live in a coastal town, this round of seaside prints really called my attention.  I knew I wanted to use the canvas as a base to make shorts and this Casting Nets on Slate really thrilled me. 

I've used the canvas from  Waymaker Fabrics  for pants, shorts, a skirt and bags and I am just so satisfied with it!  

It's lightweight but has structure. But not too much structure.  

It glides through all of my sewing machines, even with a couple of layers.  

It's soft on the inside so it doesn't feel like you're wearing burlap or like you've climbed inside an LLBean boat bag and you can't move.  

My every day school bag is made from the canvas and after using it every day for over a year, I can attest that it holds up really well.  There are no tears, no signs of wear and no fading.

Now back to the shorts.  When the fabric arrived, I was in the midst of adjusting the Henderson Pants pattern from Styla Patterns, so I was really excited to try it in "real" fabric. I am not an ambassador or tester for Styla Patterns, but I have to say the Hendersons have become my favorite pants pattern, by far.  I have had to make some adjustments but the fit right out of the box was not bad.  If anything, going by the size chart, I actually started out too large through the hips and thighs and had to take some of the bulk away.  Usually with pants, my "athletic thighs" break the bank and I'm all over the place with adding extra width.

The pattern has a shorts cut line, but something about the way the shorts fit felt too close to my thighs for shorts.  I have a specific feeling I want from my woven shorts, a certain circumference around my thighs, I guess, and I found the Hendersons to be more like "walking shorts" where they were a little too close.  I find this so puzzling because as pants, the width in the thighs is very generous and it's the same exact pattern, just cut higher. 

I have a theory.  When they are made as pants, the weight of the fabric from the length of the pants pulls the fabric out and away from the thighs.  When they are made as shorts, there's nothing to pull them down.  This theory is unscientifically based on many attempts to make cut offs from jeans and making shorts from pants patterns over the years.

My very favorite woven shorts pattern ever is the Chitown Chinos from Alina Design Co.  The ONLY reason I strayed from that pattern is that I wasn't a fan of the way the waistband is done.  I really like the waistband of the Hendersons, although it was too tall for my liking so I brought it down a half inch.  I noticed that the crotch depth and circumference of the thighs was slightly different form the Hendersons so I used them as a guide to make the Henderson shorts do what I wanted.

And they did!

Yes, there are wrinkles at the crotch but in real life, they are not as noticeable as I move. The more I learn about pants fitting, the more wrinkles across the front of pants have become my nemesis and I can't stop looking at everyone's pants all the time to see if there are wrinkles.  In real life, these are not as noticeable and most of the time I'm either moving or sitting down, so no one sees them.  

I think we are really mean to ourselves when we take frontal shots of pants and shorts and then get mad about the wrinkles because in reality, we aren't usually standing like this for people to examine our shorts and pants, right?  As a teacher, yes, I stood like this for 20 years, but normal people don't stand in front of an audience all day, every day, so let's stop getting so mad about wrinkles at the crotch!

You can see in this picture what I mean about my "athletic thighs".  I have ridiculous inner thigh muscles, probably from riding horses but also because I build muscles in my legs just by thinking about it. This extra bulk usually wreaks havoc with pants fitting.  This is also why I like a little extra room in the legs of my shorts.

The Hendersons pattern has a different fly insertion method than I prefer, so I completely changed how the fly is done.  I really like the way the Ginger Jeans from Closet Core Patterns does the fly, so I always transfer the whole process to any pants or jeans I make.  It's a no fail fly for me when I do it this way.

The pockets on this pattern are different from any I've done but I'm noticing this squared off pocket in a lot of ready to wear patterns I see out in public.  I didn't love them at first, but they are growing on me.

You can also see here how the waistband looks.  It's still taller than most of the waistbands I'm used to. My first versions kept folding over as I wore them.  I blamed my lower ribs hitting the waistband even though it's not a high rise.  I'm so short in my torso, I struggle a lot with waistbands.  I took .5 inches out of the waistband through the center and now it sits better and doesn't collide with my lower ribs.

You can also enjoy the tucked in look here because you won't see it again. I never tuck in my shirts and I'm highly unlikely to start now.  I always feel like a tucked in shirt emphasizes how short I am through my torso and it makes me feel even shorter and thicker than I am.

When I chose this fabric, I knew there wasn't really anything in my wardrobe that would specifically work with it.  Any neutral color would be fine, but the red in the lobsters kept calling to me.  It's like a Nantucket red.  That pinkish red you get when you wash a red sweatshirt a million times.  That's a color I'd wear a lot, so I asked if there was a heathered nautical red available and guess what?  There is!  It's a heathered nautical red and it's also available in this round.

The top is the Cecelia Tank and Bra from 5 out of 4 patterns.  I chose a  new modal French terry base from Waymaker Fabrics because I wanted to see how it compares to the old one they offered.  It doesn't have as much stretch and that caught me off guard.  I didn't realize how much less stretch it had until I put it on.  While the previous modal French terry would have hung looser, this one is pretty close fitting.  I love how the red printed on it and it matches the red in the shorts perfectly!

The nice thing about Waymaker Fabrics is that you get to choose from a variety of bases.  The print holds up really well.  I haven't had any ink fade in the  years I've been strike sewing for them.  This sweater is several years old and is as bright as the day the fabric arrived.  I was so excited to discover that this new nautical red is the exact color of one of the reds in this Fire Flowers print!

The only caution I have about ordering a print is that you think about whether or not the garment you're going to make will be seen on both sides, like cardigans, jackets, etc.  The print doesn't go all the way through the fabric, so the inside will be white or slightly off white.  This isn't a problem for pants, skirts, pullovers, etc.  but for something that will be open, you should be aware.  I learned this when I made the sweater above since it doesn't have buttons so it's always open.  When the wind flips it over, the back of the fabric shows and personally, I don't like that.

As always, pockets and facings fabric is something different from within my stash.  No one sees them unless they are doing my laundry, so it's my secret entertainment.  Some people call it pretty guts.  I usually choose something with some some of the colors of the main fabric and since that nautical red hasn't left my brain in months, I choose red for the inner fabric too.