Y is for yellow

I was not going to do a Y post with yellow - Mindy already did that. But for the second Thursday night in a row, I found myself with a sewing project that needed to be done RIGHT NOW.

Found out yesterday morning that Field Day was today at school, and the 2nd graders needed to wear yellow shirts. After some looking around, I figured out that the only yellow shirts for children that we own are all pajamas. But ... there's some yellow knit fabric ... and I did just get the Girl on the Go dress/shirt pattern from Oliver+S ... so at 10 pm last night, I made one.

Size 8, with the length at a size 10 because I like shirts to go a little further onto the hip. It took about 2 hours, because the knit was thin and kept rolling up on me, and I went reeeeeeally slow because I didn't want to warp it while it went through the machine.

Here's our fearless warrior girl ready to go to Field Day this morning!

I did a decorative stitch for binding the facing down, just for fun.

another way to use a quilt block

JK's friend BR is really into snails, which utterly confuses her parents. It's really hilarious. But they humored her at her birthday last week (she turned 5). They had a garden themed birthday party on Saturday and even gave her live snails as a pet for her gift.

A couple of nights before her party, I was randomly surfing quilting blogs and came across a snail quilt block. Stop. The. Presses. I am making this quilt block for BR and putting it on a tote bag for her gift. Now. I didn't buy the pattern, but eye-balled it, and this is how it ended up:

The snail itself is 6x8 inches. If I were to make this again, I would start with an 8-inch colored square instead of 6 to give more room for the seam allowances. The body started at 3 inches wide. The corner squares started at 2 inches, and then were sewn on the diagonal and the excess trimmed off. The smaller size worked great this time because BR is a tiny girl.

   

The block isn't quilted at all, but there is interfacing behind it. I used this tutorial from Simply Notable for the bag itself. It's a good sized bag for a small child for library books and carrying random toys around. I also experimented a little bit with the handles - I originally cut the strips at 2 1/2 inches wide like usual, and then folded them shut like bias tape. My addition was that I tucked a 1-inch wide strip of low-loft quilt batting into the fold before I sewed the strip shut. I like how that turned out - makes it softer to put over your shoulder! Planning to use that again with future bags.