Baby Vests

Our quilting guild (Music City Modern Quilt Guild) makes vests for the Neonatal Intensive Care Unit (NICU) at Vanderbilt Children's Hospital twice a year. This year we brought some home to work on after our sewathon a week ago Saturday.

On this cold, rainy Sunday I decided to work on some of the vests, despite the looming mass of presents to make/complete for Christmas. The vests are just so sweet that it is a pleasure to work on them. A friend at a baby in a NICU unit, and she would have enjoyed seeing her little one in a colorful vest.

It takes as long to turn the vests inside out as it does to sew them - the little shoulders are so tiny.

Coffee Cup Sleeves

I wanted to make some prizes for my students for a Jeopardy game we were playing to practice culture and vocabulary, so after some searching on Pinterest and YouTube, I decided to make coffee cup sleeves. As law students within walking distance of a Starbucks, there will be lots and lots of caffeine in the year to come, so the sleeves seemed appropriate.

I still have trouble with written patterns - don't understand them at all and end up doing something slightly different every time, so this YouTube tutorial worked for me. Next time I want to try to make the sleeves using elastic and buttons, but velcro works really well also.

After a trial run during which I managed to sew text fabric upside down and discovered that I am useless with a rotary cutter when my template is also "cuttable," I finally managed to figure the sleeves out. Don't laugh...I am learning. So, I stuck to scissors and drew one pattern on the right side and the other and the wrong side of the fabric I had chosen. Worked well for me...I clearly need to practice my rotary cutting skills. Cutting the fabric took longer than sewing the coffee sleeves.

I think the sleeves are cute though and perfect for caffeine-addicted law students.