In case you don't already know, I am in the midst of the final months of a new book manuscript. How could you not know? I feel like I have been going on about finishing it for months now, boring you all to death! But just in case you hadn't known, there it is.
As a result of the book and of the fact that it is the middle of summer, my life feels like a whirlwind of chapters, time at the pool with the kids, illustrations, kids wanting snacks, photo shoots, kid's coming home from camp wanting more snacks, more writing and then dirty, happy kids wanting more food before they play whiffle ball in the front yard with every single neighborhood kid they can scare up. Oh yeah, and they want snacks for that too.
In fact, I looked out the window the other day and one of the kids was running bases while hugging the bowl of pistachios I had put out there for them! I'll let you get a mental picture of that for a second. Got it? Good. It was pretty hysterical!
Is it just me, or do our kids eat more in the summer? I am going through food in Costco size quantities and I still seem to always be running out. But I digress.
In the midst of all this chapter writing and kid wrangling, I haven't had much of an opportunity to do anything simple and easy and, well, summery. But I have been dreaming of doing it. So finally yesterday I stopped all my deadline work and whipped up a couple of easy peasy kitchen towels. Really easy peasy.
I used my favorite kind of kitchen towel to start off - a flour sack [if your local drugstore doesn't carry these, google flour sack towel & you will find dozens of sources]. They usually come very wrinkled, so I pressed the towel well so it would be easy to lay the strip of fabric on it.
I cut a 3 1/2" strip of 3 prints from my Strawberry Fields collection and pressed each long end under a 1/4". I tucked one end under, pressed it and overlapped one edge of the towel by about 1". I pinned it in place and continued to pin the strip all the way across the towel to the other side, where I trimmed the end of my strip to hang off about 1 1/4". I then tucked that edge under too and tucked it behind the towel by about 1".
I sewed the strip on, on both sides. That's it! In about 35 minutes, I had three brand new kitchen towels that completely changed the feel of my kitchen to "summertime"- at least for me. And more importantly, I felt a great sense of completing something I had been wanting to do for a long time. And then I felt quite ready to go back to writing and making more snacks for the kids :-).
If you are feeling at all overwhelmed about the undone or unfinished state of your huge projects this summer, then just stop and do something little that you can finish quickly and that will make you smile every time you look at it. I promise that it will make you feel better!
... as you can probably tell from the photos, flour sacks come in different shades, some bleached and some natural. It seems that I have both in my stash and so you can see two different shades of fabric on the towels.
On another quick note, we have restocked the cream bundles with a new bundle #3. So many of you have requested these and I am so sorry that we were not able to get them done any faster [we were waiting for fabric to arrive] and that we don't have more. Have fun! These are great as backgrounds for whatever project you are working on or great for your stash if you collect creams like me!
xoxo
Joanna
Recent Comments