Weekend project: patches

Claire is sick now. So is Wella.Last night was really bad. Fevers of almost 103 for both girls.  Sammy finally got better from both the stomach bug and the cold/virus thing, but now his sisters have the congestion/sore throat/fever thing. So I am STILL hanging out at home most of the time. No cabin fever. Not for me. I'm cool.

Well, I'm basically fine with it. Except that since Sammy isn't sick anymore he's completely and totally stir crazy. So, on Friday, when Matt worked from home, Sam came with me to run some errands while Matt stayed with the sick girls. We went to JoAnn fabrics to buy some patches for his pants. We came home with more than patches. We also found this sweet duct tape.

Duct tape is cheap entertainment for sure. He duct taped some of his cars, a few skateboards, and started wrapping all his blocks in tape as well before we stopped him.

But, while I was there, I might have picked up this sewing machine. I know, I know. If you know me well you may remember that I bought a sewing machine a few years ago, made one thing, and promptly sold it on Craigslist because I could never figure it out very well. But this is DIFFERENT. I promise. The lady at the store told me it's a great sewing machine for beginners with lots of automatic features (like automatic tension, which is what I could never figure out on my old, cheaper machine).

So Sammy and I decided to go a little crazy and design our own patches. Afterall, I realized that the patches that you buy and iron-on were kinda expensive! Especially when you need about ten pairs of them. And we could make our own for way less! I mean, that is, if we just bought the $300 sewing machine.

So we did. We bought this heat-bond stuff that lets you make any fabric into iron-on fabric, but then I reinforced all the edges with stitches from my new MACHINE! See? If you don't get to leave the house for a long time, sometimes you have to buy something really crazy for yourself when you do.

But I will say that part of the appeal to patching Sammy's pants is that we were given TONS of hand-me-down, perfect-condition Hanna Anderson sweat pants...which just so happen to cost $30/piece. And Sam ripped the knees out of ALL of them. All. I would never pay t$30 for pants for Sam, but if someone gives them to me, I'm not going to complain!

Incidentally, Hanna Anderson is a wonderful store (with clothes that make kids look like kids...not Hannah Montana/Justin Bieber fanatics) and I do buy all Wella's little pilot caps there. I think the store is Swedish-inspired or something.

So Sam picked out pilot/airplane material for some of the patches.

They were BIG patches because they had giant holes in the knees. 

He also picked out "Indian" material (I tried to teach him to say "Native American" but he's reading Peter Pan right now so he's stuck on Indian).

But his favorite was this camo/army material.

It says things like "Boot camp" and "basic training" on it.

There were 6 sweat pants and then I also did his jeans.

I thought they turned out kinda cute.

He picked out these trucks too.

And then, Claire decided to get in on the sewing machine action so she maade this little pillow and quilt.

She really did! She quilted this! It's only about 12" by 6" but I thought it was good.

See the pillow?

I think she's starting to feel better! The doctor said no one has the flu or strep, so I'm comforted that they may recover after all.