With so many babies being born in Australia’s baby boom I’ve taken to jazzing up singlets so the little ones feel connected to the textile world from the get go.

I used to buy the pale coloured singlets and do bullion roses on them. This looked great but the roses are a bit lumpy for their little chests. Also who wants insipid colours on a child when you can have your own shades of tie dye flocked with simple flower embroidery or applique. I was disappointed that some of the neck bands, from the same packet of singlets, didn’t dye with my cellulose fibre reactives as they must be polyester. Don’t you think the manufacturer would warn us of such horrors! Perhaps if weavers ran the world this would attract a major fine or even a jail sentence with the Textile and Weave Protection Board!

These photos are especially for Alex – the mum to be -  so she can see how to make them. I just concertina folded (or pleated) the singlet then wrapped string around them very tightly. In another lot I used clothes pegs to do the resist rather than string. You can see this effect in the two purple singlets above.

Here I’ve been making aprons again, this time for my mother. She gets cupcakes in brights.

I didn’t leave my husband out either and you can see here that he actually wore it for a BBQ. It had the appropriate racing cars on it. Of course they were the wrong type of cars of interest as they all look the same to me…I don’t think I’d have any luck finding drag cars on fabric, it’s just too specialised.

Like many of us I’m always surfing the net looking for weaving eye candy. Thanks to Fibrescape I found this wonderful link to weaving classes at Penland School of Crafts. The dyeing of the yarns made a great difference to the woven textiles for these weavers. Colour just makes everything more exciting especially for beginners.

I confess, I’ve always been an apron wearer. I just ruined too many clothes with big drips of cooking oil to submit to the perceived shame of apron wearing. I think aprons somehow symbolised a womans’ home role. I still had the role but minus the protective clothing! I’ve never really thought of making one or delighting in such things. Inspired by Lucy and her aprons, I promptly went out and got enough material for aprons to suit my two daughters. I so enjoyed making them. The fresh motif based fabrics available today make choosing a theme for a person even more fun.

The pattern was easy to make up and I used 70cms of two different fabrics for each one. This makes the apron reversible. I used just about all the fabric which included enough for a ruffle and ties. Each apron took about two hours to make.

Now I’ve plans to make a few more for gifts…including, one for my husband. He has been known to get splattered by oil too!

The other little project I finished today was a fleece hat for a baby. As I don’t actually have the baby for measurements I had to search a bit but found that newborns to 6 months average a head circumference of 14-17" and a crown of 8-10". This helped when adapting this fleece pattern for the hat but, as always, the second one will be better than the first.