Showering Pincushion Treats with Elephants

Hello friends!  It’s been awhile. Right after my last post, we packed up our little family of three and headed east to Glacier National Park to join my parents and my brother and his family in a little over a week of outdoor fun. I loved getting away and into the wild, but it’s true what they say: any travel with multiple little kids (my brother has two darling little girls) should really be called a trip and not a vacation. My parents then came back to Seattle with us, and my dad decided we were going to tackle the plumbing projects that were holding up our kitchen remodel. My mom took care of my daughter while my dad and I sweated copper pipes. Every day. For over a week. It was fun but intense! The back to back adventures meant that for nearly a month the only time my sewing machine got turned on was when I mended the strap on my mom’s purse.

That is, until the end of last week.  Then my sewing machine whirred into action again in order to make a baby shower gift for Melizza of Pincushion Treats.  Yes, I went to a baby shower for one of our very own! And, it was a pretty much a requirement to make something handmade for it.

Back when several of the Seattle sewing folks first started talking about throwing Melizza a baby shower, I had so many ideas for what I wanted to make her.  I eventually narrowed it down to an outfit from out-of-print McCall’s M5415 and an elephant blanket from Cotton Ginny’s Animal Blanket pattern. I’d even picked out fabric for both.  But, then, with everything going on, the days slipped away, and I ran out of time to make it all.  So, I settled on only making the elephant blanket and wrapping up the McCall’s pattern, fabric, and trim as a ready-made project for Melizza.

I’ve made a million of these blankets, so there’s really not much more to say about the pattern. I originally got the pattern for an assigned project in my Introduction to Sewing class, and I’m almost certain that this particular pattern has been used more than any other pattern in my stash. Since it feels like everyone I know is having babies, it figures that a quick baby pattern would be a winner for me. It’s too bad I hadn’t yet discovered sewing when everyone I knew was getting married! It would have been fun to have an excuse to make party dress after party dress!

If you’ve never sewn with minky, you should keep in mind that the nap is directional and that little flecks of minky fuzz will get all inside your sewing machine. After I finish a project like this one, I typically use a pipe cleaner to dig the fuzz out from inside my machine. It’s a bit of a nuisance, but it’s not irritating enough to keep me from sewing blanket after blanket from this incredibly soft material.

Who else has sewn with minky? Any tips or tricks to share? Anyone else disappear recently on a fun end-of-summer vacation or an intense home-improvement staycation? Anyone in the southern hemisphere counting the weeks until their summer vacation?