2 year old birthdays

On Sunday night (after we got back to Ottawa), Mike and I went to our nephew Owen's birthday party. We got there late, as we'd expected, but fortunately just in time to see the little munchkin open up his gifts. Owen has yet learn the excitement of tearing open a pile of presents - each time he opened a gift, he was ready to drop everything and just play with that toy, happily oblivious to the rest of the pile just behind him!

Remember the monkey hoodie I mentioned last week? I opted to nix the ears and tail - on the one hand, Owen doesn't yet understand the concept of dress-up, and I was a little concerned that he might be turned off by the ears and tail. Also, since a monkey's ears are on the side of his head, I figured the whole thing might look kind of odd - I think I'll wait till Owen is enamoured with dinosaurs, and then make him a hoodie with spikes on the hood and back.

here's what I ended up with:

the monkey on the backThis is 3rd monkey I showed you last week, except that his hair was removed in a moment of frustration... I made these shirts with Avery Dark T-shirt Transfers (as recommended by craftster); right before ironing them, after you've removed the stabilizing backing paper, the image becomes very much like a very thin, rubbery, re-useable sticker... except that it curls slightly on the sides, and has an amazing ability to grab on to itself and not let go. the tips of the hair kept curling onto themselves, and after damaging 2 of them while trying to unstick them, I decided that the monkey was just going to have to be bald... my sanity was not worth it! :) But I think he looks fine anyway.

The monkey looked a little hungry, so I put a banana on the front for him to eat later. Then I made a little t-shirt for Owen, to warn others of his newly acquired 2-year old status.
(please note that this is shirt was not my original idea... there are lots of these shirts available on Café Press, should you be interested in acquiring one the easy way). Being cheap, I just used the dark t-shirt transfer for the white shirt as well - you can see the white bits between the letters, but other than that, it looks fine.

I also used the birthday as a chance to give Tara the much overdue blanket for Felix, which I finished about a week and a half ago (Felix will be 2 months next week).

This was the top of the blanket, a few rounds shy of completion - I finished when there were 5 strips of each colour in the blanket (looks like I forgot to take a full-size photo after it was finished! I'll have to get one next time I'm over there)

I bought the backing fabric from Repro Depot, and the cord binding from a local fabric store that sells mostly upholstery and specialist fabrics - I think this is supposed to be used for edging cushions or duvets. I started by (generously) hemming the backing to the right size, and then sewed on the cording.
I wanted to sew the knitted part on using the machine, just to make things faster, but I couldn't get the foot close enough to the cording. Also, I realised that I hadn't attached the flannel very well - the line of stitching was too far away, so it was revealing too much of the cord's mounting tape.
In the end, I decided to hand-sew the whole thing, after first locking it into place with a few lines of machine quilting - every navy strip got one line of stitching on either side, one garter ridge in from the edge (again, no pics of that... sorry).The hand sewing turned out quite useful, since it made it much easier to attach one of my new labels...
(here's the back)
I made the labels (which still needs perfecting, since I left too much blank blue space on the fold-over side, and not enough on the sew-in side) with printable cotton fabric sheets, and this tutorial that was featured on Craft not too long ago.

Hmm... now that I have a label, all I need is some product to sell! :)