Welcome to Maria Makes a Mess on Maria Makes A Mess

Halloween spoopy quilt complete!

Thu, 15 Oct 2026 00:00:00 +0000

A warm hello and thank you to the wonderful denizens of Bluesky who use the #quiltsky hashtag. I recently found out about this hashtag’s existence and used it over there, and a really wonderful community of people showed up and supported me when I was in the middle of this little project and GENUINELY considering abandoning it.

But I didn’t - and now I’m happy to say I finished this Halloween quilted table runner.

Here’s how it all went.

Doing some strategizing

After finishing the main blocks, I laid them out on my very, very badly needing vaccuuming floor. Woof, look at all those bits of fabric fuzz, ugh.

Pumpkin offers her editorial opinions and also says “please vaccuum this floor, mother”

In any case, I did my best to ignore that and just get a sense of what might work with what, and grouped the blocks in sets of 4.

Like so. Here are 4 sets of 4. As you can clearly tell at this point, the stripes were not planned out nor were they remotely uniform. I wanted this to be pretty freeform and so it is!

At this point, the hardest work really was behind me. Piecing these striped blocks felt like it took forever, so assembling the blocks is such a breeze in comparison. I think I put the whole thing together in a half hour at this point:

Here it was in progress, where I saw it all together for the first time. And I posted it on Bluesky because genuinely I really DID NOT like how this looked.

My husband also gave it a “WHOA!” and not in a good way. This is a loud, gaudy, tacky thing! I knew it would be but I think the degree to which it is all of those things really surprised me when I put it together. My original intent was to put this on a console table, and that is what I sized it for, but it felt just… way too much. Too Much Hallween Muchiness.

Wonderful folks on #quiltsky said to keep going, and I had a rare moment of good judgement and actually listened to good advice when it was given to me.

And so, I kept going.

I don’t have photos of the next steps so I’ll just go step by step:

I used June Tailor Quilt Basting Spray (use whatever brand you like) to baste the quilt sandwich - the batting and the base layer.

I used some batting scraps I had in storage and whipped them together to make the batting for this, and while I had intended to make the backing fabric thematic - black and orange, Halloweeny - it ends up I didn’t have enough of it! Nope, I hadn’t checked, and had only assumed. 🤦‍♀️ 🤦‍♀️ 🤦‍♀️ ARGHHH

Thankfully I had learned some good quilting basics from my mom, who is a wonderful quilter, and as many people learned to use bedsheets as quilt backing, I similarly had been taught by my mom to use muslin. As a result, I usually have reams of the stuff around - it’s cheap and easy to get, and it’s useful for garment sewing too so…. I thankfully had plenty on hand to back this quilt as well.

I had learned to baste quilts with big basting threads and hand sew the whole thing and whoaaaaa I did not care for that process any time I attempted it. Basting spray for the absolute win, VASTLY prefer using it, and I love that you can still reposition the fabric to correct inevitable mistakes and bunchings.

VIP = Very Important sPray
I can’t remember where or how I got the tip to try Bottom Line quilting thread, but I had some of it, black 60wt 2-ply, and used that to quilt the layers along with a walking foot. (Oh yeah and I got a new sewing machine, heehee 🤭 more on that some other day)

I had never used a walking foot before, combining that with the very-fine strong thread and my awesome new machine… well, it was like seeing in color for the first time after a lifetime of black and white. WHAT an incredible difference that made - it was so much faster and easier than any previous machine quilting I had attempted. In the past it had been so difficult I found hand quilting to be just faster and easier, but certainly that’s not the case anymore!
In two evenings I did some very basic quilting - just along major seams and diagonals - and then after edge-trimming the whole thing, I used some half-inch black binding to finish the whole thing. That binding size was too narrow and it was SUPER annoying to work with, but it’s all I had on hand (leftover from a garment project last year). It did the job.

Once the whole quilt was done, I did the only logical thing and took it outside at dusk to photograph it with some local autumn color in the background. Natural light in the golden hour always makes everything look incredible:

I’m very glad I stuck with this, thanks to the encouragement of #quiltsky truly. Even when I took it back inside at night and put it across my dining table, it didn’t look as bad as I’d feared.

Don’t get me wrong, this isn’t tasteful or subtle in the slightest. It SCREAMS Halloween, candy, trick-or-treat, gaudiness and all. And that’s what it’s for, so I’d say it’s a win.

Most importantly for me, this is a project I sort-of started in October 2014 after a visit to the Nippori fabric district in Tokyo, and saw a number of adorable Halloween prints made in Japan. I bought a few fat quarters with no idea how I’d ever use them, and then a few years later I took one of them and cut them into strips… and then totally abandoned whatever plans I had, stuffed the strips into a bin and forgot about it until earlier this year. Meanwhile cute Halloween fabrics continued to accumulate in my stash…. please note the use of passive voice there, ahem… and even after this project I still have a few leftover but not very much.

This was a great Halloween fabric stash buster and I’m so very glad it is complete. Feels great to be able to say I picked up a project from over a decade ago and ACTUALLY finished it!

WIP: Halloween spoopy quilt, update 1

Thu, 08 Oct 2026 00:00:00 +0000

No one suffers more than the cats when their human is deep in the Quilting Mines. Or so they tell me. Good thing I have made a lot of progress and am getting closer to done on this one.

The wool pressing pad is irresistable to my cats, especially Cookie. Honestly it’s my fault for leaving it out for two seconds.

Thought I’d give a little update on the Halloween quilt project I started a few weeks ago, as I have made some progress.

le sigh

A little relic of the Joann Fabric days in my stash, always makes me a bit sad to come across these. But the best thing to do is to use the fabric. It’s what Joann would have wanted.

I got to work and cut my stash of Halloween fabrics into strips. I probably should have measured carefully. In fact, most advice says yes, I absolutely should have. Maybe I should have done a bit of math to say, hmm, for my target block size, fabric strips need to be X width. That way I will have a fairly consistent amount of strips per block instead of just trying to wing it.

But I did not do that.

Early in the process, Pumpkin was appalled by my loosey-goosey approach. She’s inspecting my work and did not like what she saw.

That said, I kept on going. Thanks to various youtube tutorials, I learned early on that chain piecing the quilt blocks was a smart way to go with this. At first I really didn’t understand how that would save much time, but yes, thank you to the wisdom of others with lots more experience than me, because it absolutely did. At first it’d take a good while to make just one square, and then pretty soon I was making 4 at a time in the same amount of time.

The other thing that helped speed things up a bit was using sew-in interfacing to hold the whole block together. I wouldn’t use this for a quilt that I’d use as a bedspread but for just something I’m using as a tablecloth, it’s fine.

Soon enough I had a whole stack of blocks. I’m not done yet but I’m very close to putting it all together. It’s going to be tacky and chaotic when it’s all put together. Perfect for Halloween!

Speaking of chaos, my husband took this photo of me teaching my daughter some sewing basics and you can see my sewing table just…. a complete explosion of mess right now. It’s ridiculous.

I know some sewists work in meticulous sewing rooms or whatnot, and I’m sure that’s because they are very neat and tidy people in general. I am not one of those people.

In any case, Pumpkin says despite my messy start, and probably a lot of choices I’m going to regret as I piece it all together, the seams have hid a number of my sewing sins and here’s hoping we’ll all be none the wiser once it’s all done. Maybe it’ll even be done in time for Halloween this year. Hooray?

A basement time bomb

Mon, 28 Sep 2026 00:00:00 +0000

House maintenance projects seem to spawn more creative projects sometimes, often out of pure necessity. One recent represented quite a timebomb here at my house from the simple process of basement decluttering in prep for some urgently needed basement work. On a neglected shelf, this paper bag had been sitting for years and I had totally forgotten what was in there.

the neglected bag

…oh.

These were all the reusable masks my family used from 2020 to 2022 during the COVID pandemic. It looks like a lot, doesn’t it? I don’t know if it is - but we certainly went through them and washed them all so many times. We had a lot because my husband was working in-person, and my daughter started pre-school, and both locations had mandatory masking policies. We had paper bags to store that day’s used mask, and then lots of washing… it was a whole dang process and one that I don’t miss.

Separating out the denim masks from the cotton. My husband wore the denim ones to work. They had a filter pocket inside.

These were some of the masks my kid wore when she was a preschooler.

It was hard to see these kid masks again. And it is heartbreaking to think about how hard it was on the kids who were SO young going through a pandemic and all the isolation and the rules - especially when I see the cute designs and food stains on these masks. I am so grateful we made it through with all our loved ones safe and sound, I know not every one was so fortunate.

And of course, some of these masks were from very early on in the pandemic, and homemade.

These star-design masks were two masks I made, improvised from materials I had at home, in late March 2020. I used quilt batting for a filter layer, and twisted strands of florist wire to pinch the mask at the nose bridge. It didn’t work well but this improvised solution was certainly better than nothing.

And this small mask was the one I made for my daughter. She was 2 when COVID started and I didn’t want her to be scared by the masks, so I used the cutest, brightest fabric I had in my stash.

The masks were worn and washed many times. They look fatigued.

For comparison, here’s a proper blast from the past with photos from when I made these masks in 2020. The masks in 2020, looking fresh

How crisp they looked. You can see the spool of florist wire I used on the right.

In any case, I didn’t want to shove them all back in a bag and forget about them in my basement. These masks went through a lot, we went through a lot together, and I’m also too afraid to simply throw them out. That feels like bad luck somehow. So something Must Be Done.

I removed any masks from the bag that were synthetic or heavy. Those can easily be tossed. The majority remained - all lightweight printed cottons, similar to quilting cottons for the most part. So I got out my seam ripper and got to work. And I ended up with this stack:

My pile of reusable COVID masks, deconstructed to just their cloth parts, the elastics and cording, filters, nose bridges and seams all removed.

Can you tell I don’t have a plan yet? I have enough projects on the frontburner for now so this will stay on the backburner a bit while I figure out what to do. But a small scrappy quilt feels like the right move.

Modest late September harvest

Fri, 25 Sep 2026 00:00:00 +0000

I put raised beds in my backyard this year and for the first time in a few years I was able to grow a few veggies at home. Life got busy and I definitely was not able to tend to things as I know I really ought to - honestly most years that’s how it goes with my gardening. Thank goodness nature is so resilient and persists despite my neglect. And also thank goodness I am not actually dependent on my garden for substinence, because clearly I’d do a poor job of keeping my family fed.

In any case my August garden was a horrendous mess and I kind of just walked away from it after the mid-August glut of zucchini and tomatoes started to wane. And when the early September green tomatoes were sticking around a little too long, I didn’t bother trying to fry them up or whatever, I just left them on the vine. Even with some near-frost temperatures, they’ve been slowly ripening out there.

And to my amazement when I went out to gather the few little slicers and cherry tomatoes still hanging around, they weren’t suffering from the blossom-end rot many of their predecessors were.

In fact, these modest few fruits were some of the best tomatoes I’d grown all year and I had completely - and I do mean COMPLETELY - neglected to tend them.

A modest late-September harvest

This is definitely not a metaphor whatsoever, nope nope nope!

Actual likely explanation: My tomatoes were probably overcrowded and them naturally thinning out meant less competition for calcium, which is why these lil’ beefsteak tomatoes didn’t have the blossom-end rot.

Shoutout to the neighborhood chipmunks for leaving these ones alone so I could actually eat them, nice of y’all to make that sacrifice for me. Appreciate it!

Also look at that fabulous purslane! I waited a bit too long to harvest it for eating, but those seed pods were chock full. I’ll be sure to have even more on hand next year - it makes my favorite horta by far, as long as I remember to cut some before it goes to seed.

WIP: Halloween quilty thing

Thu, 24 Sep 2026 00:00:00 +0000

The temperatures are dropping around here and it’s feeling crisp and chilly. And I live in Massachusetts, home of Salem and all things spooky, so of course my mind is turning to Halloween.

I’ve had plans and stashed fabric for ages for Halloween quilts. The idea started in 2014 on a trip to Japan in mid-October. I saw how Halloween is interpreted in modern Japanese pop culture and I loved it - it was cute and just a little spooky, but nothing gory or creepy. Spoopy, I guess. That’s my jam, and this version of Halloween isn’t one I can easily find in the US for Halloween.

So I loaded up! During some fabric shopping on that trip (there’s a neighborhood in Tokyo that specializes in fabric - I’ll write more about it sometime) I picked up some fat quarters of adorable Halloween fabric and hoped one day I’d have enough to make something with it all.

12 years later here I am… I carefully picked out some Halloween fabrics over the years that I found mainly at Joanns (RIP now and forever) and figured it was time to figure out what went with what. A simple scrappy quilt using strips (a strip quilt? sounds saucy) is what I’m thinking of, so time to get out the rotary cutter, put on some good tunes and get to work on what I am calling my “yes pile”:

The Yes Pile of fabrics for this Halloween scrappy quilt

As you can see, right now everything is pretty saturated in colors, lots of bold graphic design, cartoony and cute.

Hmmm….I am a little concerned that things seem all very high-key, uniform in value. I’ll see if I can can add some variance there, otherwise it’s going to be just very == AHHHHH == all the time. Value contrast is so important!

Also important is looking at fabric choices in different light, literally. I picked this pile out from my stash late at night and it all looked fine enough, and now that I look at them again in the light of day, slightly different story. So fascinating how this all works.

Here are my “laters”, or I guess, the reject pile: The laters, they didn’t make the cut this time

I didn’t like the ones in this pile because the art style was WILDLY different, and as an illustrator that bugs me. Instead of bold graphic style with flat coloring, there’s a lot of shading and variance here, and mixing the two styles together drives me batty (Halloween pun absolutely intended). But maybe there are some pieces here or there I can make work, especially if they are lower in value.

Then again, I could be Overthinking It(TM), as I am wont to do. This is a Halloween project, and the quilt I am pretty sure will be for a table covering and not for actual sleep-bed-covering use.

Just say no to t-shirt quilts

Sun, 20 Sep 2026 00:00:00 +0000

…and make something else

A quick writeup for a very quick project. I’m not telling you how to live or what to do, but just me personally, I really hate t-shirt quilts. I have look at lots of them, and I know people really love them to give and recieve, I know people have made good business making them, and I know people get very attached to their own. I get it! But I have genuinely yet to see one that I liked.

So.

I posted this on Instagram but I want to mirror it here so it doesn’t get lost by The Algorithm. Here it is:

There comes a time when two nerds meet, fall in love, and move in together that one (me) says to the other (my husband), hey, your entire wardrobe consists of con shirts or geeky sayings on black and I think it might be time to retire them and level up sartorially. We don’t have to throw out your favorite shirts, I’ll save them and make them into a tshirt quilt.

Fifteen years later, I still hadn’t made that quilt because honestly? I’ve yet to see a tshirt quilt that I didn’t think looked horrendously ugly. Plus the vinyl paint for printing on tshirts is a sensory nightmare as it ages and who wants that next to their face when they sleep? Not me.

So in a bin those shirts had slept for a decade and a half. They stayed in that bin as we moved from Boston, got married, then moved to Waltham, had our kid, and then moved to Chelmsford. But at this point if I didn’t do something with them… it was time to go to textile recycling.

So I made something with them.

Last week I had the idea to turn them into drink coasters for our offices and gaming nights. Are these going to win any beauty awards? No. Are they superbly made? Also no. But they’re now actually doing something instead of sitting in a plastic bin in my closet, and best of all, my husband had cooooompleeeeetely forgotten about his old shirts all these years, so it was a delightful surprise for him to see these old shirts again in their new form. I probably made a dozen in all, here are just a few.

I’m sure this is not an original idea of mine and don’t claim that it is. Just throwing the idea out there for anyone else who has old tshirts they don’t want to toss. Sewing knits sucks (or at least I hate it) but this is a very, very easy sewing project.

Headbands for a shark enthusiast

Thu, 17 Sep 2026 14:17:56 -0400

I don’t have the time or frankly ability to make my growing kid lots of cute clothing she’ll quickly grow out of - I limit myself to cozy pajamas and the like that will get a lot of repeat wear. But one thing I have made for her that has gotten a lot of mileage has been custom headbands.

You can buy headband ‘blanks’ at lots of craft stores or online. They’re just plain plastic, and you zjuzh them up by covering the plastic with fun fabric and any adornment you like. My kid loves a small bow slightly offset, so that’s what I make.

The best part is pretty much any fun fabric you have lying around can make a great headband fabric since it doesn’t use much fabric at all.

The very simple pattern I made and use

As you can see above, I fashioned my own very simple pattern for headbands. The headband in the photo is the blank.

The fabric is fabulous isn’t it? My kid is a big shark enthusiast, and I found this fabric on a recent batch shop from Yuzawaya - a big Japanese crafting and sewing chain store that I visit when I’m in Japan, and thankfully they also ship to the United States. I save up the fabrics and notions I’m interested in so I order all at once in a big batch, though the fabrics do sell out fast if they’re especially seasonal (early September all the Halloween and most Christmas fabrics were already GONE). Thankfully shark fabric has less demand!

Shark fabric from Yuzawaya

This specific fabric is essentially canvas, so it’ll hold up well for a headband for sure. I thought I’d use the remnants for a pillowcase but it’s too rough for that. Maybe I’ll make lots of headbands?!

I made this headband from Japanese cotton remnants I’d had in my stash for years. The cotton is very soft and thin, a bit too delicate for a quilt and not nearly enough to create anything big. But perfect for this headband.

Sewing up the headband is easy breezy, takes maybe 30 minutes start to finish.

Shark headband work in progress

My pattern isn’t perfect so since I was feeling a bit picky, I didn’t like how loose the fabric looked at this stage. So I re-flipped the headband and sewed it with seams further in to tighten the fabric against the headband base.

Can you tell I do my sewing at night? Haha

Shark headband complete!

I hand-close the fabric with a simple ladder stitch to reduce any irritating seams against my little one’s scalp (she has yet to complain so I assume I’m doing a good job there). After assembling the bow, I make it into a little knot, and then tack it onto the top. I suppose I could hot glue it, but why use glue when thread is better?

I have been informed by My VIP Customer that the shark headband is everything she was hoping for and she plans to wear it on school picture day. I can’t imagine a better endorsement than that!

The Pekka jacket

Sat, 12 Sep 2026 14:17:56 -0400

After buying the pattern in 2021, I recently decided to be brave and just get this project done. I had somehow convinced myself that my sewing skills weren’t up to this ‘advanced beginner’ pattern, I don’t know why. Maybe because it’s lined and I had a bad experience trying to make a lined jacket years ago for a costume?

Well, when I actually got started, I found this jacket to be a very satisfying and easy to make. I got it done in about a week, cutting to sewing.

My Pekka jacket, freshly made

I took VERY direct inspiration and direction from this excellent blog post on Ready to Wear’s website and used Merchant & Mills quilted cotton for the shell, and a very bright and fun Lisa Congdon x Nerida Hansen cotton sateen for the lining, both of which I bought locally from Gather Here in Cambridge, MA.

Protip from me on the Merchant and Mills quilted cotton: The wrong side of the fabric, which is what gives the fabric its bulk and warmth, is a lot of loose yarns! It makes quite a mess when working with it, and in my case my sewing station is in a room with carpet and it’s been a bit of a trial vacuuming out all the loose bits embedded in the carpet. Worth it, but just be warned!

I have been wearing this nonstop since I made it. It is absolutely perfect for chilly New England autumn days, and sewing it up was a breeze – I will be making it again in slightly less ‘cozy’ fabric for more around-the-town wear soon.

Giving Halloween kitties an upgrade

Sat, 05 Sep 2026 00:00:00 +0000

I’m as guilty as anyone walking down the craft store aisles in August and September and oohing and aahing over the … frankly…. kind of UNREAL amounts of Halloween stuff that comes out now. I’m a proper millennial and love Halloween but even to me it’s starting to feel very excessive and, how shall I say, landfillcore?

But when I see something black cat related I do stop in my tracks and I gotta admit. Michael’s… ya got me with these two plaster cats. They were just unpainted and unprimed, as bare as can be, and have a little LED candle light inside so they glow. It’s up to you to make them truly yours. And well, I have two black cats for real, so it’s got to be a law somewhere that I must pay tribute to them. Right?

the kitties in progress

I used a black matte spray paint and primer to coat these two and cover the bare white plaster. This layer is always thirsty so it took a few coats. In the photo above you can also see the Arteza pearl acrylic paints I used for spot color, and I used a touch of Windsor & Newton titanium white acrylic for my tuxie cat.

I did have to wonder why the heck the witches hats on these cats had pilgrim buckles? As a New Englander, that just really bothered me. This would not pass muster in Salem. I know many actual witches. Pilgrim buckles? AbsoLUTEly not.

So as I began to make each plaster cat actually resemble the real-life kitties who bless^ and protect^^ my home, I figured I needed to cover up the stupid buckles so they wouldn’t eternally bother me.

I used some dried bean pods from my garden that had a lovely shiny texture and cut them into semi-recognizable shapes (a pumpkin for Pumpkin, and a bitten cookie for Cookie), and hot glued them onto Halloween ribbon. I’m pretty happy with the result!

Finished kitties

There’s Pumpkin, my black cat, in her plaster Halloween-y tribute on the left. And my insane tuxie Cookie is in tribute on the right.

Mandatory cat tax for comparison:

First it’s Pumpkin:

and now Cookie:

They are not biological sisters but they bonded as tiny kittens at the shelter, so we adopted them together, and even now several years later they are still very sweet with each other.

^read: beg loudly for food all the time

^^read: catch and eat mice (good girls!) and put toys in the way of the robot vacuum so they get caught and the robot throws an error (bad girls!)

Lobster! Whaleshark!

Fri, 21 Aug 2026 00:00:00 +0000

When your bestie sends you a sewing video in Instagram with zero ulterior motive but to share it and go “oh, cool!”, for me it is inevitable that I’m going to look at that sewing project and wonder if it’s something I can make for him. Because sewing isn’t really his thing, but if a sewing project caught his eye enough to send it my way, well, I take notice!

So that is how I found myself one day rooting through my fabric stash for all my red fabrics, wondering which ones would look best as a lobster shell or claws or tail. And then I fashioned this little guy up:

The lobster bag, complete

The pattern comes by way of Mariah Makes, and I purchased the digital pattern on her Etsy store.

The lobster bits before I assembled them all

This was a very sweet little project and pretty quick. The longest part, for me, was finding the right interfacing in my project supplies that would work with this. The frustrating thing about interfacing is there are a lot of different kinds, inevitably you do a lot of sewing and the interfacing starts to build up in your stash. Mariah says in her videos about this project that you don’t need interfacing but it improves the end result, and I agree - it would look a little sad without the support interfacing adds.

I happened to have a number of unused shoelaces in different colors, just sort of the detritus you tend to pick up when raising a young kid, in my case back when my kid was burning through shoelaces a ton for some reason (and no longer is). Any kind of cording will do for the lacing but using what I already had handy is always the way to, and that red shoelace is perfect really.

This lobster bag was a birthday surprise for my bestie Basil, he loved it, and is now using it as a dice bag – which I totally didn’t think of as a possible use, but now I can’t unsee it. Who wouldn’t love seeing this guy on the table at a gaming night? I’m always delighted to see this lobster again.

And of course my all-things-ocean-creatures obsessed kiddo was a little sad I didn’t make HER a lobster bag, but it just so happens Mariah also had a whale shark bag pattern, and my kid loves sharks the most so… I made a whaleshark as well.

The whaleshark pouch

The whaleshark pouch, surrounded by my usual mess

I made a small modification to this pattern and shortened the inner pouch so the whaleshark was able to hold something stuffed inside. I used some spelt and lavender buds (harvested from my own garden of course) and put it inside the whaleshark, so this guy now has a nice weight and scent to it, which my kid greatly enjoys.

My one slight, and I do mean slight, annoyance with this project was that there were no written instructions on assembly steps. Granted this project is pretty easy, but it’s not entirely intuitive how to put a 3D shape like these together, and written instructions would really help. I know I am showing my age but instructions being in video form only are so hard to navigate, and it’s made even worse when those videos are only posted on social media platforms.

I’m begging younger creators, as an Old, please include even super-simple instructions in writing with your digital patterns. It’s just like one page to append to the front of your PDF. Please please please <3

Quick pillowcases

Sun, 16 Aug 2026 14:17:56 -0400

This project surprised me when I first tried it. Honestly I didn’t believe this would be as fast as it was, because as often happens with instructions I find online for sewing projects, their estimates on how long something takes vastly underestimates how much I can easily mess up a ‘simple’ project.

But no, this is genuinely a great one. So much so that I am probably going to teach my kid how to do this because it’s very satisfying.

Objective: Make pillowcases

Requirement: A yard/a meter of ONE fabric

Instructions: The Magic Pillowcase Pattern by SewCanShe

A few base assumptions for the yard of fabric is that it is ‘standard’ fabric width, in imperial measurements usually around 45 inches, or 110 cm in metric. USUALLY simple quilting cottons or similar (like lawn or sheeting) around around that width. So generally if you just get a yard, or a meter (or okay 90 cm if you’re being very precise), that’s perfect, and you don’t have to cut a blessed thing.

Four pillowcases I recently made. Three fabrics I picked up at Michael’s and the cat one is from Yuzawaya

You can make them more complex if you want to add contrasting seaming or a special different border fabric - I have done that plenty of times, especially when using remnants and I don’t have enough of just one fabric to make a pillowcase.

A huge, huge thank you to SewCanShe for the very detailed writeup on how to do this. The first time I made a pillowcase, maybe a dozen pillowcases ago, I really appreciated the detailed steps. Don’t be intimidated, the details are there to guide but I can assure you the steps basically boil down to this:

Fold the yard of fabric in half, right sides together
Sew two of the three open sides
Fold back the pillowcase border twice, 5" each time
Sew the outside edge along the pillowcase border

That’s how I shorthand it for myself in my notes anyway since I’ve made them so many times. I can whip them up by memory at this point - they really are fantastically easy.

So when I see some very cute quilting fabrics, or my kid does (realistically that’s usually what happens), I pick up a yard, bring it home, and that night I have new pillowcases.

Some notes:

Yes, you will be happier if you prewash your fabric but again these pillowcases are very easy and not fussy. I’ve been lazy a few times and washed after I finished sewing them. (We’ve all done it, I’m not judging)
I don’t always cut the selvedge off because I’m come from the school of Waste Nothing, so I usually incorporate the selvedge into the seam.
You will be MUCH happier if after you do the initial fold if you do a quick trim of the edge to make it square. Especially if you get that quilting cotton from a generic craft store where the person cutting doesn’t really know what they’re doing… sigh I miss Joann’s
French seam if you’re feeling fancy! Especially if you’re gifting them, it’s a nice touch. (I don’t bother for ones I just use at home… sorry fam.)

A closeup of the pillowcase seam

And if you’re like me and sometimes after doing the border fold the seam you sew doesn’t exaaaaaactly grab the raw edge of the fabric, I sometimes don’t bother ripping out stitches and starting again. I will often just re-fold and sew a second seam next to the first. That does the trick.

My sewing station

Fri, 31 Jul 2026 00:00:00 +0000

This is where I do all my sewing work. I am lucky to space for my hobbies, though I don’t have a dedicated sewing room, I feel like I have more than enough space for what I want to do. My sewing station is one corner of my office room, so it’s important that I am able to put things away neatly as I’d be looking at the clutter every day when I’m working my regular job.

My sewing station - iron and dustbuster both close at hand!

The gateleg IKEA NORDEN table is beloved by a lot of crafters for good reason, and two years into having it I’m also as big fan. Being able to put the table leaves down when I’m not sewing, and having a big cutting space available for when I am, is great flexibility. The only downside in my setup is that my room is on carpet, and moving the gatelegs is a bit difficult over carpet, but it’s not a huge deal.

The NORDEN has the option of 6 drawers, three on each side, but as one of the sides of my table is against the wall, I only use the front three. I removed the back three, and now my cats like to use that open space as a little feline highway to check out what I’m up to when I’m sewing. I keep my needles, pins, fasteners, elastics, and bias tapes in the drawers – basically messy but important things that I need frequently at hand.

The pegboard behind my sewing machine has all my other sewing supplies. I know there are nicer ways to display threads but they’re all a bit fussy for my tastes. Several containers up on the pegboard are things I inherited from my yiayia after she died – lots and lots and LOTS of buttons! As well as her old tailor’s chalk and even some machine needles.

The really long stick at the top of my pegboard sticking straight up is an orphaned cooking chopstick from an old pair from years ago. These are the super long, very thick kind that are meant for high-heat cooking or, in my case, for getting ingredients out of my donabe when I’m making hot pot with friends. But since I lost its mate, that lone chopstick has been adopted by my sewing station and is SUPER SUPER handy for turning tricky tight pieces. (Don’t worry, I got a new set of cooking chopsticks that live happily in my kitchen.)

R.I.P. JoAnn Fabrics

Sat, 30 May 2026 13:04:57 -0400

On why I will always be mad that you were forced to close

JoAnn Fabrics was forced to close down on May 30, 2025. Forced to close because it didn’t go out of business, it was bought up by greedy private equity firms, squeezed for every drop it had, enshittified, and then when it was no longer useful to its PE overlords, they dumped it with zero consideration for the massive impact its closure would have.

I am writing this elegy for JoAnn’s over a year after its closure because I am still mad that it is gone. Not sad, genuinely MAD. I recognize JoAnn’s was a bit of a shadow of its former self, it had lost its focus, and its proverbial lunch was being eaten by online shopping. Had the chain overexpanded? Yes. Was it still doing enough business to sustain itself in some form though? My understanding is yes, it was, and it really should still be here.

(I’m not an economist and don’t pretend to be one. I’m not here to argue the numbers about JoAnn’s economic viability. All that matters is that the people that bought it up decided it just wasn’t ENOUGH, and instead of trying to make it work in some new way, they just unceremoniously dumped a retail chain that had been the cornerstone for a lot of crafters all around the United States for decades, one that has no replacement.)

In any case.

JoAnns largely catered to, and was shopped by, women. So this story was relegated to the “women’s issues” pile and largely ignored. Truly, there was little to no genuine discourse about why losing JoAnns is a fucking travesty and how disruptive not having one nearby is going to be for thousands if not millions of people.

Yes, we all should support our smaller local quilt shops, fabric outlets and crafting stores. If one exists near you, that is. And if they have what you need. That is always the gold standard.

The reality is that JoAnns occupied a unique place in the fabric of American crafter life. It had a wide range of different supplies in its aisles, for knitting and crocheting it had some very good basics and staple items. If you needed a special hook or needle size, they had it, and you could swing by and pick one up on your lunch break. Truly it was a haven for sewists of all kinds – hobbyists could pick through their fleece sections, garment makers could actually feel the texture and drape of garment fabrics, quilters could find inspiration from the cottons along the wall, and people needing to redo a dining room chair or whip up a curtain would find plenty to work with in the upholstery section. Was it the world’s biggest selection of these things? No. But it was enough for a lot of us.

Were you in the middle of a project and found out you really needed a different sewing needle, or a different size zipper? Chances are there was a JoAnn’s within driving distance, it was a quick excursion to go and get what you need, and resume making whatever you needed.

How much I loved going through the remnants bin when I was a broke college student to find interesting scraps to work with. How much I loved showing my daughter how to do that too, to find fun ideas to make into Halloween costumes – one year I hit the jackpot with nearly a yard of blue and green paillette fabric, and with a few basic stitches I turned that scrap into a mermaid dress my daughter proudly wore for Halloween and dress-up for years and years. How great it was to wander the much-derided wacky flannels, and go “that would make a fun set of pajamas” almost as if being dared to do it. And then go what the heck, why not.

For me, wandering the JoAnn aisles with my mom was a treasured time. She and I would ooh and aah over quilting cottons and garment fabrics, and she taught me how to leaf through a pattern catelog in that quiet table in the back, and find the pattern in the cabinet and check the requirements. How many conversations over the cutting table over the years I had with sewists with so much more experience than me, just casually sharing their wisdom about what to know about the fabric I was looking at, or the project I was mulling over. A lot of women had those moments in those stores, it was a space for that to happen. It felt very special that places like that still existed for us to slow down and learn old crafts.

I am always going to be mad that JoAnns is gone, and will hope against hope someone will figure out a way for a similar retail chain to take its place. That the practical skills of sewing and mending and making are becoming rarer and rarer, and harder and harder to find the places where not only the materials but the knowledge is easily shared, could not be coming at a worse time, when we are increasingly socially isolated and practical skills are becoming unaffordable. Most baby boomer women in the US can easily remember growing up and learning to sew their own clothes - maybe not their entire wardrobe, but certainly important pieces at the very lease. Gen X had much-derided home ec, and as an older Millennial I was one of the last years that also had that class. And then it was gone - who needs to sew anymore, just buy new clothes, right?

Does everyone need to know how to make their own garment from scratch anymore? No, certainly not. Same with rebuilding the engine of your car or starting a garden from seed. But the basics on how to repair something you’ve invested in - whether its mending a hole your clothing, replacing a windshield wiper, making a basic meal - these are all basic skills that can be a gateway into much bigger worlds if you so desire. But more importantly, they give you true ownership over basic things in your life: The things you wear, the vehicles you drive, the food you eat.

We lose our agency when we sacrifice our abilities. I don’t ever advocate for a return to drudgery, but we’ve so quickly lost so many skills it’s honestly alarming. And the loss of spaces like hobby shops, RadioShack, and now JoAnns - how can people learn to fix and truly own their own things if there’s no way to get repair materials and talk to other people about how to make the repair?

First Post

Thu, 01 Jan 2026 10:24:14 -0400

Yes, a classic. Making my mark on the interwebs!