Sewing Project: Phoebe the Test Elephant

Meet Phoebe, the cute little Melly & Me elephant that started my sewing craze. I first met Phoebe back in August last year when we visited the in-laws in Highfields, near Toowoomba. My Mam and I wandered into a beautiful little patchwork shop called The Quilters Angel. The Melly & Me dinosaur, Dilbert caught my attention first but when Mam pointed out an elephant called Phoebe I just couldn't resist. I spent ages picking out fabrics for her.

I asked the lady at the counter if I'd need a sewing machine and she said it was advisable so I could get small enough stitches to keep the stuffing in. I didn't have one but my mother-in-law came to the rescue and loaned me hers. After a quick lesson in how to use it she suggested I make linings for the curtains I was having made. And the rest, as they say, is history.

Well, sort of. I started making a test Phoebe with fabric left over from the quilt we made at my baby shower. Then work got busy, my mother-in-law reclaimed her sewing machine (by which time I'd finished the curtain lining) and poor Phoebe sat earless for quite a while. The ears were to be hand-stitched anyway so I eventually got them done over Christmas. Then all that was left was the blanket, for which I needed a machine.

Then I bought a machine but got very excited about all the other things I could do and it was a further three months before Phoebe finally got her blanket. I finished her yesterday and presented her to the real Phoebe, who said "Wow, Mammy."

Here's a photo of them together.

So now I can get on with the proper Phoebe using the posh fabrics. But first I have to make a Mrs Perkins for the baby and then I have to acquire some decent toy fill - the stuff from Spotlight is rubbish. It goes all lumpy. But the Quilter's Angel are going to call me when they get some in and mother-in-law will pick it up for me. It might get finished within a year of buying the materials. Then again...

Sewing Project Number 2 - Another dress for Phoebe

This second dress is actually the same pattern as the first but with slightly more pricey fabric and I also got brave and sewed some ribbons on it.











The first dress is looking a bit worse for wear after getting into a disagreement with the elastic band from a mattress cover in our (hopefully temporary top-loader) washing machine. It resulted in the beautiful lace section along the bottom getting ripped asunder and it's now all raggedy and a bit narrow to be honest. Phoebe hasn't seen it yet but as it's quite a plain dress I don't think she'll be interested in wearing it unless I replace the trim. Which is a total pain as it basically means unpicking and resewing the hem. Not sure it's worth it for a $5 dress. (I'm guessing that's how much it cost but I haven't worked it out. The buttons would've been the most expensive item.) But it's such a cute dress it seems a shame for her not to ever wear it again.

I think I'm familiar enough with this pattern now to risk some fancier fabric next time. But I don't know when that will be as I have another one lined up waiting to be made. I have purchased a second-hand duvet cover from the charity shop, which gives me massive amounts of material for $4. I'll use this to make my mock-up and then delve into it with the real stuff.

Spice Girl

I have given Phoebe some old spice jars to play with in her kitchen. As in jars that used to have spice in them, nothing to do with the aftershave. Although sometimes I wonder as one of Phoebe's favourite phrases is "Look at me", or rather "lookame Mummy" (I'm on a horse).

So anyway I was cooking dinner last night and Phoebe always wants attention at this time of day. It really bugs her that I might have something to do that doesn't directly involve her. I suggested she might want to cook in her kitchen whilst I was cooking in mine. That gave me some reprieve and I managed to plough through dinner and start tidying up.

A short while later Phoebe came into my kitchen carrying a spice jar from hers.

"None left, Mummy," she said and showed me her empty jar.

"Well, you'll just have to pretend," I told her.

"Yes," she said and returned to her kitchen.

Then it occurred to me that something wasn't quite right. Took me a while to put my finger on it but I soon realised that there were traces of spice in the jar she'd just shown me. I'd washed all the ones I'd ever given her to play with (not least because one of them was hot chilli powder). I retraced my steps in the kitchen. Three spice jars out of the cupboard, two back in the cupboard. So the third one must still be on the bench.... nope, nowhere to be seen.

I asked her to show me the spice jar again. Yep, definitely traces of spice in there.

Me: "Phoebe, did you get this jar from the kitchen bench?"
Phoebe: "Yes."
Me: "What did you do with it? Where is the spice that was in the jar?"
Phoebe: "Here Mummy," as she holds aloft her blender jug full of ground coriander.

I persuaded her to give it back as I needed it for cooking and diligently returned the contents back to the jar.

When Toby got home he said, "What's with the ground coriander everywhere?" so I told him the story.

This is what he found in Phoebe's kitchen (minus the jar of cumin, which he added for poetic license):

Actually the photo doesn't do justice to the amount of mess I had to clean up.

I think we've cracked it: Toilet-training 10 days on

So far so good.

After a week of little accidents in her knickers, Phoebe even managed to get to the toilet for her number twos on both Monday and Tuesday this week. (Yesterday she pooed in her nappy during her sleep at daycare.) We have had no wee accidents. She seems to have mastered holding it in, although it is more often that I think to take her to the toilet just to see than she actually asks to go.

I really do think we've cracked it. Gosh! It was so easy. I mean I know it kind of took 6 months but once we committed to actually wearing knickers and only using nappies for sleeps it's gone incredibly smoothly. I guess the timing just happened to be right. Lucky us.

I suppose there's still a chance that she'll get sick and have an accident or that she'll regress once the baby is born but even on Tuesday when she had a bit of a runny poo thanks to a virus, she managed to tell me and got to the toilet on time.

What a clever little girl.

Knickers!

Today is Phoebe's first day at daycare without nappies. She's been wearing knickers (or not wearing them, depending on her mood) for the last two days. I committed myself to toilet training and vigilantly took her to the toilet every hour starting on Monday morning. So today she went off to daycare with two nappies: one for her sleep and a spare just in case; and three spare pairs of knickers.

We've only had one accident since we started on Monday and that was a poo, which she came and told me about straight away and thankfully was nice and solid, well contained in her knickers and easy to clean up. She did learn from that though as she did a couple more that day and they were all done on the loo. So proud. I'm sure there will still be little accidents and who knows how it's going at daycare, but so far so good.

I'm probably slightly paranoid about accidents in the car or supermarket and take her to the toilet repeatedly until she does something. Before we go out. When we get there. Before we leave again. When we get home. I have her potty and a terry toweling nappy on stand-by in the car for emergencies and accidents, although I haven't started carrying them everywhere with me yet. I do put them in the bottom of the pram if there's room though.

I'm dying to phone daycare and see how it's going. I'm not picking her up today as I have my yoga class but I think I'll call just before I leave work and see how she went. Fingers crossed this is it and there's no more going back to daytime nappies.

Paid Parental Leave Irritation

I just had to blog about this because I'm mildly irritated.

Okay, so brief background. Last year, having not intended to have another baby for at least a year, I took the brave decision to leave my job of almost 7 years at the university. Basically, I had an offer of part-time work for an organisation that did not suck the life force from my body on entering the room. Everything about this new place and the people in it told me it was the right thing to do. There were probably only 3 things holding me back:

1. Familiarity, better the devil you know, however you want to put it.
2. Security and stability of a large-scale public organisation.
3. The fantastic maternity benefits of 6 months full pay over the course of 12 months.

Well, as you all know I took the leap and I have had no regrets. As I said to Toby at the time, I couldn't put a baby that didn't yet exist, and for all we knew might never exist, before the one I already had. It was more important to me that I remove myself from the stressful environment I was in, find a vocation I truly enjoyed and maximise my time with my little girl.

Two months later I was pregnant. Okay so I always knew it was likely to happen at some stage and despite the loss of oodles of dollars in maternity pay I still have no regrets.

On 1st January 2011 the Australian Government introduced Paid Parental Leave. This is basically the equivalent of 18 weeks pay at the minimum wage. To qualify you have to have worked 330 hours over 10 out of the 13 months prior to the child's birth. This is basically just over 1 day a week.

So when discussing maternity leave, and in particular the fact that I don't get paid leave where I work now, people point out how good it is that I am eligible for the government's scheme. Don't get me wrong, it's great. EXCEPT that I am no longer eligible for the Baby Bonus. When I had Phoebe I got my employer's paid leave plus the Baby Bonus. If I didn't work then I would still be entitled to the Baby Bonus. In fact, I can choose to take the Baby Bonus instead of the Paid Parental Leave if I so desire. The government's Family Assistance website even provides a comparison calculator to help you decide which you're better off going for.

So I did that. According to the tool, which is just an estimate, we'll be a whopping $1,347.00 (approximately) better off with the Paid Parental Scheme than we would be with the Baby Bonus. And the government has made such a big deal about how great this is for families, working mothers and employers. Er... excuse me? In which world is $1,347(or £837 in real money) going to make that much difference to whether (and how long) women can afford to take leave to nurture and look after their babies? Seriously? I don't want to sound ungrateful but Ms "I can get the best job in the country if I steal it from a very nice man" Gillard, stop dressing this up to be something it isn't.

And that's all.

My first sewing project

Well, as this is a blog about things I have in production I thought I'd share with you the results of my first sewing project.

Actually, this isn't really my first sewing project as last year I made curtain linings and started a test run of a soft toy, an elephant called Phoebe. She's pretty much finished so I'll share some photos of that when it's done. She just needs a blanket on her back.

Anyway, mid-way through producing Phoebe, which I sadly had to put on hold for a few months pre-Christmas whilst I had all that extra work to do, my mother-in-law retrieved her sewing machine, which she had very generously loaned to me for a few months. So after much consideration and debate, and a half-price sale at Spotlight during which I put a super-duper computerised one-button-does-everything sewing machine on layby, I finally purchased my own.

It's utterly fab.

So I thought it'd better earn its keep and I went back to Spotlight's half price sale and purchased a load of "easy" patterns, mainly for Phoebe, but one for me too.

Then I went back (not during the half-price sale unfortunately) to purchase fabric and discovered why no one makes their own clothes any more. All the lovely fabrics I wanted to get were $10 a metre and I was a bit scared of making mistakes. I found a couple of slightly cheaper fabrics to start off with and then managed to pull an offcut out of the $1 a metre bin.

I got some books from the library, studied the patterns, traced them onto a roll of interfacing, which I used like tissue paper, watched youtube videos, washed the fabrics, ripped the fabrics to find the grain, pressed the fabrics, pressed the patterns (! before tracing them. I had no idea you had to do that but I suppose it makes sense), pinned the traced patterns from the easiest of the easiest patterns (or at least what seemed to be as such to my untrained eye) to the el cheapo fabric, and finally I was ready to cut out and start to sew. It didn't really take me that long, but then it is a bit of a no-frills design. Except for the frill at the bottom of course.

So really, what this is, is my first dressmaking project (given the curtain lining and Phoebe the Elephant). I didn't have a very cooperative model. In fact I had to give her an iPhone before she'd even sit still and stop showing me her bum. Models are so hard to work with these days.

Anyway, here it is. And the good news is, Phoebe loves it.

Oh, and an interesting thing I learnt, when threading a needle, don't moisten the thread. Instead moisten the eye of the needle. The moisture draws the thread in. It works. Of course, I don't need to faff around trying to get my tongue over the needle of my sewing machine because it pretty much threads itself.