New (free) tutorials and some sewing

It’s the first week of Spring and I’m spending more time outside in the sunshine and less time curled up under a blanket on my couch. I love this time of year and am trying to get our yard looking a little nicer. Last year we removed the rest of the yew bushes around our home and two large pine trees in our front yard. Consequently, our yard is pretty barren now. So I’m trying to add some garden beds and shrubs. We’d like to plan more trees too. Oh, and when we removed those shrubs, we exposed the area of the front porch that the previous painters weren’t able to reach, so there’s a prominent unpainted section! (See photo below from just after they removed the bushes). We plan to strip the paint and redo the porch this year. I’m happy that the garden bed I planted in the fall has lots of pretty bulbs coming up, and this week I’m working on planting some shrubs in the garden bed in front of the porch and around our mailbox.

Today I added a new section to my website for free tutorials. Over the years I have made several videos and tutorials for Sewing Summits, and while the videos are only available through purchasing All-Access Passes, the patterns are now on my site for downloading. If you want to access one, you still have to put it in your cart and go through the purchase process, but you do not need to put in your payment information. I also included my Edward Tulane pattern, which can barely be called a pattern, as it is just a list of instructions, but I regularly get emails asking for it, so I’ve included that one too. All these tutorials are tested only by me, so there may be mistakes, but hopefully not too many.

I went through my sewing projects this year and there have not been too many! My Pepernoot Coat was the big one, plus my Allegra Wallet pattern. Also, I’ve had more stocking orders than usual for this time of year. But I have had made a few other projects.

Looking through my other photos, it looks like my only other projects have been hats for cancer patients (donated to Delaware Head Huggers), and gauze blankets for my brother’s new baby and a friend’s baby.

I’ve been buying so much fabric this winter, so I really need to actually start sewing it! My kids need new clothes, I need new clothes. But I also have new patterns to develop. So maybe this year they will have a little more store-bought and a little less mom-made, but that’s okay.