life and puppies

Feel free to take note of the sewing reference book open, as well as the iPad on top of it. I had to teach myself a few new skillz. The idea behind all of this? Well, I waned to buy Mollybear one of these:

But, at $159, and $199 with the cushion, I didn’t really feel like it. I mean, come on, it’s just a bunch of fabric, right? I’ll show Land of Nod a thing or two, I thought. They’ll come crawling to me, asking me to whip up new models for them. I seriously had delusions of a new career. Tee to the hee on me.

I bought this pattern from Etsy for about $7 with shipping. Score! Then I bought a boatload of super cheap pink fabric from Joann’s because Bear insisted on a pink tent and I wasn’t going to buy expensive fabric for my first go-round at this thing. The fabric for the main part of the tent cost me $30. I decided that to save money, and to offset the wow-factor of the hot pink, I’d use some corduroy aqua blue fabric that I already had for the top. And then I splurged on this super duper cute fabric for the cushion and the back pockets.

I mean, what? Could that get any cuter? At first Bear pretended she didn’t like it, but come on. She’s not fooling me. So, two weekends ago I finally dove into the project. About four hours in, I realized that I had cut my pieces all wrong. And I hadn’t even begun sewing yet. Last weekend, I started sewing. About an hour in, I realized that not only had I cut the fabric incorrectly, I hadn’t even cut enough of it. Although I had spent over four hours cutting out the pattern and then the fabric, I still hadn’t cut enough. Wonderful! My thoughts of a second career were starting to subside. When I reached hour six of sewing and recutting and resewing and recutting I realized that $200 for that Land of Nod tent was a steal!

Our dining room table still looks pretty much like the above picture. Yesterday I managed to buy one yard of the supposed five-plus yards of Velcro the project demands (it’s all Walgreens had and I didn’t have the energy to figure out how to get more). I still need to buy an S-hook and a few other things, and to sew the top. And the cushion. And figure out how to open the doors. I think I may have sewn them shut. And poor Bear. She keeps asking when her pink tent will be ready. In the meantime, AO has fastened a very nifty tent out of two chairs, some painters’ tape and a blanket. It didn’t cost us an additional dime and he was done with it in about two minutes. Though I did hear him complain once that the blanket fell down on his first attempt.