Real Girl and American Girl doll sleep mask tutorial

UPDATE - The pdf for the shapes in this tutorial is now available as a free download from my Craftsy store. 

When I posted my "American Girl doll hoodie towel tutorial" last fall, I had no idea it would still be getting daily hits 7 months later. I love knowing that I had a part in all those Emilys, Rebeccas, Kananis, and Kits out there who are surely rocking their fab new hoodie towels. Because of the popularity of that post, and because I might as well ride the wave of "stick 'American Girl' in your post title somewhere and it will get hits", it's time for another tutorial for another must have item for your doll.

Somewhere along the way in the last year, my daughters became sometime-primadonnas who will insist upon wearing sleep masks several nights a week. Unfortunately, they refuse to take my advice to always put them in the same place when they are done wearing them, so we often have emotional breakdowns at bedtime if the masks are not found. Those of you with girls between the ages of 4-10 are nodding in agreement. Those of you without are saying, "She really should just make them clean their rooms." And while that may be true, if I did, there would be no tutorial today because I wouldn't have been inspired yesterday to make more for them and in doing so surprise them with matching ones for their dolls. I am a pretty cool mom for sure.

So here's what you need to whip up these masks - and by whip up I do mean whip up. A set of girl/doll masks will take you less than 15 minutes.

Supplies:

• 10" square of scrap fabric


• 10" square of backing fabric


• 10" square of batting


• 1/4" wide elastic - lengths will vary based on the size of your child's head (my big headed child Eva needed about 11", my pin headed child Greta needed about 8", my normal sized headed child Paige was somewhere in between).


• thread


• pinking shears


• a printout of this pattern:

Jellybeans for Mask




1. Print out the pdf of the mask shapes, from here out referred to as jellybeans because good Lord do they look like them. Cut out on lines. (As many of you know, I am completely computer inept. The fact that I have figured out how to pdf that thing and embed it this morning is a personal triumph of immense magnitude, but if you have issues printing it I likely will not know exactly why. If you cannot get it to print, PLEASE email me at evapaigequilts@charter.net and I can forward you the actual pdf, no problem. I may be a computer idiot, but I have no issue going above and beyond to make everyone happy.)

2. Cut out one large and one small jellybean/mask from your scrap fabric.

3. Place the jellybeans on top of the batting, and the batting on top of the backing fabric as shown in the photo below, wherein you can see that I am making three large masks at once with a piece of fabric about 12" x 15" and a backing fabric scrap that I have not even bothered to trim. It's a free tutorial and I know you get that if you are making a small and large jellybean set, yours will look a little different. I like to use some 505 spray to keep the sandwich together, but pins work too.

4. Stitch 1/4" along the outside edge of each jellybean.

5. Using pinking sheers, cut out each jellybean from the fabric sandwich, coming close to but not slicing the stitching you just did. If you do not have pinking shears, or if yours are 14 years old and have never been sharpened, you can instead serge or zig zag along the edge after cutting out the jellybeans. Or you can borrow some pinking shears from the next door neighbor. The possibilities are endless.

6. Attach the ends of the elastic bands to either side of the jellybeans.

7. Rejoice that the AG dolls will no longer be keeping you up all night with their incessant partying. With the aid of their new sleep masks, they will be off to dreamland in no time.

"Who turned out the lights? Molly...are you there...? Zzzzzzzzzzzzz"

Eva, Greta, and Paige with Amelia, Kayla, and Emily

One housekeeping note. If you make a sleep mask for a Bitty Baby, which I did as Greta's doll Kayla is a Bitty, be aware that because these babies are baldies, the mask will not stay on properly as the elastic has nothing to grip onto on their shiny little heads. Greta doesn't care, as the mask also makes a lovely necklace, but some children might not be thrilled with that outcome.

So stay tuned for my next tutorial - Bitty Baby wigs.

I'm totally kidding.

Sign, sign, everywhere a sign

This week I've been working on a quilted sign for NEQDC to hang out into the aisle at our booths at our future shows. It's a concept we saw done at Genesee Valley quilt show in June and we loved it so much that I was elected/offered/last one to say aye is it to make a fun sign for us to use. I came up with the concept of a two sided sign with our name in a block at the top and then each of us was to make two blocks representing our pattern style and I would throw them together in a row at the bottom. Quick, easy, and relatively painless. Ha.

Quick quiz, what does the NE stand for? I know, you thought it might be Naturally Elegant. Or Newly Emergent. Or Nasty Eggthrowing. All of which would be great names for my designers group, which is in actuality New England Quilt Designers Cooperative. Northeast would also work, and lucky for us, New England and NE on a map of the USA is the same thing. Good planning, forefathers. But Hotties, that is a LOT of letters to cut out for the sign, especially when you consider I had to cut them all out TWICE so I shortened it to "NE" with the group's blessing, and last night, thanks to Netflix, I was able to get all of them cut out and adhered to both main blocks of the quilt.

This morning I headed downstairs to take these cute little strips of our blocks and sew them to the bottom of each block. Gaze upon these strips and you will see one in each row from each member of the group. If we look at the top strip, that would be a Lava Lamp block from Judy Damon, a fun applique block from Kristi Parker, a snowbally block from Barbara Chojnaki, a Take Four block from Cary Flanagan, a Syncopated Ribbons block from moi, and a very fun Purple Moose from our head moose, Terri Sontra. I will be honest in tooting my own horn to say this block part of the sign was my idea and was brilliant.

What was not brilliant were my math skills. Just to review, 4 x 6 = 24. Not 18. Which is what I was thinking when I cut my main blocks to 12 x 16. Imagine my horror when I saw that this is how they would go together this morning, while I was still dealing with cramping hands from scissors last night:

Thankfully, I remembered that I suck at math but immediately rejoiced that I had at least done the central block with one side divisible by 4. Dumb luck at it's finest. So I just reworked the design (after all, if I couldn't do that I wouldn't be much of a quilt designer, would I?) and the result, I have to say, is adorable.
Here is one side:

Here is the other:

I decided I didn't care to put a binding on and take away from the blocks at all, so it's just poor-man serged using a big old zig zag. Much quicker than trying to set up and figure out my serger this morning.

If you are heading to Maine Quilts in a few weeks, please stop by and check out our sign in person! It will be its first time at a show and it needs some lovin'!

Name game

I've been thinking a lot about quilt names this week, so over on my Facebook page (www.facebook.com/EvaPaigeQuiltDesigns) I have an informal poll asking about how you came up with your favorite quilt name ever. I'd love to have you add your two cents! Just like talking about baby names ("OMG, can you BELIEVE Sheila named her child Hildegard!?!?!?!"....."Don't you just love the name Simon? It's so manly."), quilters should never tire of chatting up quilt names.

You can lead a husband to your stash......

...but it will take a miracle for him to actually find what you asked him to bring to the cottage with him despite the ridiculously detailed description.

I have waxed poetic more than once on my personal Facebook page about how joyous it is for me to be the only person in my family who can ever find anything. Anywhere. Ever. The response has always been overwhelmingly in favor of all women everywhere feeling the exact same way. And yet I keep giving my family members chances to redeem themselves, always with the hope that they will this time triumph over the Black Hole of Things Visible Only to Women.

It was in this spirit of hope that last Friday I called my husband from our lake cottage, where I had taken the children earlier in the week to spend some time with their grandparents and cousins. I had also taken my sewing machine so I could work on a project for my friend Barbara Chojnacki's upcoming book, a project I had totally forgotten I had signed on to do and which was now unstarted with a few days to the deadline. I blame my computer meltdowns for everything I can, and this oversight is no exception. But I was not going to let Barbara down, especially as she did an adorable sample for my "Once Upon a Time" book, so while the kiddos built fairy houses and played street hockey and in between my own gin and tonics, I got the entire top pieced the first day. I had not packed batting, backing, or spray baste with me as I never imagined I could be so productive, but now I needed my husband to bring them that night so I could move on to the quilting process. Dare I ask him to find these items in my admittedly not overly organized sewing studio? Oh, I dared.

The following is an approximation of the message I left on the answering machine for him:

"Hey Lover, it's me. For whatever reason the girls are allowing me to sew up here. I may move here permanently. Anyway, I got the top of Barb's project done and I want to quilt it but I don't have batting or backing. So here's the deal. Go downstairs and look on my cutting table. There is a stack of batik fabrics sitting directly in the middle of it. They look a little like tie dyes, but they are called batiks. Quilting lesson for the day. Lots of different colors bleeding together on one fabric, really cool looking. It's a stack of about 15 or so fabrics. Grab me a few of the larger dark pieces, please, so I can use one for the back. Then go to the box on the shelf underneath the table and grab me a piece of batting that will fit a quilt about 24" x 24". Awesome. The last thing I need is a can of the 505 spray baste - that should be in the cabinet by the computer, on the top shelf. The can is yellow with a blue top and says "505" on it. Bring all that and it will make my day complete. You are awesome. See you soon."

As we women know, you really can't be too specific, and I figured that would work.

The following is a photo of the stack of batiks, which as of this morning was still sitting on my cutting table.

Witness the neat stack! Witness the multi-coloredness that almost looks like tie dye! If the photo were bigger, you could witness how the stack was dead center in the middle of the cutting table!

Witness what my husband brought instead.

Yes, that's right. A jumbled mess of random pink fabrics that were sitting off to the right after a recent project was completed. I can totally see the resemblance to what I asked for.

We won't even go into the batting. Suffice it to say at least he went with the "more is more" rule. I could have quilted fifteen 24" x 24" quilts.

The spray baste, however, he got right. I truly was expecting a can of hairspray by the time I got to that item, but he redeemed himself. Lucky to be cute, is all I can say. And luckily there was a big chunk of hot pink batik in the jumbled mess that I could use for a back, so the day was not totally lost.

I can't show my entire project that I was working on, and have now completed, for Barbara's book, but I will show you this little snippet. It combines my batiks with my newest toy, my Kanzashi flower maker. Way too much fun and the quickest way to make a 3-D embellishment ever.

I really loved being able to use not only the flower maker, but all the batiks I have collected for years and never done a thing with. Barbara's ideas for putting shapes together are really fun, and I hope she likes my attempt.

Pack carefully for your summer sewing, hotties. Our husbands are cute, but I venture to guess that few of them possess the object location gene.