How to Make a Blythe Hooded Capelet

Once you've crossed into the territory of making snuggies for your Blythes, a hooded capelet isn't that much of a stretch. And it's not that much more difficult, either.



You will need:

• The Pattern

• Fabric for the top

• Fabric for the lining

• 18" (45.7 cm) thin ribbon (I like 3mm, personally)

• Needle & Thread, or a sewing machine

• Scissors

Download The Pattern Here!
Piece 1
Piece 2

Cut out the pattern pieces, and then cut out:
2 hood pieces from the top fabric (You may want to fold the fabric in half, right sides touching, to cut two mirror images of the fabric at once.)
2 hood pieces from the lining fabric (Ditto the folding and the cutting.)
1 cape piece from the top fabric
1 cape piece from the lining fabric
2 - 9" (22.8 cm) pieces of ribbon

Sandwich the hood and cape pieces together, right sides touching. Make sure you wind up with the hood pieces being mirror images of each other, like so:


Assemble the cape:
Starting in the middle of the top, sew the cape pieces together. Leave about a 1/4" seam. Carefully place the ribbons at the top edges, making sure to tuck them inside. Leave a 1" gap so you can turn the whole thing inside out. Turn it inside out, and stitch up the gap at the top. Be sure to backstitch!


Assemble the hood:
Starting at the middle of the bottom seam, sew the hood pieces together. Leave about a 1/4" seam. Sew all the way around, leaving a 1" gap for turning inside out.

Turn the hood pieces inside out. Sew up the gap on the bottom. Then sandwich the two pieces together, and sew from the top front of the hood, all the way down to the back. Be sure to backstitch! This will leave the front and bottom of the hood open.

Place the hood and cape together, right sides touching, and sew. Again, be sure to backstitch.


Trim the loose threads, and that's it! You're done!


Feel free to make as many of these as you wish. If you wind up selling them, please link back to my blog in your listing. These tutorials take forever! ^_^

(Behold the fun you can have with other fabrics. This capelet is one of my favorites.)

In Which I Sort of Attempt to Cross Stitch

I like podcasts. I usually listen to them while I work on plushies, or when I'm driving. During a not so recent episode of JJGO, Jesse said something that really stuck with me. It was the sort of thing that should be embroidered, framed, and stuck on a wall.
Here's what he said:

"Legs of two, good for you. Legs of eight, deserves to die."
Perhaps I should back up and tell you that this is his campaign slogan for The War On Spiders. (Which was the title of one podcast, mentioned briefly in the next, and then never again. Such is pods.)
But I couldn't let it go. This simple two sentence glob sums up everything I feel about spiders. And humans. We suffer a surfeit of black widows, wolf spiders, daddy long legs, and eleventy billion other types in our home. I hate them all. Once they figure out how team up with the dust bunnies, the spider army will come after us for sure.
Clearly, there was only one answer. I had to design and make a cross stitch pattern with this slogan.

Designing it was easy. Wham, bam, photoshop. Getting it to translate into a pattern was much, much harder. I tried many online services, to no avail. I suspect that this may have had something to do with the flowery font I chose. Either that, or the fact that I know nothing about cross stitch.

Eventually, I decided to trace the pattern onto the fabric. This worked fine, but I suspect it was at this point that I drifted away from true cross stitch. Oh well. On with the stitching!

I learned some things right off the bat. One, that cheap off-brand embroidery floss is horrid. It'll sliver and unravel and just generally be a pain to work with. Don't bother. Two, this sort of detail work will give me crazy rib pain. And three, I kind of hate cross stitch. If that is indeed what I was doing.
For some reason, I had the hardest time getting started, despite all the online tutorials in the world. I blame pregnancy brain. (What is this blog going to be like when I can't blame hormones for everything?) Once I finally did, pulling the (cheap, off brand) embroidery floss through was a nightmare. Things did not flow smoothly.
However, I was determined to persevere. I had to show those spiders who's boss! (Me.) It took HOURS. And then more hours. The piece I was working on was about 6" x 8".
Things really started to fall apart when it was time to stitch those letters. The font that I had chosen did NOT translate well to the simple pixelated look I was going for. (You could point out how obvious this was from the get go. At which point I would point out to you BABY BRAIN. And then I would win.) I had to abandon the tiny x's entirely, and just fudge my way along.

You know how the back of embroidery is supposed to look as pretty as the front? I don't know if cross stitchers play by the same rule, but if they do, I most certainly failed:

Oh well. Who's going to see it? (Besides the whole internet, now.)
Eventually, I was done. DONE! There's nothing like the satisfaction of forcing your will on an unsuspecting, unwilling piece of cloth.

And here it is, framed and hung high enough on the wall so the mistakes aren't quite so evident:


Should you decide "Hey, this is just the sort of thing I would like to embroider/cross stitch! I could make that awesome!", here's a .pdf of the image I used.
Legs of 2 Download
Download it, fix it, use it, make it awesome. And if you do, let me know! I'd love to see what you come up with.

3 Ways To Make 2010 the Best Year Ever - Part Two

Yesterday I talked about the Etsy Goal Spreadsheet, and the importance of setting and tracking goals.
Okay, you've got goals. Now what?
If you're anything like me, you probably have more goals and ideas than you know what to do with. And maybe you follow through isn't *ahem* always the best. (Or is that just me?) I've found that simply writing these goals down on my to do list does not get them done. They're too big and overwhelming. So I took a page from traditional project planning but made it less boring and easier. You need to get the goal out of your head, onto paper, and then one more thing. You've got to break it down into do-able steps.
Enter the Project Planning Worksheet. Don't let the capital letters fool you, this is simple.

Here's what you do.
□ In the Project line, write down your goal/project/thing you want to do.
□ In the Description line, write down (briefly) your idea for the end product/effect/what you hope to accomplish.
□ In the Steps section, you start breaking it down. What is the first thing you would need to do to accomplish this? What's the second? And so on. It might help to work your way backwards if you have no idea. (i.e. start from the end project and work your way in steps back to the beginning.) Try to make each step a do-able chunk: something you could put down on your calendar/to-do list and actually accomplish.

Click here to download the Project Planning Worksheet.
When the new window pops up, click on Download (At the top left of the page). Then print it out & use it! As always, feel free to print & share & forward willy nilly, but tell 'em http://chickenpants.net made it.