Spawning Gift

In the search for awesome patches for my husbands battle jacket , we have run across a wide variety of patches.   I could easily go broke trying to buy everything that caught my eye. Not every single cool patch out there is destined for his jacket, but some of them are just too unique to pass up.  I have found that Etsy has become a dangerous thing for me to explore.  The important thing when looking at patches is to have a purpose for it.  A patch does no good sitting in a drawer.

The influx of cool patches out  there and the rapidly decreasing room on the battle jacket inspired me for my friend Lizzy's celebration of spawning gift.   (I am talking about baby shower.) I prefer to gift something homemade or heartfelt that has a unique blend of personality and usefulness.  You can not clothe a boy child in patches, but you can put cool patches on his clothes, which is almost the same thing. 

Armed with golden advice that children grow, and it is okay to gift something they won't need right away, I pillaged a local clothier for plain polos for mini humans.  I was in luck as there was a holiday sale, and purchased several basic colors. I then proceeded to search for the best patches that would reflect personality and humor of the recipient. The one thing you want to keep in mind with any patch project is the size of the patch versus the size of the object it is going on. There were several patches that I loved that were simply too big and had to be filed away for a future project. Deciding on which patch to get was the hardest part. 

I highly recommend this gift idea.  It is relatively simple if you know how to use and iron and sew, and also completely customizable to the intended party.  Just remember that Etsy is a dangerous place, and it is easy to find really unique patches.

Built To Last

Sometimes when life gives you a hiccup, you need to learn to embrace the sudden disruptions to life sustaining pathways and instead of focusing on how to prevent the next spasm. As of recent I have been working on the Battle Jacket project; however a short break was required on the jacket to finish up a couple of gifts for some dear friends.

I was in the middle of working on a simple stitch project and my sewing machine had a hiccup. Human hiccups and machine hiccups are two different things. When a machine spasms, it will only end in tears.  I was pretty close to tears when everything locked in the machine and refused move.  It took some fancy jiggling and manual moving of some gears for it to release the fabric from it's angry clutch.

Thankfully there is more than one sewing machine in my home.  My husbands grandfathers sewing machine has been living in our basement, untouched since he passed away. Dusting off the case, we set up the machine as I tried ignore my husbands as he encouraged me to go get a new machine as he tried to research how to operate a classic Singer on YouTube.   I don't want a new machine, I want my old machine fixed. Since it is going to take a little bit of leg work to find out who fixes sewing machines, and I needed to finish my project, the family sewing machine was going to have to do the job. After a few failed attempts we were able to get it working.

I don't often want to give myself a pat on the back, but this is one of those moments that I think I deserve it.  I was full of trepidation when it came to Jon's grandfathers sewing machine, mostly because I remembered Hank, and I still have a waffle iron from him that is almost considered a lethal weapon. Hanks sewing machine exceeded my expectations and also made me feel like a want to be hipster.  I am extremely proud that I was able to get it up and running.  There is something to be said about things that are built to last. While I might not convert all my sewing projects to the old machine, I am happy that I was able to finish some current projects in a timely manner.

Battle Jacket

I didn't know that I needed a project until I gained a project. My husband had this brain child where he wanted a battle jacket.  I will be honest. I had no idea what he was talking about for a moment, but having watched a fair number of post apocalyptic movies and listening to punk rock, I could envision a little of what he meant by a battle jacket as he started to describe what he had in mind.  It was a jacket that had patches all over it of things that he felt were cool. Patches of things that he represented. Patches that would bolster his sense of self and make him ready to do battle.

My support in his brain child, is that after he did the hard part of ironing, I would sew the patches on for additional stability. (I really hate ironing. Sewing is cheesecake.)  I had no idea there were so many patches out there.  As they began to trickle in, the plain canvas jacket slowly became something infinitely more awesome.  I have to admit that it is becoming increasingly fun, trying to find a patch that my husband will go nuts over.  This is a unique art form of self expression that is testing my abilities with a sewing machine.  It is a weird sort of sense of accomplishment when I sew an extra difficult patch on.  My husband is is full of high fives and praise when we get another patch finished and it feels lie we are team awesome.  While I was not instantly on board when he explained his project idea, I have certainly seen the light and have found something to love about this project.