'Make Life' Hair Pillow

Once upon a time, I ordered my very first fabric jelly roll.  Make Life.  I loved it and had this vague plan of what I wanted to do with it to make something really nifty for my mom.  I started sewing things together (thank goodness, not cutting anything!) and very quickly realized that I wasn't feeling the project.  It was just kind of wrong.  So I put it aside.

Then my sister was diagnosed with breast cancer and my mom and I discussed using the multi-color text fabric to make her something really awesome for her healing room.  It turned out that the colors she used in there worked perfectly to make something really pretty...but by then no one had any more of that fabric (who was willing to give it up without me signing over my firstborn), so I tried to figure out what else I could do.

When my sister started losing her hair and decided to shave her head, someone said something about a hair pillow.  I was given a little baggie with a handful of my sister's gorgeous auburn hair in it.  When it came time for clean-up, I bagged the rest as well.

Eventually, the Make Life hair pillow was born.

Front:


Back:

Quilting:


Finished!





Two issues with the finished project:

1 - I made it a little too large.  With the way the hair compressed, the finished pillow is plesantly squashy, but a little thin.

2 - The hair pokes out of the pillow!  I'd hoped that the quilting would prevent that, and it does to some extent, but I probably should have put another layer of fabric inside as another barrier.

Prickly or not, I'm thrilled that she really likes it. :)

Garden and Other Goodies

Today, we were very excited about this:



Our second almost-ripe tomato!  We've been watching it grow for what seems like forever.  Ages ago (it feels like), our little plant popped out one little tomato and Bug grabbed it when it *thisclose* to being ripe.  He devoured it - though he did offer me one bite, sweet boy.  It was SO tasty!  And I was so very excited that we've actually gotten something edible off of the plant before I had managed to kill it.  That was a first.

(Last summer, nothing grew on the tomato plant, but I did manage to keep it alive all summer.  Also a first.)

Bug was so excited by the sight of an almost-ready-to-eat tomato that he plucked it right off.  We've been checking it every.single.day so I'm actually kind of impressed that it made it this far.

Two still-green tomatoes have been plucked in anticipatory excitement.  Bug tried really hard to eat the first one and ended up declaring it "too crunchy".  It was vaguely amusing though.  He *insisted* on eating that first green one.  We were on our way someplace, so sat in the car seat with it...taking a bite, exclaiming "yuck", spitting it out, taking another bite...

Bug, sweet thing that he is, offered me the first bite of his newest treasure.  It wasn't quite as sweet at the first one (also not quite as ripe), but was still pretty tasty.  He certainly seemed to enjoy eating the rest of it.  And he was really, really excited when we stopped and counted fifteen (!!) green tomatoes still growing on the plant.  And there are more blooms, too!

I am amazed.

In other news, I lopped off my hair this afternoon.  Perhaps a decision based on stress and hormones, but I decided beforehand that I would be thrilled with the results pretty much no matter what they were, and I am.  We took off about fourteen inches.  Yes...fourteen inches.  There were three women working where I went to have it cut and I think one of them just about passed out when she saw it all come off.

My hair is, admittedly, quite a bit shorter than I had intended.  I'll never really understand why stylists never seem to believe me when I tell them that my hair curls when it's short.  It was supposed to end at roughly my shoulder blades...and now curls up just below my chin.  I can *barely* get it into some semblance of a ponytail (and, thus, out of my eyes and out of the toddlers easy grasp).  But I like it. :)  It's definitely a lot cooler!

Time for bed now, but tomorrow I may show off some stuff that I'm getting excited about.  We'll see. ;)