First Day of Spring

and its snowing.

FOOEY!

I'm just coming off of my wonderful week of vacation (stay-cation), my first day off since going back to work, wanting to get in the garden and do oodles of things, also a bike ride would have been nice. But no. Snow instead. 

So I'll just reminisce about my wonderful week last week.
My sister is expecting. The baby shower is this coming weekend and I've been agonizing over what to do. She lives in southern California. Knitting would be the obvious answer (for me) except - it would be kind of a waste of time. It's too warm for the knitting (it was 93°F last week!). I don't know how it came to me, but I realized I should do some t-shirt transfers onto some onesies. It was so much fun!  I think this kid is going to have more onesies that he will know what to do with. 

 

Now I have a question for you, who's bright idea is it to give a baby WHITE onesies? Won't they be stained the first time the child wears it? I have tons of RIT clothing dye, so I chose my favorite boy-colors (which irks me because there shouldn't be boy-colors and girl-colors and don't even get me started on those awful pastel baby-colors - yuck!) but anyway, ranting aside, I chose Blue, Kelly Green, and Yellow. 

 

I decided to try my hand at tie-dying two of them and am thrilled with the results! I just boiled everything on the stove-top for about 1/2 hour. Maybe I should have done the green longer, it has become a very light green after washing. But that's okay.

Then came the hard/fun part - choosing what to put on the plain onesies! Originally I had wanted to use some images I've been collecting from work.

There are some great mechanical drawings, compass roses and the penny-farthing! I was also joking with a friend that since I live in Philadelphia I have to send one with the Eagles logo on it. Then of course, I'd have to balance that out with one with the Lakers logo on it (See - 'cause I'm from Southern California and when I was a six-year-old at Sports Camp - Magic Johnson came and made us all swear to be Lakers Fans for life. I take that kind of thing seriously.)  But the dyed colors didn't come out quite like I had expected and so I decided to skip those.

As I was pondering how to decide on more images, I remembered some of my dad's drawings. My dad has a natural gift for drawing. His latest project has been to draw initials for as many people as he knows. Has he passed the 1000 mark yet? I'm not sure. Putting an initial on the onesie is an obvious choice. But my sister is keeping the baby's name a secret until he arrives. We don't know the first initial and so my dad has not drawn one for him yet. What I do have are all of the little tags my dad whips up for Christmas gifts.  Each one has a tiny little drawing on it (these are all around and inch tall or so).

I was able to narrow it down to the few I thought would scan well and be the cutest for a little baby onesie. 

I scanned them at a high dpi, blew them up, cleaned them up, and chose my three favorite. 

 

 

  

 For the two plain dark blue ones, I didn't think the line drawings would stand out so I still had to find something different. I remembered a process I liked very much, bleach stenciling. I found two images on the internet I wanted to use and tried it out. It didn't work. I think it might be because I used a non-chlorine bleach. That's okay - I have time to try it in the future. For now, I decided I still liked what I wanted to stencil so I printed those up instead. An interesting thing happened as I was ironing them on. When the area I had bleached heated up, the color changed a bit - now that area is a sort of lavender color. And I think it works.

I did end up using the penny-farthing which I just love. I used the same image on a t-shirt for my dad for Christmas. Now they can be twins! 

 

The tie-dyed onesies came out much better than I'd dared hope. I think they are also adorable. 

 

 

It is taking all of my self control not to race to Target and buy more onesies and to not call my dad and ask him to whip up some more drawings so I can make more. I think I should hold off until my nephew actually arrives and we can see how this first batch was received. Right size? Did I fix the color okay?  It would be terrible if I inadvertently turned him navy blue.