Birthday Sewing

Monday is Sam's 7th birthday and he is crazy about cars and racing.  He goes to the stock car races every Friday with his family and can rattle off names, stats and owners better than kids lots older than he is.  He especially loves it when his Uncle Steve is there because they really get into the game together.  Sam's mom and dad go just because they love him and want to encourage his interests, but Uncle Steve is an ally in the Friday night routine.

When they were staying with us a couple of weeks ago and I was sewing for Gracie, Sam spied a piece of race car print flannel.  He begged me to make him pajamas for his birthday.  I was noncommittal (tee hee!) but of course I made them.  Only thing was, it was the end of a bolt that I got a good price on but not enough for a top and bottom.  That's just fine with him-he only wears the bottoms-just like his 16 year old brothers.

I had seen a cute thing on Pinterest-a Matchbox car wallet.  It was for sale on Etsy and was really nice, but it only had places for cars on one side, so I set to work making one that would hold cars on both sides-a total of 8.  I had enough scraps from the pajama bottoms to make 2-one for Sam and one for Sydney-Stan's mom always said, probably in Dutch, "You can't make stepchildren!"

I bought 8 Matchbox cars and put them in the wallet.  Then yesterday I was walking through Walmart and spied this:

It was only five bucks so I've added it to the gift.

Eight nice compartments for cars.  Closed with my best friend, Velcro.

I can't wait til the kid see this!  He's going to love it!

What sold me was the tiny signs.  These are all Matchbox-sized cars.  His folks are going to be thrilled with 17 new Matchbox cars for the boy!

Sam's party request is a camping trip to Hyalite lake, a few miles from here.  Stan and I don't have a camper right now so we'll go up in the afternoon and come back home to sleep.  Gotta love an air bed and indoor plumbing!

Welcome, Winter!

We got our snow today-in some areas of the county they got three feet. Here in Manhattan, we get much less-probably about 5". It was beautiful, but what a headache. My daughter-in-law works at the University. It took her 45 minutes to park this morning, after getting stuck three times. She was in a 2 hour zone, so she went out to move her car after 2 hours and got stuck again. She went into her office, got her work and went home to work for the day. That was on top of having a bad cold!

I have been sewing, just not blogging about it much. I'm making a black cardigan out of a nice interlock-kind of a wardrobe stretcher, and I have all the grandkids' PJs cut out:

Now to work through that pile.