My little fabric stash builder

After preschool Friday I stopped by Bernina Connection in search of a particular fabric. While we were there Dashiell found some green fabric with little monkeys on it and said he wanted to buy it so I could make a shirt.
I said, "Oh, like the Lightning McQueen shirt you never wear?" (just that morning he had refused to wear the shirt when I suggested it.)

I told him I didn't have a project in mind for it so I wasn't going to buy any.

He said (get this) that we needed to buy it now before someone else buys it. 

WOW!! I have not specifically trained him on stash building/fabric hoarding but he has got this DOWN. He almost had me with that. :)

I still said no, and he continued to whine and complain about it. Kind of threw a mini-fit that sealed the deal on my "no".

As we were checking out he told Lynn (store owner whom we go to church with) all about it, and described what he wanted. He was calm and rational and articulate and charming... rather convincing and totally enchanted all three women working there. I looked at Lynn and said, "I suppose I should embrace this for as long as he's interested, right?" Afterall, he won't always be a three year old who wants to wear mommy-appliqued shirts. So I went back and grabbed the bolt. Well Lynn cut a quarter yard and handed it to him and didn't even charge me. Said she was partly to blame for the situation by continuing to question him about it. :)  The stipulation was that he had to show her what mommy made.

 

While he napped that afternoon (woo-hoo!) I brainstormed what kind of design I could use to show off as many monkeys as possible. You see that was part of his negotiating technique. When I reminded him he already had a monkey shirt, he said, "That only has one monkey on it. I don't have a shirt with LOTS of monkeys." 

I looked through my applique alphabets to see if I had a big chunky D that would maximize fabrics, and then I remembered this cool font!

This is technically the D from East Coast Applique's Baseball Alpha, but instead of using white fabric I used the monkey fabric, and I skipped the step with the red stitching across the ball. (You can see my friend Wendi's sample of the alphabet here)  I added his name with Embird Alphabet #4.

I really like how it turned out. What a neat way to show off cool fabric. And it was a quick design -- one fabric to trim, one thread in the machine!

 

Dashiell was really pleased. As soon as he saw it he gasped, grabbed it and ran to show daddy saying "I love it!" and then came and gave me a big hug. Here he is at St Marks yesterday:

 And acting like a monkey!