All good skirts start with making a large pile of ruffles. I love my ruffling foot. And I love being able to serge the top and bottom edges of the ruffle fabric and not having to hem all eleventy billion yards. I will be sad when serged hems are out of style. But that probably won’t keep me from using them!

It is possible that all good skirts start by finding some awesome fabric. In which case this good skirt got two good starts, because I LOVE this Kokka Treffle double gauze print of Alice in Wonderland. Double gauze fabric is such an lovely floaty but substantial weight for a skirt! Love love love. I originally ordered three yards of it from PurlSoho, and I was crushed when I only got one. Sad mistake! But they made it up to me by letting me pick three yards of something else comparable, whether or not it was on sale (like the Alice print was.) So I found something compatible, the red stripes, and thought I could combine them in panels, and then I ended up totally switching my mind about the kind of skirt I liked and really only needing one yard for it anyway. Or perhaps it was really the opposite order, I only had one yard, and I was feeling lazy… In any case, skirt!

My fashion photographer (5) is still working on not taking totally blurry pictures. Possibly I need to set up the camera differently for her if I am not going to be holding still!

I am into comfy yoga waists right now, and this was my experiment with a yoga waist with a non-knit skirt. Worked fine. I like the tutorial at Sew Mama Sew, although frankly I think it is silly to suggest that you can subtract 3″ from your waist measurement to get the jersey waist measure no matter your waist size. If your (child’s) waist is 21″ and you subtract 3″ as they suggest, nice snaggy waist. If you’re a large woman and your waist is double that, and you only subtract 3″, your waist is going to be a little saggy I bet. Much more sensible to reduce by a percentage, I used their reference measurements to decide on subtracting 7%. Seems to work about right for me. I am concerned that yoga waists in general will loose their stretch over time like my favorite t-shirts, and then I will be sad. We will see how long my infatuation lasts. So easy, so comfy! Please last.

I scored an old Wowwee Robosapien v1 at Goodwill for $20. With no remote.. There were two of them and no remotes, as I was just about to the check out a nice employee said, “Oh, are you buying that?” um, yes? (No, I’m just clutching it to my chest on the way to the checkout…) “Did you get the remote?” No! He thought he had seen it somewhere but then couldn’t find it, and Rebecca, Penelope and I turned the store upside down looking for it with no luck. So in the end we brought white robot home with no remote, and thought maybe we could program a universal remote, or maybe we would have to buy a replacement since it was looking kind of tricky, what was I thinking buying a robot with no remote?? I was thinking hacking… But I have too many projects already… Anyway, I was feeling lucky the next time I went by Goodwill, and thought, maybe they found the remote and stuck it back to the other robot. It could happen. No, there was a *third* Robosapien, in special shiny red, with his remote still packing taped to him. Cue me grabbing the second robot of the week and clutching it to my chest. Score! (For robots they are strangely huggable, I think it’s their narrow waist and curvy war mongering figure. Um.) So now we have two robots and one remote. Perfectly workable! Why did they have three robots in one week? Conspiracy.

Getting back to the point, lost so long ago, White Robot was too scary! So we made it a frilly skirt and some shoulder bows. Scandalously short skirt, but I needed to make sure it wasn’t going to get caught in any of its joints. Now White Robot is less scary, and Penelope will sit in my lap (the safest place) and push the buttons to get Robot to walk around in circles and kick balls. I heart robots! And I need to make sure the younger generation is indoctrinated! Robots! Sushi! だいすきです！ (Did that hiragana finally work?! WordPress after three years I have finally defeated you! Hopefully?) Robots! Woo! Maybe with some paint and plastic surgery we could convert White Robot into a Maid Cafe girl? Should have bought all three of the things!

These pictures are six months old. That’s what happens when I stop taking pictures of what I’m doing now! Swimming mostly, but we just built an air rocket launcher. Clearly I have been taking pictures of the wrong things…

I love this skirt though. I need to work on the lines a little bit, it is/was a little too long for Penelope, but I like the flaired morning glory-ish skirt. I may have to do something like that for me, but with a yoga waist. I am SO IN LOVE with yoga waists right now, they are cleaner than an elastic waist band, and so much easier than a zipper + button/hook/whatever. I am all about easy when it comes to clothes, my button holes are, um, appalling. I don’t care if I have a machine that is ‘automatic’, they just look awful once you cut them open. So snaps or hooks. But the problem with zippers is you have to go and buy them, and I never do, and then you have to put them in, and frankly I’m pretty bad at that too!

But I adore the little mermaids on this skirt. (I think I got it from Jo’s etsy shop, she is so sweet.) Oh, and it is a double gauze! Double gauze is so nice! It has such a nice weight, and it’s breezy! (exclaim exclaim exclaim!!!) I have a bunch of it to make me a skirt (Alice in Wonderland and stripes that I got from Purl Soho, a story in itself), but I haven’t and I haven’t. Maybe the yoga waist will get me back on track. Have to think about that. Not sure I’m brave enough to do the knit yoga waist + woven skirt. Think think think.

These shoes used to constantly frustrate Rebecca, they had straps with velcro across the top, and whenever she walked normally the velcro would pop open, so she’d walk like a duck, really slowly, whenever she wore them. Great! No, not great.

So I undid all the stitching on the straps and velcro and cut them off the shoe. Then I cut some short lengths of cupcake ribbon and some wide elastic, wrapped the cupcake ribbon around the ends of the elastic and sewed around all four edges of the cupcake to secure the elastic. The cupcake ribbon gives it a nice finished look, and, most importantly, now Rebecca can happily run in them!

We went on a mom-field trip to the Fitzgerald Marine Reserve on the coast just north of Half Moon Bay. It was cool! There are tons of tide pools, a creek, boulders, anemones, starfish large beds of mussels and a bazillion hermit crabs and marine plants. I’d like to go again. I don’t think I’d ever seen anemones in the ‘wild’ like this before.

The bodice is a shirt pattern, Imke from Sewing Clothes Kids Love, and I really should have raised the waist. It’s a fine waist for a shirt, but makes the dress look like it is about 3 sizes too big. Okay, lets be honest, the dress is also just three sizes too big. The skirt is a circle skirt, kinda obvious from the twirl! It has a layer of sequin fabric on top, then three layers of tulle, then a bottom layer of the same blue jersey as the top to keep it from being scratchy. I used a ribbon hem for the top layer, and the jersey bottom layer I just serged.

You can see that I cut it a little too far into the selvage, there is a bit of the skirt that doesn’t have any sequins at the right of the photo. Oops!

Given how big I managed to sew this dress, I’m hoping she loves it for a very long time. Since most of her dresses have to be pried out of her fingers when they are stretched tight and the hem doesn’t even make it to mid-thigh, I don’t expect that to be a problem!

The dress is loved, and I am happy.

Back in September we all had excellent hat habits. I could get Rebecca to wear her hat whenever we were at the playground, or outside at school, because that was what we did. People would ask me how I did it. I started really young. But then we lost her hat. Being certain that it would turn up again, I waited. And waited. I looked at buying new hats, but the Sunday Afternoons hats no longer had cute flower ribbons around them, and the cute style that used to get so many ‘where did you get that hat?’ questions was nowhere to be found. Why do styles change every year? Why when I find the perfect pair of pants, when I need a new pair the next year are they gone? Why? The only thing that stays the same from year to year are men’s jeans, and I’m done with that phase in my wardrobe!

So what to do? Pick the best hat and add the cute ribbon. Rebecca’s hat, with the cupcake trim, was the first, and the easiest. The rick rack was large and easily positioned against the ribbon. (I sewed the rick rack to the top and bottom edges of the ribbon, then sewed the assembly to the hat.)

Digression. Isn’t this vintage rick rack package awesome? We’ve started going to estate sales, and I get to ravage the 70yo craft supplies. 100% cotton rick rack? I guess you can buy it online, but it sure isn’t at the local Jo-Ann’s. Estate sales are the best for picking up trim, buttons, and sewing machine feet for pennies. When you can find a good one, but that’s half the fun, right? If I go to too many more though, I’m going to fall pray to the desire to start collecting antique tea cups, and I do not need to start collecting anything else! ‘But the children could use them for tea parties!’ This is how the rationalizations start… Nevermind that Penelope just managed to break one of Rebecca’s more solid ceramic toy tea saucers by dropping it a mere two feet onto the wood floor. (Oh the tears…) I’m sure the porcelain would last minutes around here…

But back to hats. When I picked the ribbon for Penelope’s hat out of my stash I wanted to use the same rick rack so they would match, but her ribbon was just too fine. It called for baby rick rack. Oh there was swearing. I sewed it on once and it was wobbly. I ripped it out and tried again. No luck. I tried sewing the rick rack to the top and bottom of silk tape and sewing to the ribbon to the center of that. Awful. I chucked that one out, I couldn’t bear all the ripping I was going to have to do. The fourth time I resigned myself to sewing the rick rack to the ribbon by hand. Most of the swearing was due to this being a night-before-solstice kind of project. I forgot to mention that, didn’t I? I did not get to my hat until at least a month later.

I remembered my lesson though, and since I was using some of my beloved Kokka Robot tape I just skipped straight to the hand sewing step. Basting really. Then I added a red zig-zag stitch at the top and bottom edges of the tape. I agonized about that, I felt that there wasn’t enough contrast between the linen tape and white lace, but the red zig-zag sort of obscures the robots cute little red feet and antenna’s. Agonized. Yes I can be a neurotic spaz! But now, now I have a froofy lavendar Sunday Afternoons hat with ROBOTS. Lace and robots are awesome.

Now we just need to get our hat habbits back. Mine are good, but I’m struggling not to write Rebecca off. These hats, although they are cute, have very wide brims, the better to screen your nose from the wicked sun my dear… But they really do cut down on the kid’s range of vision. Especially Penelope, when I put this hat on her she cranes her head so far back to look up at me she falls over. We live in California though, so we can’t be bad at sunscreen and hats, one or the other tops… Cute as the hats may be, I think it’s time to start practicing sunscreen instead. :-/

Here is a beautiful skirt we made based on the under skirt from the Insa pattern from ‘Sewing Clothes Kids Love’. This is the third time I have sort of used this pattern. (Here is the second.) I don’t think it really counts this time, because I changed the curves, and I realized at the end that it was basically a circle skirt (but sewn out of four wedges), with a straight waist. Not very fancy fundamentally, although there was lots of subtle pink ribbon trim following the book’s philosophy that more trim is better trim. The fabric is really the lovely part though, it is a cotton faux linen, covered with floral embroidery and sequins that I got half off with a coupon from Jo-Ann’s. (Really it seems that their entire business model revolves around getting people back in their stores to use coupons, and if you pay full price for anything it is ridiculous… Not my favorite game.)

Hey, I never posted the first one either, this one was for a friend’s daughter, I probably wouldn’t have picked these fabrics out for a skirt, but I really liked it when it was done. You can’t really tell from the photo, the red fabric is a fine corduroy, actually the same that I made my own red skirt from. It made a nice skirt the first and second times, corduroy has a nice weight.

Did I make either of these recently? No. My life for the past two or more weeks has been devoted to reading the good, the bad and the crazy about Waldorf schools (no black crayons? Anthroposophism? There seem to be some pretty bitter ex-waldorf parents, but everyone I’ve met involved with Waldorf has been really really nice) and trying to decide if we want to go through the admissions process. Most of it seem very cool, and a lot of it aligns with our personal values, we actually have no TV, (we do watch movies on laptops sometimes), but it is so expensive here. Maybe we could get financial aid, but I’ve always *hated* bargaining. Also our lease came up, so we had to re-evaluate the whole rent/buy thing. Where we live the rent/buy ratio still makes it much cheaper to rent an equivalent house than buy (using the simple numbers OR factoring in all those headachy numbers like maintenance and property tax exemptions.) Major life decisions and uncertainty. I’ve been getting pretty depressed with all the uncertainty. The other kindergarden we’d like, Stevenson PACT, is a lottery, and we won’t know whether we got in/where we are on the wait list until the end of March. Bleh. Maybe I should make some more twirly skirts for morale? I have been making fermented pickles like crazy, using a new-to-me no-mold-skimming fermentation lock process. (I know, mold on your pickle brine is fine! No. I do not feed my family things with mold on them, or near them, or whatever. I can’t get over it. Yuck.) Two thumbs up for no mold and yummy pickles. Something to be positive about anyway.

Oh yes, it’s hard to see, but I also made matching corduroy bows! Ah yes, the skirt is corduroy from my stash, along with some vintage cotton(!) ricrac that I just picked up at an estate sale, and some old black lace I had in my lace drawer. The bottom ruffle was supposed to be longer, but I ran out of red corduroy. And I am loving my serger, I got some extra black on red detail by serging the bottom and top of the bottom ruffle rather than hemming them. Way easier and cheaper too! Well, not if you count the price of the serger, I haven’t done nearly enough sewing to amortize that cost yet!

Also, I am re-in-love with my ruffling foot. Gathering foot? Pleating foot? Whatever. It is awesome. I used it to gather my skirt, and it is so much easier than basting and hand gathering! Which I had to do for the bottom ruffle since I ran out of corduroy and the one downfall of ruffling feet is they are hard to tune exactly. Gathering the bottom ruffle was not fun. (Yes this picture is from a different project.) But the extra thrilling part? This is an antique Singer ruffling foot, but it seems to fit and work just fine on my antique Elna. SO HAPPY! I thought I was going to have to invest in all new feet for my new/old sewing machine, but the old metal Singer ones I have seem to more or less fit. YES!

So anyway, here are some fun things we’ve done over the last several months that I never got around to blogging about.

We’ve done fishing with paper fish with paperclips and magnets-on-a-string, but this is much cooler. Valerie over at Frugal Family Fun made her fish out of pipe cleaners, which makes them easy, cute, and their whole bodies are ferromagnetic! (I had to look that term up… ferromagnetic materials are the ones that are strongly attracted by magnets and can be magnetized. Now we know.) Since the pipe cleaner fuzz keeps the magnet from directly contacting the wire you need a relatively strong magnet to put on the end of your string to go fishing. We cut our pipe cleaners up into different lengths, and made lots of fish! Now they are living in a fish patterned tea tin on our game shelf.

Here we made a stamp pad out of felt and wet it with acrylic craft paint. Then we stamped Totoro and Hello Kitty all over a pair of pants that were already in sad sad shape. Be sure to clean your stamps promptly afterwards or the acrylic paint will gum them up. Acrylic craft paint is great for painting clothes, you don’t really need fabric paint. This activity is an easy way for little kids to personalize their clothes by themselves. Getting out the letter stamps would be fun too.

Play dough with your feet. Why should hands get to have all the fun? This is home made glitter play dough. More sparkles is better. Rebecca had fun kneading the sparkles in. That may have been where we started using feet, I can’t remember!

If you get a box in the mail and it is full of bubble wrap, put it in the driveway! It is super fun to zoom over. Then you can revert to the traditional mad stomping dance to pop the rest of the bubbles. At our preschool they buy a big roll of bubble pop just so the kids can do this once. The environmentalist in me cries, but the kids loved it.

You can tell I’m tired from the preponderance of short declarative sentences. I’ll go work on that sleep thing now.

A month or so ago I got ‘Sewing Clothes Kids Love‘, and I heart heart heart it! It is full of the clothes that I wish I had had as a girl. I may yet scale some of the patterns up and wear them myself. I’m not sure I’m allowed to wear them as a mom though! I just made the Insa Skirt for Rebecca. I convinced her that it was a princess skirt, and she wants to dress up as a princess for Halloween… is that cheating? We went to Jo-Ann’s Fabrics when they were having a $1 fat quarter sale, and I let Rebecca pick out 8 different prints. I think the result is awesome. And a little big. It will probably look better on her scale wise in a year, I should really draft the proper size for her, and then make 10, because I think they are so cute.

Notice the upside down Hello Kitty framed ribbon bit? She demanded that Hello Kitty be upside down everywhere on the skirt, so that she would be right side up to Rebecca when she was looking down. I sewed most of the kitties on right side up… but I relented and sewed one special one upside down. I don’t know if that makes it look like more or less of a mistake than if I had just done them all upside down…

Here is the skirt from ‘above’ so you can appreciate all of Rebecca’s fabric choices. At first they were going to be all pink, but she really branched out! Her favorite after bringing them home was the purple stars, so that is the ‘front’, as much as this skirt can be said to have a front. When she wears it it tends to spin around through the day anyway. Then she gets a bit peeved that someone has turned her skirt around!

I feel like I’ve learned a lot from this book, and between it and my serger I’m finally making clothes that I actually really like. I learned how to use elastic to make the vertical gathers in the skirt, and for the first time managed to hem a non cylindrical skirt without any swearing. Excellent book! Now I just need to quadruple my ribbon stash. I’m going to need to make another ribbon spool holder!