Posts Tagged ‘clothes’

Twirly Skirt

Friday, February 11th, 2011

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.

Clothes for Mom

Sunday, November 21st, 2010

I was inspired by MaryAnne’s participation in Hazelnuts’ Clothes For Mum Challenge. So I got off my bum and sewed a skirt for me instead of Rebecca. You get the picture of me jumping, because I look too embarrassed in the other pictures! I was aiming for Harajuku with this skirt + tights + legwarmers. The self conscious side of me thinks this outfit is much too young for me, but it makes me feel happy, so I’m trying to thumb my nose at the self conscious side. How old am I? I am 34. I don’t think I look much like 34 in this picture, does that make me silly? Oh well! I am also planning to make some longer skirts that don’t involve crinolines under them so that I can look elegant and beautiful chasing across the playground like MaryAnne.

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!

Things to Do, Things We’ve Done (Not Sleep.)

Friday, November 5th, 2010

I haven’t been getting enough sleep, which means my life starts falling apart and I start throwing mommy tantrums. Usually I’m pretty good at avoiding those. Must get more sleep… We’ll see how the weekend goes.

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.

Insa Skirt

Tuesday, October 12th, 2010

[Don't forget I'm having a Candy Corn Barrette giveaway!]

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? :-D 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!

Playing Mail Man

Tuesday, June 15th, 2010

I’m not supposed to be blogging right now, I’m supposed to be meeting my deadline. But it’s been a week! My house is getting messier and messier and older daughter spent an unheard of amount of time in front of the computer today. So here, here is something I whipped up before I was sucked into this One Yard Wonders 2 thing.

Birthday. Mother suggested that she would appreciate play acting props, careers other than ‘princess’. I chose mail man. This hat, other than being too small, worked wonderfully from my imagination to implementation!

The bag, well, it is recycled from a shirt in the rag bag. I got a new serger! Named Sammy. This was practice using it, quite a different thing than I’m used to, it was quite fun! I made the strap about twice too long and tried to just lap it and sew to make it shorter, but that was a disaster, ended having to undo the bag seam, remake a bunch of it, but it was still a quick satisfying project. So what if I did write the letter shapes with permanent marker rather than erasable marker… It is still quite good for play acting, not going to be winning any design comps with it though!

One Yard Wonders Exhibit A

Saturday, May 8th, 2010

I had a problem with timing this year, the call for submissions to the second One Yard Wonders book came out while I was packing to move, and with the approaching deadline last month at the end of March I was still unpacking. I was not very happy about this. So a week before the deadline, desperate to submit *something* I made this fairy skirt and play silk. And I told them about all these other brilliant ideas I had that I didn’t have time to make before the deadline.

Long story short, they did not take this skirt, unsurprisingly really, but they *did* extended the deadline for everyone for another ~2 weeks, one of which my little sister was visiting playing au pair. So I got three more projects sewn, although one was a little late, and they were accepted! The down side being that now I have to finish writing up the instructions for three projects and re-make them with the soon-to-be-provided fabric for the final versions. So along with making things for Rebecca’s birthday party next week, I’m going to be pretty busy for the next month! And here I was wanting to get back to working on patterns for my sadly neglected Etsy shop. But life just is. I’m doing what I love, so I can’t complain.

And here’s a picture just for fun:

This picture sums up what I love about my bounce flash. Is that shallow? Okay, silver lining lifestyle comment: since our mattress was saggy and pokey by a year after we bought it, 8 years later Rebecca is allowed to jump on it whenever she wants. Bonus. She jumps on the couch too. It’s a nice couch, but we got it for free from family, and jumping always seemed more important than preserving the couch. It’s holding up so far. :-)