Dress for Isabella.

I started with this shirt, bought unworn, with tags, for $2 from the Kindy fair left overs. (New price $69.99).  Nice soft slightly brushed cotton.  Not a style or colour that David would wear, which was fine, because I had designs on it for something else.

A few polka dots in two different sizes stencilled on with freezer paper (thanks J for the circle punches!)

And I ended up with this.  Because little girls who are turning four tomorrow NEED a new dress. I think it's a rule.  (Little boys who are turning four tomorrow don't need a new shirt because they have yet to outgrow or wear out the new one Mum made last year!)

Piped peter pan collar and petal sleeves in a red I chanced upon in a remnant bin which matches my paint really well.  The original front button and buttonhole bands are now at the back.  I did have to add a little yoke to make up length.

And some inseam pockets inspired directly by this dress on Pinterest.

I decided to photograph the dress today because when we get home from kindy tomorrow it will probably be covered in mud, paint or food.  Or all three.  Which is as it should be when you are four.

My Creative Space - Um, Bandwagon, room for one more?

I thought I'd join in with Kootooyoo's Creative Spaces this week because I just couldn't resist jumping on the man's shirt to toddler dress refashion bandwagon. (One of my personal favourites on this theme was the hilarious "How to turn a toddler's dress into a man's shirt" posted on April 1st. annoyingly I can't now find it, and Google isn't helping)

So here's my version, for which I won't provide a tutorial because there are about 70,000 results from Google if you look. Besides which I don't do the "lay a dress which fits your toddler on top of the dress and cut around it" style of sewing. I'm a pattern maker. Not a proper one (a patternmaker, with no space between the words), but I learnt the principles as part of my degree and continue to learn all I can from books and the internet (check out Sherry's blog for some brilliant tutorials). I drafted a pattern for an A line dress in a size three (so it should fit Isabella better this summer, when she'll be over 2 and a half) and made this.

I'd started with this. David doesn't wear short sleeved shirts, so when his brother was having a clean out I swiped it.


To maximize available fabric I unpicked the (flat-felled) side seams.

And squeezed my pattern pieces on. I had to unpick a bit of the armhole seam as well to get it to fit.

Here's a reminder of how I manage my turn of cloth allowance for collars. Sherry shows how to do it properly at the pattern stage. I've folded the collar and pinned the lower edge and now I'm sewing within the seam allowance to secure it before attaching it to the neckline. You can just see how the underneath layer is peeking out.

Also on my desk today are these trees, freezer paper stencilled. I really really really love silhouettes of bare trees.

And my friends have been giving me stick for not mentioning my dress. I wore it out to dinner for one friend's birthday last weekend. Where it was much admired and I felt a million bucks. (I even ran into my BIL who told me I looked fantastic.) I realised that it wasn't the dress that left me feeling Meh, it was the grey and dismal winter we've been having! So Keely, J, M, H and other J, there you go. I mentioned it.

My Creative Space - dress interrupted

I'm playing along with Kootoyoo's Creative Spaces this week.


As much as I want to finish my dress, it's taking a backseat this week so I can make a top for a dear friend to whom I owe sewing in return for babysitting during the school holidays before I had the twins. Um, yeah, she's patient! (actually she waits till she wants something then cashes in a favour). Even if I didn't owe her sewing I'd want to do it because she's a) lovely, and b) a real pay-it-forward kind of person. She truly deserves a bit of pretty coming her way. Anyway, she's just undergone surgery and (as you do) needs a pretty new top. This is one that we copied for her from a RTW top a couple of years ago. By "we" I mean "me-while-she-sat-beside-me-saying-"uh huh"-at-relevant-points-and-feeding-me-Pinky-bars." I got started on it yesterday and quickly decided that it needed to be prettified. J and I have very similar taste so I am a little more confident that she will like something I like than other friends would.

My first idea was to do a very simple applique using a running stitch around a stencil design then cutting away the excess fabric, a technique very similar to what I've done on my children's designs with an influence from the utterly stunning work of Natalie Chanin (if you've never heard of her, go and check out Alabama Chanin). After I'd done the first one I was not convinced. Here's the best photo I could get of the front of the top with one applique done and two others pinned in place.

I just wasn't feeling it, so I decided to paint a couple and see if they look better. Since they're on scraps of fabric there's no risk of wrecking J's top if it doesn't work or she doesn't like it. Two silver and one burnt umber, on two different coloured fabrics. Now to watch the paint dry......

.......and they'll look a little like this. Once the paint is properly dry and heat set I'll figure out how best to attach them to the top. I'm thinking of going back to the running stitch (with toning but slightly contrasting thread) and trim method.

And just to finish I thought I'd show what happens when you forget to cover (or lower, if that's an option) the feed dogs on your sewing machine as stated in the instructions before using your new favourite toy, the Greist buttonholer. I was trying to go around each buttonhole twice and the second one wasn't lining up with the first. After four keyholes and one short buttonhole (and several heart palpitations) I realised my mistake and covered the feed dogs. After which I got a beautiful short buttonhole and the most Perfect Keyhole Ever. I am so in love with this. I need to make myself a(nother) coat just so I can USE it!

And many thanks to Katie, who had the great, simple (and blindingly obvious to anyone other than me) idea of starting the buttonhole at a point other than the top with my other buttonholer - worked a treat!

My Creative Space - Why buy what you can make better?

I thought I'd join in on My Creative Space over at Kootoyoo today, because it's so much fun peeking into other creative spaces!

My creative space has been busy for the last few days, working on a few different projects, depending on whether or not the twins are around. Lately I've been trying to get sewing done while they're not napping, so they get used to it going on in the background and don't feel the need to investigate what I'm doing in up-close detail! Um, yeah, this might take a while.

So anyway, project #1 was a singlet (vest, undershirt, onesie) for Isabella, who is about to outgrow the ones she's wearing now. I bought a couple on sale in Farmers and wasn't happy with either of them really. I didn't like one because I don't personally like the envelope neck style - great principle, but they never seem to sit well because the wrap over bit isn't big enough so they take fiddling . I'm NOT a fan of fussing with clothing on wriggly toddlers! The other was annoying because it's a wrap over style (so far so good) but it has too many domes. (See previous comment about fussing and wriggly children). So with two not-very-satisfactory singlets I wondered why I didn't just MAKE her some - I'd adapted an Ottobre pattern for Nicholas some time ago and it works really well, so I just needed to do the same thing for her size and get to it. (For the record it's Ottobre 01/06, #4)

First I needed a complete pattern for the front. Trace one, flip the paper and trace again...
At this point Nicholas got interested. This will become relevant later.

I drew my new style lines on the complete pattern. The outer neckline is there so I can measure it to see how long to cut my neckband. The inner neckline is the new seamline. The two horizontal lines are where to cut the under layer and it's hem fold line.

To make the singlet I cut one complete front and one (mirrored obviously) half front. I find the cross over style is easy to pull on over their heads and then sits nicely. And I only have to do up two domes at the crotch. Easy! Easy is good.

Then Nicholas did this....

Yup - tore it! By very lucky chance he only ripped the bit I was discarding anyway, but still! At this point I gave up till nap time.

With the tiny destructo-bots safely tucked up for a snooze, I went on to the Not-With-Them-Around project - freezer paper stenciling for a bubble dress. I wanted to use a darker, more wintery coloured fabric, but it still needed to have a bit of a pop to stop it looking too drab.

I didn't want to waste effort stenciling on the turned in lower edge of the bubble, so to establish where that lower edge would be I placed the lining pattern on the dress section and chalked on a line half way between the two to use as a rough guide.

Then I cut a bunch of leaves from freezer paper with a craft punch - how quick and easy is that compared to laboriously cutting each stencil with a knife?! Iron them on in what I thought was a pleasing pattern...

Have at it with textile paint, and there you have it. A front and two backs lying on the floor to dry. Slight panic while I figure out where I'm going to put them when the twins wake up...

When the paint was dry and I'd peeled off the freezer paper and heat set the paint, it looked like this.

Much prettier than plain navy I think. I have a couple of plaids destined for the same treatment once I get the right paint colours....

Meanwhile, while the paint was drying, I got to sewing Isabella's singlet. It took next to no time to sew, and cost pretty much nothing. Pattern from a magazine I admittedly bought, but already owned, so that's free right? Fabric courtesy of Keely destashing while I was pregnant - free. Domes - 2 sets of the 2000 sets I bought for $4.00. That's 0.2c each - not 2c each, 0.2c each! Thread - hard to assess how much overlocker thread I used, and the sewing was done with whatever was lying around, so next to nothing. End result is a style I really like, and all it really cost me was a small amount of time. So why did I buy two I didn't even like?

Edited to add - oops, domes are snaps. I forget that not everyone speaks New Zealand!

Freezer paper stenciling, oh yeah!

I've wanted to have a go at freezer paper stenciling since I first saw it somewhere on the net. It looked just like something I would really enjoy, and really lent itself to the sort of embellishment I like to do. So when I realised that I could get freezer paper at Spotlight there was no stopping me!

I won't bother with any sort of tutorial because blogland is full of them - I googled it and got over 10 000 hits! It's really easy and heaps of fun. I plan to do a lot more of this.

After a couple of experiments I made pants for Nicholas. I wanted to photograph them flat on the floor to show the design, but as soon as he saw them Nicholas decided that he wanted to put them on. (He was really interested in the stenciled leg when it was on my desk). As it turned out, the resulting photo shows the design really well! So here is my first stenciled garment - footprint pants for Nicholas.