Kids' Clothes Week, the rest - part III

The other thing I did in Kids' Clothes Week (which was how many aeons ago now?) was make a Jack O'Lantern with L. A nice friendly one so as not to freak her out.

I also made the dress she's wearing in that photo. It's the only picture of it I've got so no-one ask for details please. And when I say 'made', what I mean is, took in the sides and sleeves of a merino wool top that I no longer fitted into so that it miraculously became an item of child's clothing. It was Boden too. Guess I'm not a Boden wearer after all.

We also went to the flea market and bought this for T's bedroom wall (tis nearly ready!). He likes trucks.

All in all, the Kids' Clothes Week Challenge was, I think, a good thing for me. I got over my fear of trousers and knits and have since made trousers and a t-shirt for L as well. Plus I got into Sewing for Boys and started making some stuff for T too. It really is a good book with great patterns and clear instructions. So, hurrah!

But I have also realised that blogging is about the lowest of my priorities right now. Then again, I don't do it for anyone else. Posts will henceforth be random, as and when I feel like recording something (should I rename? Jo Crafts for Posterity, anyone??).

Dress success

This post is a while overdue, because I finished this project several weeks ago. And for once, I've been happily wearing it ever since! That never happens! Here I am posing in my father in law's luscious garden:

I'm particularly pleased because - third time lucky - I finally adapted this pattern in a way that works. It's a variation on the Anda dress, which I stumbled on over a year ago while looking for free/very cheap patterns to download off the interweb. It's extremely easy and only has two pattern pieces, but the concept is deceptively straightforward - although it's loose fitting, the fit still matters. And on my first two versions of this, it really really hung wrong.

This picture was an attempt to show the back view, for the sole reason that I adjusted not only for a full bust but also for a small back (like that would actually have been visible in a photo...). Tada! It works! Commercial dress/top patterns suddenly get a lot less daunting! It seems have finally figured out my fit problems with all clothes ever!

Here is a blurred photo of it hanging up - you can still see the overall structure of the thing:

I added the pockets for some visual interest in all that grey, because I didn't want to include the drawstring from the pattern or have to wear a belt with it. The shape of them comes from the pattern for L's ikea dress - I just sized them up on a photocopier.

I find it interesting how the positioning of the pockets just sort of evens out my top-heavy figure. It's an optical illusion but it works: I got them in the wrong place the first time round and it didn't 'balance' at all (fortunately, I love a good opportunity to spend some quality time with my seam ripper).

All said and done, I really LOVE this dress. It's comfy (and particularly forgving around the post-childbearing waist and hips), it's versatile, and oh my aren't big pockets useful! I doubt I'll be making tons of them, as there's too many other things eagerly awaiting my attention. But I'm very glad I've got the adapted pattern just waiting there for next time and some slightly more interesting fabric than the cheap, plain grey cotton.

Finally, dress success! I really can't wear this one enough.

P.S. Nice post-holiday tan, no?

May Revelation

I just had a revelation in the queue for coffee. It involves a re-think of The List, but I can live with that (yes I can. It's my list. I'm allowed to re-think it).

The lightbulb pinged on while I was doing my pre-caffeine empty stare into space and having these random musings:

1) Making clothes for myself is actually a bit stressful. But I've been doing some enjoyable and successful shopping recently.

2) Buying clothes for the children is actually a bit stressful. But I've been doing some enjoyable and successful making, crafting and sewing with and for them.

3) The majority of things I've made that have been both enjoyable and subsequently used have not been items of clothing for myself. They have been bags, gifts, bits and bobs. Etc.

You see where I'm going with this, don't you.

I'm liberating myself from the self-imposed aim of making my own clothing. From now on I will just make things that are fun. And probably small, because big stuff just takes time I haven't got.

Hmm, that all sounds so obvious. Just as well I don't usually try tackling big ideas before the morning's latte.

Machine love

Even brand new sewing machines are not immune to fluff, it seems. Me being a bit of a technical dunce about these things, I tried every possible solution from the manual (and probably some other irrelevant ones too) before eventually curing my repeatedly-broken bobbin thread problem by getting up close and personal with a screwdiver and the machine's inner workings.

Having got all down and dirty with its nooks and crannies (I performed a rather intimate, gentle toothbrushing-style action and then I blew), I actually I love this machine even more than I did before. Which frankly is out of all proportion for a mechanised home-economics device, even if it was Very Expensive.

The Mother Of All Spring Cleaning Lists

What's the best thing when you have too little time for all the things you want to do? A Great Big List, of course! I love lists - organisational, motivational little things of beauty. This one is a spring clean of all the stuff that's been plotting itself To Do in my head for the last few weeks, and oooh it feels good to have written it all down.

So let's share the love. First of all, clothes.

1) Anda dresses: one dark blue, with in-seam pockets and a big wide band of funky leafy material at the hem, and the other one in grey, maybe with gathered pockets (and maybe like these?) on the front. I might finish this one off with some contrasting bias tape (would pale yellow work?). This is such an easy pattern that this time I will be trying to draw it a bit less bulky from the waist down.





The Hawaiian-style leaves just shouted summer at me







Not sure about the colours to be honest 





2) Then another dress, made by lengthening the lower half of this two-piece bodice pattern. The fabric I have in mind for this was cheap and lovely but is only 90cm wide, so we’ll see whether I need to cut the pattern into more than two bits to make it work.

3) Then I want to turn my red jersey dress (last summer’s first make, fact fans!), which has managed to get stains all over the top half, into an a-line market skirt like this one. And while I’m on the subject of red jersey, I’ll finish the t-shirt below and adjust the sleeves beyond all recognition (all that fabric flapping around my sausage-like upper arms! No!).




Note to self:
accentuating biceps that flab
Is. Not. A. Good. Idea.

 
4) Also on the top half we have a nice green jumper which was a bit crap and hung funny and will become a cardigan or shrug. But which? A shrug would be easier (see here) but I have never yet been known to wear one, and just because I don’t know where to put the buttons yet doesn’t mean they’re an entirely bad idea. I've already done the cutting, in attempt to move this off the To Do list and into my wardrobe again.

5) I will finish making a dress for L out of one of G’s old shirts, following Martha’s instructions. If this is a hit I’ll do more later in the summer, as we seem to have old shirts aplenty.





Cuteness!





6) And because the half-made shirt dress is short enough to look like more of a tunic, some laid back ¾ length shorts or summery trousers to go under it wouldn’t go amiss (think I'll adapt this a bit). And while I’m making them, T should definitely get some too – the poor boy doesn’t have any  homemade clothes so far.

7) But girly stuff is so nice to do that I would really like there to be another sundress for L, using the ikea dress McCalls pattern or this MADE tutorial…. Or one of each, if by some miracle I have time.

PHEW!

In the non-clothing category, for the moment there’s only:

7) these baby booties, the first pair of which will be needed somewhere in May (the others can wait till September). In fact I’d love to do these as part of a package together with:
8) a bib, and
9) one of these hats.

Apart from all that, I have a secondary list brewing in my head under the heading “late summer holiday stuff”. This includes ridiculous camping accessories like bunting and dresses made of towelling for beach or poolside ease. I like this list mainly because it assumes that will have completed the above-mentioned by the early summer…




Many works in progress

  And then I’m looking forward to the children’s bedrooms and the hall/stairwell being renovated and needing decoration. Fabulous practical ideas don’t get much better than this, this and this, do they?

All in all, I think I won’t mention yet the little germ of a Christmas crafting list that planted itself yesterday afternoon.

Dress!

So this one was a bit of a project. Of course it took much longer than I expected - partly because of all this fiddling with the pattern, and partly because I suddenly got fed up and it sat waiting to be zipped and hemmed for quite a while.

But then I realised I had a dress-requiring occasion coming up and no dress for it. A burst of activity later and this was finished:

       

Thanks G for the nice dark blurred photos.

Things I like about this dress: the fabric, which is a lovely lightweight purple wool that I found reduced from €34 a metre to €10. I wanted to make a dress with it because I knew it would hang beautifully, and it does. Also, the whole thing is rather well finished, if I do say so myself. This is all down to well-judged use of the possibilities offered by the fab new machine. By well judged I mean, not like last time when I experimented excessively on a skirt with overlocking stitches and it was a terrible a mess. Just because one has a new thing does not mean it should be used indiscriminately. However, an invisible zipper foot is a fabulous and appropriate thing to use when sewing in an invisible zip. And a blind hemming foot produces a beautiful invisibly-stitched hem as long as you have enough hem allowance to fold it all up properly (yes, I am good at making mistakes just so I can learn from them next time).

Things I do not like about this dress: the fabric, which is wool and despite being lightweight is in fact too warm for the spring weather that has just arrived as if to torment me on finally finishing something I have been planning to make as a staple part of my winter work wardrobe since, yes, finding the stuff at a much reduced price in September. But it will still do for next year so I will get over it. The other thing is that having put a lot of effort into adjusting the bodice (see fiddling with pattern), I ran out of patience and didn't test run the skirt. As a result the dress is a bit too loose at the back - it could have done with taking in a couple of centimetres at about waist level, in the centre back seam. But no way am I going to unstitch it all to do that now. It's got room for manouevre.

And despite the minor drawbacks, it's getting plenty of use. I am in fact rather proud of my first proper project - from puzzling over how, where and why to adjust the pattern, all the way to wearing the finished thing.

I don't know whether it's good or bad (when will I find the time??) but it's re-fuelled my obsession with making dresses, which is where my sewing mania got started last year. Bring on the summery stuff next!

Trials and errors

My rediscovered love of sewing over the last year or so owes a lot to the allure of making my own clothes.  I've been growing out of the high street (literally and figuratively), and passing my time stitching things that fit well seems like a total win-win situation. The flaw in this plan is that although I know how to sew, I have more or less no idea about fitting and adjusting patterns.

Thus, I requested and received this book for Christmas. A revelation! It is possible to make dresses for people who have both small shoulders and large boobs! All you need to do is understand and follow the instructions...

So if I'm going to learn this thing, I'll be thorough. Oh yes. I will adjust the pattern and make a 'draft' dress out of calico first before unleashing my newly-acquired expertise on the expensive stuff.  In fact, I'm so thorough, I'll do this THREE TIMES! Because I actually prefer to learn by visualising my mistakes in 3D!

It all started well with L helping to make a nice colourful line of pins:

Imperfectly modified bodice #1: 'x' marks the, err, bust point.

Um, actually, no it doesn't. And the dart I added is pointing at the opposite armpit. And the calico practice dress is a bit spooky and unpleasant. Does it help I wonder that I picked a pattern which doesn't include useful information like ease and the finished dimensions?

I have no pictures of adjusted bodice #2 because it was 11pm on Sunday and I was pissed off. But I was so pleased with neat, tidy, accurate #3 that I can't resist showing it off (apart from forgetting to merge/cut the lines properly at the side of the dart, don't look at that bit).

 

The bodice result is more or less perfect (on me if not the dummy). However the skirt hangs like a sack.

By now though I am so fed up with trial and error that I have cut out the real thing and just done the skirt part the same but smaller. Let's hope this wasn't a(nother) monumental mistake.

Photos of the finished dress will follow, once I have it looking as fabulous as intended.

Recycled skirts

It seems that the word for this these days is actually re-fashioning. Call it what you will - basically, I made two skirts out of two unwearable dresses.

This was the first one:

A lovely Zara dress in nice slinky fabric - but I finally had to admit that I'm never going to fit in it ever again. I bought it at my thinnest ever and that's just the way it is. So I chopped a rectangle out of the skirt, sewed it into a tube, turned over the top and put elastic in. Et voilà, skirt for a 3 year old! It didn't even need hemming as I just used the bottom of the original dress.

The second dress I had made myself, and it was a disaster. Wrong pattern/fabric combination, and a terrible fit too (I'm trying to learn my way out of that particular problem, but it's slow going for someone with no fashion school skills - I'm doing bas couture rather than haute at the moment). Two people suggested I just chop it in half and give it an elastic waistband, and once I'd got over my fit of pique about the original project's utter failure, that's what I did. It's a jersey fabric so I added some cheap polyester lining to make it hang nicely, and then I experimented with the invisible hemming on my new sewing machine. Result: rather nice skirt as long as you don't look too closely at the finishing.

Here we are wearing our recycled skirts:

As you can probably tell, we posed and took the photos ourselves.

First post

This is my idea of a good time: at home pottering about and making a merry old mess. Them: toys, crayons and books. Me: pins, needle and thread.

I learned to sew with my mum and at a rather traditional girls’ school where I and 5 others took GCSE textiles. In my rose-tinted memory the class was a twice-weekly haven of calm, creativity and gossip; my mum mainly remembers the enormous practical coursework burden and desperate all-nighters trying to finish the projects.  These were clearly enough to put me off, because I hardly sewed anything for the next 15 years or so.

And then last summer I got my stitching mojo back. I rediscovered my sewing machine (a secondhand 1970s model that cost 20 pounds and weighs about the same), experimented with some easy dresses, and then threw myself into making Christmas presents for my friends. Since September I’ve spent more lunchbreaks than I care to admit on fabric porn*. 

Even at its most frustrating, sewing is total occupational therapy. It’s absorbing and it's liberating, keeping my hands busy and clearing my head. I find myself actually thinking about things again (with two toddlers and a full time job, it's been a while since I did that).  So this blog is mainly about keeping a record of the things I’ve made - but it’s also about getting myself to keep sewing and thinking. Because another thing I really enjoy but don’t do any more is writing.

The idea is that making stuff and writing about it keeps me more or less sane...

* i.e., wandering around fabric shops, stroking things and trying not to drool.