Catching up

This past month has been interesting.

Instead of sewing internally, I sewed almost exclusively for others.

Some people paid me for my handmade items, some items I gave as gifts.

I did 2 craft fairs and sewed something like 40 items.

I blogged nothing, and these are all the pics I have. Hodge-podged from various iPhone snapshots and poorly lit 10pm bleary-eyed shots.

There were aprons.

(My beautiful friend Sarah modeling one of my cafe aprons AKA her new birthday present because she looked hot in it)

(Custom sea shell/beach theme apron, but this photo totally misrepresents the color, which is NOT yellow at all)

(Custom "purple" apron)

(Little thing I started doing on the inside waistbands)

There were various custom items, most of which were patterns or things I hadn't made before. Which was an experience. I am proud of myself for being brave about that.

(Wet bags lined with PUL)

(Open handle for snapping onto stroller)

(Added this as an extra to the shell apron)

(Custom Sleeping Beauty cape for a darling little girl)

(It's really not crooked)

(Princess Insa skirt)

(Her mom sent the blue fabric, as well as several yards of this pink camo she had meant to turn into blankets. So I did that, too.)

(Minky scarf for the same precious girl)

A few lucky people got presents. I only managed to get pics of these.

(Cozy knit double-sided blanket for my 2-month old nephew)

(Minky scarf for my 4 year old niece)

(I love this button)

My wonderful friend Shari took more pics of things I will be offering in my shop. They have been ready since before Christmas, but the holiday rush took over, and I haven't put them up yet. Something I will be remedying!

Oh! And I did sew pjs for my kids. The problem with handmade pjs is that your kids love them too much. They aren't off the machine long enough before the kids have grabbed them, and then those kids won't take them off. Or stand still for pictures because they're on a holiday/sugar high. Darn them.

I want to talk about my New Year's resolution, which is to sew all of my family's clothes for one year, but I think this post is long enough already. I have so much to say and so much to show that I am just bursting! Big sewing and blogging plans for this year, to say the least!

Love you guys for still reading this. Muah! :)

She Hath Fix-ed It

You may remember a very short time ago I posted that I had finally set up my Etsy shop, and I felt rather apathetic, er, overwhelmed. At a loss as to how to do the graphic design/photography aspects of this whole idea, I called up my Very Good friend Shari, and said,"helllllllp!!!"

So she did.

Reaaaallly. No REALLY. Like, I think at this point she may have put more work into my shop than *I* have! Shari has ridiculous photography talent and technical know-how, and that is why I am so honored to have these pictures of my creations!! Wow, just wow. Let me share:

Anyone else smell the apple and pumpkin pie with in this shot?? Thannnnnnksgiving....mmm....

Not going to lie, kind of happy about these butt shots. Um, who wants her butt to look bad? Not me, my friends.

(Incidentally, my irreverent husband calls these aprons, "the ones where you're not supposed to wear anything underneath.")

Just gonna let that sit...

Whoa, and on a completely different subject: kids aprons! Wait, I think I need more white space...

...

...

Okay, I'm good now. Um, how adorable is her little daughter modeling these kiddo versions? I love her "popped" foot and her pink Chucks!

Up close the mini-aprons are just like Mommy's. :)

Having visited my rather overstocked sewing room, Shari knows a thing or two regarding how passionate I feel about fabric. Specifically, I want to make love to piles and piles of beautiful fabric, dive into it, smell it, stare at it. I have a love-love relationship with it. I will only accept the best, quality and print-wise. *sniiiiiiff* Fabrique!

So, in the interest of taking fabric pictures "for custom orders", she took several shots of various piles of my fabric. *ahem* Yeah...these are for custom orders. Not for whipping me up into a frenzy of fabric lust. *cough* Nooooooo. Strictly busnaz.

These are all Christmas prints from a recent Fabric.com order. I got a great deal on them, as they were all on sale, and then I had an additional coupon code. Regular prices per yard for premium quilting cotton, as you may know, usually run ~$10 a yard. So happy that Fabric.com and Hawthorne Threads are always hooking me up so I can enjoy my favorite habit without having to pay full price every time. :)

Incidentally, these prints are mostly from Robert Kaufman and Alexander Henry, and they make me feel all Christmasy giddy inside.

These are some vintage Joann's prints. A while back they decided to jump on the whole Japanese novelty print bandwagon and came out with a few Japanese-inspired whimsy prints of their own. I gobbled these two up, but sadly my daughter is not so much into prints like this. Princess or fairies or flowers or bust, she says. Oh, she is so hard to please! :p~

Recognize these? Leftover scraps from the Glam Garden dress I made for my daughter's 1st day of school. Still completely gaga over this line. I don't have enough for anything big, but I figured I'd put them out there for some of my checkbook covers and wallets. At the very least, I am making something for me! :)

I am all about these saturated blue/turquoise prints lately; these are from two different designers. The top one is from Tina Givens' Fairy Tip Toes line, and the two down from that are from Jennifer Paginelli's Flower Power. These two lines are printed on the most amazing, luxurious quilting cotton. It is perfect for more structured items like aprons, and wears so wonderfully. The quality honestly spoils me when I am working assembly line, because it puts even some of the other premium quilting cottons I use to shame!

More of Tina Givens' Fairy Tip Toes. I am amazed at how she makes these rather different colors work together all in one line. Combining brights and pastels is no easy feat. Sooo beautiful--I can't wait to sew them into girly-girly-ness, whether it be some of my aprons, other kitchen items, or maybe a little girls' dress??

Speaking of clothes, YES, I am still sewing those. My kids need pajamas like they're naked (they aren't, actually, but you get the idea), and I still have those freaking Michael Miller knits calling my name very, very loudly. With two craft fairs under my belt in the last few weeks, I haven't had time to clothe my own kids, so I hope to remedy that a bit this week.

Until next time!

Lil' Kingdom Apron

I felt really guilty about sewing so much lately and, well, not sewing so much for my own kids. Like, reaaaaaallly guilty. Hello, my beautiful daughter is pretty much one of the main reasons I DO sew. Putting handmade clothes, made by my own loving hands, on my kids is 1000x better than clothes from any store. It is a serious sewing-crack high, I'm tellin' ya.

DD has noticed me up in my sewing room (duh!) these past few weeks and taken to spreading out all of the patterns and magazines I have for HER stuff, just sort of hoping that I'd take the hint. "Mommy, is that one for me...?" Poor thing.

And so I finally took pity on her and made HER a custom-drafted mini-version of the adult aprons that I've been working on.

Fabric: Lil' Kingdom by Michael Miller. This fabric is TO DIE for. I always buy the good stuff when it comes to quilting cottons, but this particular line is just a cut above. It's thick and soft and crisp, and the colors really pop. It's just beautiful.

Pattern: Drafted by me.

She LOVED her apron. I even convinced her to wear jeans with it. (She usually refuses to wear any kind of pants, insisting that she can't, "sit criss cross apple sauce," when wearing them. Child has a boo-tay.)

Okay, fine. I had to bribe her with chocolate AND the apron in order to get her to wear the jeans. Sheesh.

Beautiful top stitched crisp apron-ness. :)

I really wanted to make sure this apron was appropriately child-like, yet still a scaled down version of my rather sexy adult aprons. I think I succeeded?? I have mad requests from friends and family who want copies of it...luckily I did have enough fabric to make several more. I put one up in my Etsy shop, which is now live!

Yeah, the Etsy shop is live. Like, I dunno. Ooooooh, this selling thing is wigging me out! I have no idea what I'm doing; I am SO not a businessy person at this point. I am sure I must be doing everything completely wrong. And how silly am I to add this onto all the other holiday/traveling stuff I do this time of year??! Nuts. Srsly. Ah well, visit my shop if you feel like it. If not, that's okay, too. :/

(Best marketing line. Ever!)

Apronique

Erm.

Yeah. Have had a hard time gettin' up in the sewing room these months. WHAT IS WRONG WITH ME?!?! Am I ever happier than when I have glorious fabric feeding through my fingers and waving my magic wand at my sewing machine?? Staring upon my finished creations? Sharing them with you all so you can gum up your keyboards with drool? What better endorphin rush is there?

Wait. Don't answer that.

Suffice it to say, Sewing is, like, waaaaaaay up there. Yeah.

I am happy to report though, my friends, that inspiration has struck! I have been busy at my sewing room with a fever, makin' stuff like crazy & like it's nobody's business & like I have Satan breathing down my neck.

This sewing has and shall manifest itself in several ways:

1. A beautiful Cinderella dress for my daughter. OMG. I must blog this thing, but wah wah, I really botched the pics from our Disneyland trip. Must take new pics and then: drool-worthy blog post!

2. Gifts for family members, chillens, etc. You know "A Handmade Christmas" and all that shoot.

3. A FREAKIN' ETSY SHOP!!! Yes, Yes, YES! I will be selling some things. SOME things. We'll see how it goes. Like I said, inspiration has struck like crazy, and for some reason it has particularly settled in the make-20-aprons-but-what-shall-I-do-with-them area? Oh, sell them. Also, apron ornaments (srsly, I don't know. My muse is hungry or something and doesn't want to get anything on her dress), ummmm, wallets, and ummmm...maybe some other Christmas decs. This will be a way for those less sewing & fabric enabled to enjoy some of the fruits of my sewin' schwang. And who doesn't love sewin' schwang? I know I do. :)

Stay tuned for more posts and info in the next week!

Purple Jersey Twirl

See, I told you I would be back.

A few weeks after school started for DD, the note came home that...dun dun dun...School Picture Day was coming. Ack! A quick perusal of her closet showed me what I already knew--she had nothing just right. Soooo, of course a late night/early morning sewing spree followed, and voila, problem solved.

[But not, it must be said, without much eye-rolling from my husband ("Why do you always DO this to yourself?? You ARE crazy, you know that?" I know. I am a beyond batty sewing lady. It's okay.)]

Fabric: Lycra-blend jersey print. I think it has at least some synthetic in it, since it didn't want to iron very well, but it is very lightweight, drapey, and comfortable. I believe it is a boutique overrun from either Plum Pudding or Baby Lulu. I got it online quite a while back for myself, but it just seemed to fit for this project so I gave it up to DD. :)

Pattern: None, really. A few weeks ago I had DD go through the Mini Boden catalog and circle all the things she liked, for inspiration. One of the items she circled was this dress, so I used my go-to puffed sleeve t-shirt pattern (Ottobre 1/2007 #18) and figured the rest out. I didn't have any solid colored jersey with the right hand for it, so I went with this print from my stash. I think it worked out perfectly.

The inspiration dress had this little loop detail in the back, so I swallowed my fear and tried my hand at it. I discovered that basically...if you can do a t-shirt binding, you can do a loop in the back. It was really no harder than what I've already been doing. The only thing is that I can never remember how to do french thread loops to go over the button, so I just sewed the top of the loop closed with the button. It fits over her head just fine.

I did three ruffles about 1 1/4" wide each for the bodice. Ruffles like this are pretty easy in a knit fabric, just make sure you cut your strips so that the sides will not curl in. Jersey only curls on 2 sides, so just check which way it curls and cut your strips the other way! Tea Rose Home has some great jersey ruffle tutorials and projects if you'd like to try your hand at this.

I didn't want this skirt to be tooooo full, so I gathered each tier at about a 1:1.5 ratio with clear elastic. Each of the tiers has a finished width of 6". I know I've mentioned this before, but I buy tons of clear elastic by the the bunch over at Sewzannes (see link on the side) and use it like crazy in all my knit projects. Because I used it to gather each skirt tier, these ruffles s-t-r-e-t-c-h when DD pulls her skirt over her knees and does all those horrible things that kids do to their clothes. If you gather your knits without stretch, as you would a woven, you will be sorry because your seams will pop! Ack! Don't do that. :p~

One of these days I will have to do a clear elastic tutorial, but in the meantime you can always Google it and see what that comes up with (I know, I'm soooooo helpful!). Also on my list: how to gather a tiered skirt in the flat--I do all my tiered skirts this way and it is so quick and painless! Soon, soon, I will have to put that one together. I promise!

I'm stuck on a clip kick, eh? For this clip I fused some scraps of fabric to a woven interfacing, cut out shapes, then hot glued them to a clip. An easy, easy 10 minutes, and it really finishes off your project.

Okay, that's it for today, I need to actually go pick up DD from school. Coming up next I have more dresses! Tutorials! So check back, my readers, okay?

Back and Fabulous!

It has been a while, hasn't it? To paraphrase a Carrie Bradshaw line, I've been cheating on sewing...with my house!

Yes, yes, my new house is sucking up all of my time. Unpacking, setting stuff up, buying stuff, cleeaaaaaaning stuff, ugh. Even though I've had my sewing room set up for quite a while now, I'm having a really hard time getting in there and accomplishing anything. And--hello--I have a whole entire sewing ROOM now--surely I could use it on a regular basis?!

It seems now that we're not living like teenagers at my parents' house anymore, I have to learn how to be a homemaker all over again. And with A LOT more square footage than we previously had. It's like, what is my schedule? What do my kids need from me? How to I do take care of my home AND have some fun, too? It is honestly as if I've started a whole new job.

But. Now school has started for my daughter, I'm trying to get into a routine where I can regularly create again. Because without sewing I die. Die!! Sewing is breathing, and I must breathe! Okay, speaking of school, I did manage to get this pretty fabulous (see title) dress done for DD for her first day of Kindergarten.

Fabric: Glam Garden by Josephine Kimberling. You may remember that this fabric was in my first order from Hawthorne Threads, which I posted about here. It. Is. Beyond. Beautiful. Honestly, words cannot express how passionately I feel about it...suffice it to say this dress was not a chore AT ALL.

Pattern: Analise by Portobellopixie. This dress is just lovely even with a plain skirt, as I did for this one, but for something extra-special I sewed the full-on, patchwork version. At first glance it seems like no big deal, until you see how full it is. Then, holy crap! Hecka gathered mosaic patchwork! I was a little worried the skirt would take forever, but I sewed all 4 sections at the same time, assembly line style. Combined with my serge & top stitch method it really wasn't that bad. Would I do it again though...hmm, let me think about that!

Here she is in front of the door posing, getting ready to head out for her first day of school, ever! Seriously, she has not even been to one day of preschool, so this was a pretty big deal for me. Hence why the dress had to match the occasion!

The back is my favorite part of the Analise pattern. For one thing, I would sew two straps over back bodice any day. For a second thing, it's adorable. :)

And yes, the money shot. This thing is holy freaking full. Like, a 1.5x circle. Yaaaayyyy!

I just used regular serger thread with slightly smaller stitches for this rolled hem on my serger. I went through a whole woolly nylon phase, but lately I feel like regular thread is better. You can iron it when your ruffle gets wrinkly out of the dryer. Ask me how I know that woolly nylon thread melts like a mofo. :p~

The patchwork is rather complicated in order to make sure that the skirt gets larger around towards the hem. Kudos to the pattern designer for figuring it out so perfectly. I just followed the directions, and voila! Huge twirly skirt.

Oh, I do love these back ties!

Posing in the garden, appropriately. This backpack seem a little big, much? Yeah, well, apparently they make big kid backpacks and little tiny baby backpacks, but no medium size. I figure this will grow with her, and plus she loooooves it. (It was a birthday gift last year.)

The shoes are from Baby Gap, and she picked them out. I thought they looked like flimsy cheapies over the Sketchers Twinkle Toes I had been looking at, but these have held up wonderfully! They are the perfect school shoe, and go with a lot of the outfits in her closet. Not to mention they cost about a 1/4 of what we would have paid for the Sketchers.

DD is growing her bangs out, so I have been experimenting with hair clips. For this one I used Wonder Under to fuse two pieces of fabric together, then abstractly sewed around two of the print's flowers. Then I cut them out and glued them to a plain clip (from a beauty supply store) with a jewel on top. The jewel fell off one of her dress-up jewelry rings, so I appropriated it! This clip is super-sturdy, and I think it sets off the dress just right.

Okay, that is it for now! I promise I have some more things to show, as well as some pics of my sewing room! It is awesome and the perfect place to create. I have missed sewing and blogging so much, and I have so many projects I am working on to catch up. Stay tuned!

Process (How I Cut Out & Schtuff)

Um. Yeah. I am so consumed with my house right now that my sewing machine is like a foreign object. Actually, it's like cigarettes (were I to smoke)--just put the pack away, don't think about it. It's not there. I don't need to smoke (sew).

I read so many sewing blogs where people don't do any more sewing than I do. Yet they manage to post every single freakin' day. How do they do this?! I feel like I'm cheating on my smoking (sewing) diet by coming over here and posting. Like, I'm not smoking (sewing), but I'm reaaaallly fantasizing about it. *sniiiiiiiiifff* Cigarettes (fabric).

In lieu of presenting any sort of project, I thought I'd talk a lil' about my sewing process. Okay?

I learned to sew Ye Olde Fashioned Way. You know. Iron your pattern tissue. Lay the tissue on your fabric according to the recommended diagram. Tediously pin like heck. Cut out with shears. Rub your sore scissor hand and curse. Use huge-a$$ seam allowances, pin every seam, blah, blah, BLAH. Quit sewing because it's not worth it...

I don't sew this way anymore. Because I have small children, and my patience could fill a teaspoon. Really. That is the entire amount.

Starting with the cutting out process, I have streamlined. I took a few pictures when I was prepping the infamous Anna Maria Horner sundress, so I thought I'd walk through that one. Seeing as how I don't have any pics of anything else I've cut out, it was an easy choice (duh).

Firstly, I like to trace my patterns. WAIT: I know. This is not technically streamlining. Buuut, if I am using a boutique or magazine pattern, it's the only way to go. No way I'm cutting into a $16 pattern, areyakiddingme??! I get for realz artist's tracing paper from Dickblick.com, and I love it. I have used different sizes, but the 50yd x 24" roll is my fave.

Then I weight down the tracing paper and trace with a good ol' Sharpie.

For weights I like to use these 3" washers that my lovely husband picked up for me at Home Depot. A while back I hot-glued some dollar bin ribbon around each stack of 2, which makes them a lot less clink-y. I have also seen people do the same thing with huge nuts. (TWSS)

Next step, cut out each piece with paper-cutting scissors. DO NOT use your good Ginghers. Not that those Ginghers have done your thumbs any good favors in the past, but still. You might need them for something fabric-ish.

Yay, pretty stack of traced pattern pieces! (cigarettes and a lighter)

Now, I didn't trace every single piece. The skirt pieces on this dress were pretty large and rectangly, so I just folded those back to my size. No sense wasting time and paper when it's not absolutely necessary.

Then I lay my pattern pieces down on the fabric, weight them down, and cut with my trusty rotary cutter. I understand that some people do not use these yet for apparel sewing. To which I say, what are you thinking??!?! Get thee. A rotary cutter and cutting mat at Joanns. Now. Because you're not getting mine.

For the jersey skirt lining, I just laid my skirt pieces, on the fold, on top of my jersey, which is also on the fold. Then I just folded up a few inches at the hem and a bunch in the middle to make my jersey lining pieces quite a bit smaller around than the outer skirt. That way it's not so bulky.

Ah, completely used up fabric. This picture means my scrap pile will not be getting a huge random piece of fabric that I have no idea how to use.

Oh, and here's how I do my facings. I just lay my fashion fabric pieces, wrong side down, directly on top of my woven interfacing, which is sticky side up. I weight a little, then cut with my Ginghers. Hey, whaddya know, they do have a purpose.

This stack is all ready to go!


Since I usually cut and sew on different days, I like to put my projects in ziploc bags or any other clear plastic bags I might have. I try to reuse the bags as much as possible though, because just looking at them makes me feel super duper non-green guilt. Damn you, ziploc bags! You have infiltrated my subconscious with your usefulness! Grr.

Alrighty, so there ya go. Now I have to get back to painting my son's room. Until next time!