Clearwater Creations

Making Clothes for the Grandkids

Sat, 17 Mar 2012 21:49:00 -0400

Back last summer I told you of making the Thomas the Train shirt for Jake.

And I’ve been trying to get a good photo of him in it ever since. So I finally decided to go with one from the summer. You can’t see the shirt front, but sometimes the only way to get a still photo of an active kid is when they are napping!

When Jake was about 2.5 he decided that all he wants to wear is Thomas the Train. So this has been somewhat challenging. I made some solid corduory pants and cut out Thomas from other fabric and sewed it on them. He’s wearing them here along with one of his Thomas the Train T shirts here.

Meanwhile Emily either wants to be girly girl in frilly dresses or tom-boy like Jake. But she really likes Tinkerbell. Since my daughter doesn’t sew, when she sees Thomas the Train fabric, she buys it and mails it to me. I never know what to expect. Over Christmas I got a package in the mail of 8 yards of fabric, some Thomas the Train and some Tinkerbell. So I’ve been very busy!

I really like the Oliver +S Sketchboy Shirt http://oliverands.com/patterns/pants/patterns9.phtml It makes a very neat-looking shirt.

I don’t have a photo of Jake wearing his shirt, but I have one of Emily in it.

Over Christmas I made some for the twins and also for their cousin, Evan, who was 9 months old at the time. The same pattern covers sizes 6 months to 4 years. I’d already made Jake one with the same Thomas the Train Christmas fabric. Here I am holding Evan in his first Thomas the Train shirt. If he’s like his cousin Jake, he’ll be wanting lots more, and he’ll be getting a bunch of hand-me-downs from Jake.

Last Saturday I shipped off another package to the twins with 3 more Tinkerbell shirts and 2 more Thomas shirts. Here are the TInkerbell ones.

And I got a photo of the twins in them!

Where have I been

Sat, 01 Oct 2011 20:03:10 -0400

Ok, a little while back ~~three months ago~~ I said I was going to write a post every Friday….. Well, as one of my sewing friends put it, some of the time life gets in the way of your sewing.

We went on vacation in Aug. I’d planned to get a post up about sewing on vinyl making boat cushions, but ran out of time before we left. Vacation is at our northern MN cabin, which is also our retirement home, and there is no good internet. The only thing we have there now is connected to the phone (land line) and slow dial up. So writing blogs, uploading photos etc just doesn’t happen. Any attempt takes forever and things time out before it completes. The county has a grant for broad band so in a couple years…..things should be wonderful! Our cell phones don’t work there either. But I did get a lot of sewing done. A few things for my Artfire shop but mostly clothes for the grandkids! Jake loves Thomas the Train and Cars, and I found both fabrics at Walmart on the trip. Emily is happy in most anything girlie. And Evan is too young (almost 6 months) to tell me what he wants.

Before August ended I flew to my daughters to help with the twins as she’d scheduled some jaw surgery. An old problem that now they catch and correct in little kids, but didn’t when she was a kid. She’s recovering fine since her surgery. I got to spend about a week there, and got a few photos of Jake and Emily in some of those new clothes I’d made. Hurricane Irene hit CT while I was there and we were without power for 20 hours. Long enough for food in frig to spoil.

I flew back to MI in time for my classes to start. I have two freshman chemistry lectures and two of the labs. It’s a new text book, so that’s requiring extra work preparing my notes to match the book. Then my husband had surgery. I had exams in my classes those days since someone had to cover them for me, while I was at the hospital. Now he’s home and doing well. So things have settled down a bit closer to ‘normal’, which for me is a little bit crazy anyway.

Now to upload some of those photos -of kids in their new clothes, to get back to writing about boat cushions, and to even finish the last of those boat cushions. But thought I’d at least put up a note about not dropping off the planet or some such.

One of my oven mitts and potholders is featured in a new Artfire collection. #widgetcont p{...

Thu, 28 Jul 2011 22:02:16 -0400

One of my oven mitts and potholders is featured in a new Artfire collection.

Warm Creams and Browns

Curated By: DesertWindDes…

ArtFire.com

Handmade Gifts

Photos Emily's Family Reunion and Matching Doll Dress

Sun, 24 Jul 2011 22:54:12 -0400

Back on July 4 I wrote a post about making the doll dress to match Emily’s Oliver+S Family Reunion Dress. By the end of that week the package was shipped off to my daughter, and we went out of town for my husband’s family reunion. My son-in-law posted some photos in the Family Reunion Flickr account for me while we were away. And I’m just getting to post some of them here.

Normally Emily keeps her doll without any clothes on her and sort of throws her around. But…there was a huge change after the matching dresses arrived. Emily didn’t want to tke her dress off. She wanted to sleep in it. And she dressed the doll, carried her around with her all day, and wouldn’t let anyone else take it from her. Of course, Grandma was thrilled about all this!!!

Emily’s dress fit her just fine, but the doll’s was a bit tight. Next time it should be about 1/2” bigger. Considering the problems I had making the doll pattern, I was pretty happy that it wasn’t worse than that! In the photo below she’s dressing her doll. And you can see the trim on the front of the dress in this one. I used Velcro on the doll’s dress because it was what was used on the dresses that came with the doll. And I’m not sure if Emily has learned how to do buttons yet.

The last photo shows the front of the doll’s dress. Emily was moving in this one, so it’s not as clear as the previous.

So the Family Reunion Dress was a big success as far as Emily is concerned. I already know what I want to make for her next. I added another cute dress pattern, the Junebug, (http://bit.ly/n5pxX3) to my pinterest today, but I want to make some OverMost (http://bit.ly/ploT6l) for Jake first. It’s his turn for somethng new.

Making Mitered Corners

Fri, 22 Jul 2011 09:17:17 -0400

The other day a friend asked me to make some white linen napkins for her. She wanted them 12” square. Linen can be sort of thick, and I was trying to figure how to finish off the edges. Serging and just turning that under wouldn’t look too good, since there really wasn’t a ‘wrong’ side to these. So I thought of having a 1/2” hem all around, and having it doubled so that the raw edges were well hidden. Well, that is going to be thick and what could I do to finish the corners nicely? That’s when I thought of mitering them. This is not the first time I’ve tried to do mitered corners, and everytime seems to take a long time in figuring out how to make it work. That was when I decided to document it here! Now the next time I can just pull this out and reread it, and maybe this will be useful for someone else too.

I started by adding an inch all the way around. So I cut out a 14” by 14” square. Then I pinned and pressed under 1/2” and 1” inch all around.

Now I had to figure out the corners. I started with some pieces of paper and then with some extra linen scraps to try and get this right before I did the real napkins.

Gee, looks like I either got too close or didn’t hold the camera steady. Some of these photos are fuzzy. I don’t notice that when I look at them on the camera, and I don’t download them until I’ve finished whatever I’m sewing. Here all of this was done when we were in MN at my studio there, and I didn’t download any of them until last night back here in Detroit. These are the only photos I have. Hope you can still see what I’m trying to show you.

Here’s what I came up with. With right sides together fold the corner on a diagonal. Make sure that you have the exact corner by matching up the cut edges of the napkin.

Pin the 1” hem going all the way to the end at the diagonal.

Where that last pin is, where the hem meets the diagonal, draw a line perpendicular to the diagonal

I used a fabric marking pen that is air erasable.

Now sew from the diagonal to the 1/2” fold line only, not all the way to the edge. Trim the seam and also trim the fabric from the 1/2” fold to the end.

Turn right side out using a point turner in the corner. You can see that there is a diagonal seam from 1/2” to 1” and the rest from the edge to the 1/2” fold is not sewn.

Now you can easily turn in the rest of the hem, from the edge to the 1/2” fold and the extra fabric that would have bunched up in that corner has all been trimmed away. Pin the corners and the rest of the seam. Then sew and press the final napkin.

Looks like I forgot to take a photo of the finished product. But I think you can see how it’s going to work from the photos above.

What do you think? Would this work for you? Please let me know if this is helpful!

Matching Dress for Emily's doll

Mon, 04 Jul 2011 14:14:57 -0400

At the end of May we were all at my mother’s for her 97th birthday. My daughter asked me if the next time I make a dress for Emily, would I also make a matching one for her doll. While I was there I took measurements of the baby doll’s outfits and added it to my ‘to do’ list. Then early in June I saw a post on Twitter that sent me to instructables http://bit.ly/lp5iyE where they had instructions for converting a miss pattern into one for a Barbie-type doll. That gave me the idea of taking one of Emily’s toddler pattern and converting it to one for her baby doll. So I downloaded the Google SketchUp (free) program so I’d be all set to go the next time I made an outfit for Emily.

Well, as you know from reading this blog several other things came up between earlu June and now. In June I took part in the sew-along at Above All Fabric making the Oliver + S Family Reunion dress http://bit.ly/iJEaPi for Emily. And it occurred to me there was the dress pattern that I could convert to a doll size. But before I could get to that I made the dresses for her cousin, Maddy and her doll, that I’ve described here before and also a shirt for Emily’s twin brother, Jake.

So a few days ago I tackled the conversion of the Oliver + S size 2T pattern to a doll pattern. I first tried just following the directions given in the instructables post. I carefully took photos of the pattern pieces looking straight down on them and pulled them into SketchUp. I’d never used Google SketchUp before and it soon became obvious that I had no idea what I was doing. There’s a great deal of help for SketchUp, including a number of YouTube videos. I discovered that it works best with 3D objects (like a barn!) that you photograph at a 45 degree angle. That makes it easy to setup your 3D axes. So I retook all my photos with the pattern piece as much at a 45 degree angle as I could do. This didn’t work too badly for the front of the dress which was on a fold since I could use the fold as one of my axes.

The absolute hardest part was trying to get the pieces the size I wanted. I’d tell SketchUp that it should be 7”. It would be on the screen but when I printed, it would either fill the page, or scale to some factor, that didn’t seem to be under my control. Very frustrating!! I somehow managed, after several calculations to get the dress front pattern piece printed that was just about 7”. At that point I decided to try a different approach. The back of the 2T dress pattern wasn’t that much different than the front. The neck was a bit higher and there was a back facing attached. I could copy the 7” front dress piece, add a bit at the neck and the back facing, and make it into a back piece. Much easier!!! I made several copies of the front and adapted one to be a ‘back’. I wonder if the last step in the Instructables description using Make the Cut with Pixel Trace (which was not a free program) is how they got the sizes for the pattern pieces that they wanted?

Next I tried to do the sleeve pattern. After much work, it was a disaster. I’d tried taking the photo with the corner to the front, so I sort of had a 45 degree angle, but then I couldn’t get the perspectives set correctly in SketchUp so that the two underarm seams came out the same length. That was when I gave up and decided there had to be an easier way. Since I had a photo of the sleeve pattern piece, I just tried different printing sizes to get what was close to the size I needed.

I decided the neck facings and hem facing I could just figure out from the doll dress as I was going, without making pattern pieces. So finally here’s the photo of the front and back pattern pieces on the fabric. The length of the dress from shoulder to hem is about 7 “. I added 1/4” seams around everything. Fortunately when I was copying the pattern in SketchUp, I copied lines for the pin tucks.

I’d added 3/4” to the back for the facing, which at the time I thought was enough. It wasn’t until I was in the middle of putting the doll dress together, that I realized it should have been more. So I just made the back facing/closure a bit different from the 2T dress.

Now that I’ve finished the doll dress, I wonder why I ever picked something so complicated! Especially for the first attempt, when I really don’t know if it’s going to fit the doll or not. Have you ever tried to make pin tucks that were less then 1/4” wide? Fortunately the green and white on the seersucker fabric helped with that! I marked both sides of my pattern with a red pen and then used an air erasable marking pen to mark the fabric. Because the tucks were so close together, I’d pin and sew one before trying to pin the next.

One trick for sewing something so small and not having the fabric go below the needle plate is to hold the needle and bobbin threads. Put the end of the seam under the presser foot, and put the presser foot down. Stick the needle in the fabric. Grab the bobbin and needle threads and hold behind the needle, but don’t pull them -yet. Take a stitch or two and hold those threads tight. It will keep the fabric from going under the needle plate and making a mess. On larger seams this doesn’t happen, but with anything really tiny, it can, and that causes a big mess.

So here is the finished front with pin tucks.

They are not perfect. There’s a bit of curve to the one on the left. Sewing that tiny is hard, plus going through the embroidery on the fabric didn’t help. And I wasn’t about to rip it out! I sewed the back pin tucks in the same manner.

For the back facing I used a little piece of interfacing that was the same 3/4” I’d made the facing. I set my serger for 3-thread narrow overlock and finished the back edge. For the doll dress the closure was going to be Velcro and not buttons, since this is what the purchased doll dresses used. So I only folded the 3/4” in once.

Next came the tab on the front of the dress. I had copied the size of the tab when I copied the front dress pattern, so I used that as my guide to make a tab and added 1/4” seams to it. I ran a seam 1/4” from the edge to use as stay stitching, to tell me where to turn it under and so that I could clip the curve. For Emily’s dress I’d put some green fabric underneath, and so wanted to match her dress as much as possible. I cut a scrap of green and ironed it on with Stitch Witchery prior to sewing it. The photo isn’t real clear, but with my fingers there you can get an idea of what size things are.

I trimmed the green leaving about 3/8” around the tab, and then stay stitched about half way on that, so I could cut around the curve. I was going to again press it with Stitch Witchery. Below is with it all pinned ready to iron onto the front of the dress.

After sewing onto the dress I removed any stitches that were showing from the stay stitching. It’s a little large, if you compare it to Emily’s dress, but I wasn’t going to fiddle with it at this point. You can see that the tab is up higher but the bottom was lined up with the mark on the pattern. I just trimmed off the extra when I did the neck facing.

I sewed about half of the shoulder seam right sides together and the half closer to the neck wrong sides together, as per pattern instructions. Then I made patterns for the front and back neck facing using the neck of the dress as my model. I estimated that an inch wide was about what was needed and cut them from small scraps of fabric - since my able assistant was napping on the rest of the fabric, and I didn’t want to disturb her.

Since I’d not totally decided how the back was going to be done because the facing wasn’t as wide as it should have been, I cut the back neck facings longer than needed. I had to clip curves on the neck and trim off some of the tab so it wouldn’t be too thick where it was turned. Here it is all pinned and ready to sew.

Putting the sleeves in was difficult because everything was so small. Years ago when I made doll clothes for myself, my fingers were lots smaller too! I gathered the sleeve at 1/4” and sewed it into the dress. I decided I was not going to try and put that seam into the serger for fear of cutting the fabric where I didn’t want it cut. I did the side seams on the regular machine too, and wasn’t going to serge them, for the same reason, but they were raveling so badly, that I figured I had to serge them. Below is the dress with sleeves in and side seams done.

On Emily’s dress I’d used green to match the trim on the tab for the bottom facing. So I used the bottom of the doll dress to make a pattern for the hem facing.

To finish off the back opening I serged the edge of the back neck facing and turned it to the inside and sewed it down. Then I cut a piece of Velcro in half and attached it to the back opening. Emily’s other doll dresses had Velcro in them. In the photo below you can also see the green hem facing.

I debated trying to do anything about buttons on the front tab. I did have some tiny ones, but they were white. So decided to not put any buttons on the tab.

To get an idea of the size I took a photo of the finished doll dress next to a 12” ruler.

And also one next to Emiy’s dress.

Now they are all ready to be sent off to Emily. If today hadn’t been the 4th of July, I’d have shipped them today. So first thing tomorrow it’s off to UPS to send them out to her.

I can’t wait to see Emily and her doll in their new dresses!!!

Matching Dresses for Maddy and her Doll

Wed, 29 Jun 2011 13:32:00 -0400

Last Friday I said I was going to do a post about Emily’s Oliver + S Family Reunion dress, which I posted on Monday, and then one about Maddy and her doll’s dresses. That’s the subject of this post. The patterns that I used were Kwik Sew 3767(http://bit.ly/jjISuQ) for Maddy and 3771 (http://bit.ly/ltUjFh) for her doll. The doll pattern has several options and there are other Kwik Sew patterns for girls to match the doll options.

The pattern had sizes 4 through 8, and Maddy currently wears size 7, so I traced the pattern pieces for the top and folded and pinned the ones for the skirt for a size 7.

That way I can use the pattern later on for the larger size. The top photo is traced version of the back of the bodice and the lower photo is the folded over pattern for one of the skirt sections.

I decided to cut both the girl’s and doll’s patterns at the same time, since there were 3 different fabrics involved. And since the doll pattern was in only one size, I cut it directly without tracing any of the pieces. A lot of the small pieces for the doll dress could be fit in spaces left by the girl’s pattern. Here’s the red floral that would be the middle layer of the skirt. The 2 large pattern pieces are for Maddy’s dress and the smaller one on top for the doll. Here they all had to be on fold.

I made Maddy’s dress first and then worked on the doll dress. Here’s Maddy’s finished dress.

For the doll dress the seams were all 1/4”. Since the fabric tended to ravel I adjusted my serger for a 3-thread narrow overlock that was 1/4” wide. Each of the skirt pieces had to be gathered. I used a long stitch and loose tension on my regular sewing machine to create a gathering thread. Then I match the center front and any notches on the pattern and pin those together before pulling the gathering thread. Especially when something needs to be gathered tightly, I will pull it gently from each end and only gather to the middle, rather than trying to pull it all to the other side. This method has worked well for me so as not to break the thread I’m pulling.

The photo below shows the center front and ends pinned prior to gathering the red floral to match the bottom of the blue.

The photo below shows the same red gathered to the blue after it’s been pinned.

I typically use a lot of pins to try and hold the gathers in place and to have them spaced out across the distance. I then sewed this on my machine, but because it was such a small seam and you can see it raveleing in the photo above, I then carefully re-did that seam on the serger. Moving slowly and making sure to keep the extra fabric out of the way. I didn’t want to trim any fabric, just overlock it to stop the raveling. In the photo above you can see the sergered seam where the bottom layer is sewn to the red floral.

So here’s the skirt so far. Now for the top. The pattern said to use purchased bias tape for the neck and armhole facing. I didn’t want to do this as it would not match Maddy’s dress where the bias facings had been cut from the blue fabric. So I made my own bias facing. I measured purchased bias tape so I’d know how wide to cut it, pulled out the blue fabric where I’d already cut the bias for Maddy’s dress, and cut what I needed.

Then carefully ironed the bias pieces so that I could attach them similar to purchased bias tape.

Because I knew there was no way that my bias tape would be as perfect as the purchased, with one side slightly smaller than the other, I sewed the tape to the inside of the doll dress neck, and sewed it down.

Then I turned it to the right side and sewed it again. Photo below shows the completed neck facing, but it’s fuzzy.

For the side seams on the bodice, I sewed them directly on the serger. The long tail of thread that was left, I pulled back into the seam using a bodkin rather than putting an fray check on it. I don’t care for the various fray checks as I feel it makes the end of the seam stiff.

Here’s the finished seam. You can see how the threads have been pulled back from the right side into the seam.

With the top completed it was time to sew it to the skirt and to gather up the blue floral to match the bodice. Next came the velcro in the back of the dress, and the doll dress was done!

Here it is laying across the pattern instructions. So the final piece of all of this is how well did Maddy like it all? I think you can tell from the photo below.

Emily's Oliver + S Family Reunion dress

Mon, 27 Jun 2011 14:52:50 -0400

The Oliver + S Family Reunion dress sew-along started on June 13. Here’s the link to the Above All Fabric blog about it http://bit.ly/iDAd5b I was all set to go with my fabric from my stash, and the pattern and buttons I’d gotten at Habermans. http://habermanfabrics.com/

I’d already traced the size of the pattern that I needed and cut 2” off the bottom to give the right length dress for Emily. So I pinned the pattern to the fabric with the help of my trusty assistant, who has to inspect each step of the way. Baby has the idea that the cutting table belongs to her.

One of the first steps was ironing on the interfacing.

I had no idea what a great purchase those little silicon finger covers would be. But they’ve saved me many burnt fingers. So the interfacing has been pressed on and here I’m folding the back facing over.

Next were the pintucks. I marked the right side of the fabric with yellow tracing paper, which shows up a bit in the photo, I think, but will wash out. I normally don’t like to mark the right side of the fabric, but couldn’t figure any other way to be able to see these. Here’s the back.

After the pintucks the little tab for the front was put together. As the sew-along was progressing, you could check out other people’s photos on the Flicker site. I’d seem several that had added lace, rick rack or some sort of trim around the tab, and I decided to do something like that myself. I had some leftover green in my stash that perfectly matched the green embroidery on the fabric. So I added that around the tab.

I thought it looked great until I looked at some of the other photos in the Flicker group and realized I’d put it on in the wrong spot.

Now why am I showing you that I made a mistake? I was reading in Problogger http://bit.ly/llivPa the other day how people don’t like it if you come across as perfect. They want to read a blog and see that you make mistakes just like they do. Hey, if we never made any sewing mistakes there would be no need for seam rippers. So I pulled off the tab and redid it. And here it is where it’s supposed to be.

As I mentioned last time because of all the other family things I was trying to get finished before Father’s Day weekend, I ended up getting behind with the sew-along, and didn’t catch up till the last day.

The shoulder seams and neck facing were different than any I’d ever done and required close watch of the instructions. Half of the shoulder seam was done ‘normally’ with right sides together, and the rest near the neck edge, was done with wrong sides together. I’ve always thought of a facing as being something inside that you didn’t see, but that wasn’t the case here. The neck facing was sewn to the wrong side of the neck and then turned over to be the neck edge on the right side.

Now that the neck facing is on it’s obvious why the tab had to not be at the top edge or a lot of it would have been hidden. Glad I saw that before I got too far!

Next came the sleeves. I noticed that my fabric was raveling a lot, you can probably see it in the photo above, so I decided to serge the seams. With sleeves I always run gathering threads between the front and back notches, gather the sleeve a bit and use a lot of pins to hold it in place. Then I run the seam on my regular sewing machine, pull out all the pins and check that it’s the way I want it to be before going to the serger. For this dress, since they were using 1/2” seams, I adjusted the serger to be a narrow 3-thread overlock. I run the serger slowly and keep moving the fabric out of the way so that I don’t catch a part of the dress or cut something that I don’t want to cut. The photo below is after the sleeve seam was serged.

The sew-along recommended using French seams for the side seams. Since my fabric wasn’t sheer and I’d already worked out the serger settings, I serged the side seams instead.

The hem facing was the next step. I was concerned about having enough of the green seer sucker left to make the doll dress that Emily’s Mommie had asked me to do, so I used the solid green that I’d used for the tab trim for the hem facing. Since Emily is short I decided not to add the 5 rows of stitching at the bottom. Next came button holes and buttons. The buttons looked a bit delicate and I didn’t want to break them so I sewed them on by hand, after making the button holes with the machine. And here’s the final dress.

Along with a close up of the top.

Now all I have to do is make the doll dress and something for Emily’s twin brother, Jake and I can ship the new outfits off to them. I’ll add a photo of Emily and her doll in their dresses when I get them.

Every Friday?

Fri, 24 Jun 2011 11:51:43 -0400

So I told myself that I would write a post for the blog every Friday. Well, as you notice there was nothing last Friday. Am I the only one who underestimates how long everything will take? Or do you do that too?

A week or so before I’d gone to Haberman’s http://habermanfabrics.com/ to get the Oliver +S Family Reunion Dress so I’d be ready to go when the Family Reunion Dress sewalong on The Above All Fabric blog http://www.aboveallfabric.com/blog/ began. Right there displayed in the pattern area was a dress pattern for a girl and her American Girl doll. When Maddy, our 8-year old granddaughter, had spent the weekend with us she’d indicated that she would like to have a matching outfit. The patterns were Kwik Sew 3767(http://bit.ly/jjISuQ) for Maddy and 3771 (http://bit.ly/ltUjFh) for her doll. Of course, I couldn’t resist! Now all of a sudden I had dresses to make for both granddaughters and a doll. Well, actually I’m going to make a doll dress for Emily’s baby doll to match her Family Reunion one too, but I’ve got to make my own pattern for that, so it’ll take awhile longer. Now my next problem was that Maddy would be here the Saturday of Father’s day weekend, and so I needed to finish the dress for her and her doll by then.

Fast forward to the end of the story. I got the dress for Maddy and her doll done by Saturday. I didn’t finish Emily’s dress until the day after the sew-along finished. I still haven’t started her doll dress. Oh, did I mention in the middle of all this I was cooking all the food for the family gathering on Father’s Day? And had to make a new tablecloth for the picnic table too? What a week. I spent Monday this week just catching up on housework stuff. And then my internet went flaky Tues and Wed. So much for trying to catch up on a blog.

What I’m going to do is to write a post about Emily’s dress and another about Maddy and her doll’s dresses. I think it’ll be less confusing that way. So here goes….. First will be Emily’s Oliver + S Family Reunion Dress that I did with the sew-along.

What I'll be doing for week June 13

Sat, 11 Jun 2011 16:07:10 -0400

Well, I’m finally starting to feel better after over a week with a bad sore throat. Finally ended up at doctors and on antibiotics. My best friend came down with strep and is on same meds. Likely we both caught it when we shared that mac and cheese Wed a week ago.

Last week I did manage to get the dress made for myself that I needed for award cermony. I learned years ago to alter a pattern using wax paper, then make a muslin and fit that on myself. Once I’m happy with the fit, then I cut the good fabric, and can throw together the real dress in short order. One friend said I should go through and describe that procedure, and I’ll add it to the ‘to do’ list. I’d need a lot of photos and didn’t take any as I rushed to get the dress done. Here’s photo of my dress.

It was Simplicity 2247 http://bit.ly/kZZEE7 I liked that it had an A, C and D cup pattern and so you didn’t have to do that sizing yourself. The fabric was something out of my stash from probably 10-12 years ago, most likely from Fanny Fabrics in Thunder Bay, ONT since my note said I had 3 meters. I lined the dress, but not the sleeves, since the fabric was a little sheer, and I didn’t a want see through dress. Oh, I’m wearing a sea glass necklace and earrings that were birthday present, but they came from Fish Princess Designs http://bit.ly/kT4eYd on Artfire.

So this week should be busy. I’ll be doing the Oliver + S Family Reunion Dress sew along with the All About Fabric blog http://bit.ly/jUcgyu Making dress for Emily. And when we were at my Mom’s Memorial Day weekend, my daughter asked if I could make some matching outfits for Emily and her doll. So that’s the other challenge this week is to make one for the baby doll that Emily is carrying in the photos below. Fortunately I saw this post in Craft Daily Newsletter http://bit.ly/kUsjqP earlier this week about changing full size patterns to doll clothes patterns. It was using a misses pattern and making one for Barbie, but I don’t see why it wouldn’t work for changing a toddler dress pattern to a baby doll one. And Sketchup software was free download from Goggle! So this will be a real adventure!!

And since the rest of the family will be together for Father’s Day here, I want to get a dress made for Maddy and her American Girl doll. I’m using Kwik Sew 3767 for Maddy and 3771 for the doll. Just washed the fabric so waiting for it to dry before I start on that. Need to finish the collar and buttons on the sweater I knitted for baby Evan too. Should be a fun week!

My nautical oven mitt and potholder are featured in new Artfire collection

Tue, 07 Jun 2011 21:00:01 -0400

This new collection appeared a couple days ago. I’ve been running behind all week not feeling well since my allergies kicked up big time, so I’m just getting to post this on the blog. Hope to be feeling better tomorrow and spend the day sewing!

Summer!

Curated By: DesertWindDes…

ArtFire.com

Vintage Fashion

Emily in her yellow eyelet dress

Tue, 07 Jun 2011 17:00:02 -0400

Back on May 12 and 15 I told you about making the yellow eyelet dress for my granddaughter, Emily. Over Memorial Day weekend we were all in VA for my Mom’s 97th birthday, and Emily wore her next dress to the birthday party. It turns out the Thomas the Train shirt I’d made for her twin brother, Jake, was too big, so I didn’t get to see him in it. At least he can always grow into it.

The only photo I have with the purse and it’s on her other arm so you really can’t see it that well. But she did like to carry her little boxes of raisins in it.

You can see the front of the dress better when she’s sitting next to her great grandmother who was opening her presents.

My birthday is the day before my Mom’s and when I was opening presents we got a photo of the back of Emily’s dress as she was leaning on my knee. The size 2T fit her perfectly. I just had to make the skirt 1” shorter than that pattern called for.

My next project for Emily will be the Oliver + S “Family Reunion Dress” that Sarah is going to be heading up starting June 13 on http://www.aboveallfabric.com/blog/

Back from Memorial Day weekend/Mom's birthday

Wed, 01 Jun 2011 09:41:00 -0400

Well I got back home last night and am slowly digging out of the things that piled up over the week I was gone. We had a nice 97th birthday with my Mom. Emily wore the yellow eyelet dress I’d made for her to the birthday party, but the Thomas the Train shirt is too big. I’d made a size 3T before I found out he was still in 2T. So we’ll get a photo later when he grows into it. Emily’s dress fit perfectly! I’ll post some photos of her in it on here later. I haven’t gotten that far in unpacking/digging out etc.

I hope everyone had a wonderful Memorial Day holiday.

Why I like selling on Artfire

Sun, 22 May 2011 20:48:51 -0400

Artfire is having a contest and they are going to randomly pick a winner from the blog posts that are made. They want to know the 5 things I like best about selling on Artfire. I think my number 1 reason is that I pay a flat fee per month, no matter how many items I list, or how many items I sell. There’s no additional fee for either of those. I had a shop at another online venue before where I had to pay a fee to list an item and it was only good for a few months, then if I wanted to list it again I had to pay again. And if someone bought my item then I had to pay a percentage on that. None of that happens at Artfire.

Another thing I like about Artfire is how helpful the staff and the other sellers are. There is a 45-day guide to help you set up your studio and get started on the right foot. There are help guides on photographing your items. Recently Artfire sponsored a social media boot camp. I learned more about Facebook fan page, learned about Twitter and got started tweeting, learned about writing a blog and got started on here. Artfire staff want all of us to succeed.

The other sellers are so friendly and genuinely concerned about each other. I’ve made several new friends in the forums. Again the 45-day guide was helpful in getting started here. With the other venue I mentioned I tried chatting in the forums but no one ever replied. At Artfire I can ask other people to critique my shop and help me make it better.

I have an Artfire Pro account, which is what I was describing above with the fixed monthly fee. It is also possible to have a Basic account where there is no fee what so ever. It’s free! But there are several advantages to the Pro account. With the Artfire Pro account I can customize the look of my shop. There are a number of tools I can use for promoting or making changes to my shop. I can make coupons that apply to certain items or categories of items. I can select the amount off for the coupon, and the date it expires. There is a ‘vacation mode’ which lets me decide whether to have my shop show all my items with a message that I’m away until a certain date, or to close the shop until that date. This is extremely handy when I go out of town to visit my grandchildren! I can keep the shop open, but not worry about being away and unable to ship an item as quickly as usual.

I can select to have my items automatically fed into the Goggle Merchant Center. So that they will be more readily found in searches. The majority of customers on Artfire come from the outside web, and not just from other Artfire sellers. And anyone can purchase an item from any Artfire store without having to join Artfire. Artfire provides a ‘Rapid Cart’ that I can drop into my website. I don’t have to figure out how to code or purchase some other method for selling from my website. There’s also an Artfire Kiosk that I can have on my Facebook Fan page to promote my items.

There is also a referral program going on now. if you click on this link, Become an ArtFire Pro with this link and get your 3rd month free! as it says you’ll get your 3rd month for free.

KCWC Day 5, 2011

Sun, 15 May 2011 11:00:02 -0400

At the beginning of this week I made the little yellow dress for my granddaughter, Emily. She is very much into purses, so I decided I’d make the purse that was in the pattern for her as well. I wanted the sides to be somewhat stiff, so I used fusable craft interfacing, which was stiffer than what you’d put into shirts. And since the eyelet fabric was so pretty, I decided to fuse the interfacing to the lining instead. I used a lighter-weight interfacing for the gusset so they purse could fold on itself.

The first step was to stay-stitch the gusset. Since the pattern has 5/8” seams I normally stay-stitch at 1/2”. Then when I cut up to the stay-stitching, there’s no chance of cutting too far. This photo shows the stay-stitched and cut gusset being pinned to the side of the purse.

Here’s the completly pinned piece.

Laying behind it is the interfaced lining gusset that has been stay-stitched but not yet cut. Once I got the purse sewn together, I realized that it was going to be awfully big for a 2-year old, so I trimmed 1” off the top of everything.

I decided that I wanted some buttons on the purse for decoration. So I stitched those on next.

Then came the handles. I’d used the lighter weigth interfacing in those as well. They had been sewn with a 3/8” seam. I sewed the end of one of them to make it easier to turn right side out using an unsharpened pencil to push. I basted them to the top of the purse using 1/2” seam so that it wouldn’t show when I did my final 5/8” seam, and I could just leave that basted seam there as well. You can see how the handle at the top of the photo has the end sewn.

Next the lining was put together in the same fashion as the purse, but with a few inches left open on the side where the gusset attached so that the purse could be turned right side out at the end. This photo shows the purse all pinned to the lining and ready to be sewn.

After doing this seam I trimmed it and then understitched the seam to the lining to help keep the eyelet fabric from moving into the inside of the purse. With the stiff interfacing it was a little hard to turn the purse right side out. You can see the purse coming out of the opening and the lining has to turn yet in this photo.

Next the open seam in the lining had to be sewn by hand.

And we have a finished purse that can stand up by itself. I hope Emily will like it!

KCWC Day 1, spring 2011

Thu, 12 May 2011 15:42:42 -0400

This week is Kids Clothing Week Challenge Spring 2011 sew along organized by Elsie Marley (see details http://www.elsiemarley.com/kids-clothes-week-spring-2011.html). The idea is that you spent at least 1 hour per day working on something for your kids, only in my case it’ll be for my grandkids. A couple of weeks ago I posted about the Thomas the Train shirt I’d made for Jake. So Mother’s Day I started making a dress for his twin sister, Emily. I’d seen this cute McCall’s pattern 6310 ( http://bit.ly/kb9ZCN) and a yellow eyelet fabric that looked so much like spring, that I thought would be perfect for dress A.

I’m going to make the purse too, as Emily loves to carry a purse, but I’ve only got as far as cutting out the purse. I actually started on the dress on Sunday, and finished it Monday, so I’m calling it a Day 1 item, even though it’s taken me most of the week to get the photos and get it out there. Obviously the dress took more than 1 hour to make.

It has a left side-zipper and the shoulder straps cover over in the back.

I’ve added the photos to the Elsie Marley group on Flickr as well.

Featured in Artfire Collection

Sat, 30 Apr 2011 13:34:13 -0400

One of my oven mitts and potholder sets was included in an Artfire collection for Mom for Mother’s day. Help her keep from burning her hands while cooking all your great meals!http://bit.ly/jBgu2m

My story made Friday Finish!

Fri, 29 Apr 2011 09:18:43 -0400

I’m very excited! The story I wrote about Jake’s Thomas the Train shirt made The Unfinished Sewing Project Party (blog) Friday Finish. Here’s the link: http://bit.ly/jLILlc

Putting a new zipper into a leather jacket

Wed, 27 Apr 2011 12:24:22 -0400

Recently I had to replace a 32” zipper in a leather jacket. This was a new experiecnce for me, so I thought I’d share what I learned. First of all ripping out the old zipper has to be done carefully so as not to rip the leather. And when you go to put the new zipper in you can’t use pins to hold it. Pins would punch holes in the leather, which is something you don’t want. I went searching online and found several helpful items. Use rubber cement to hold the pieces together. And then clamp it with office clips. Off to nearby Staples for supplies. First time I ever got sewing supplies at Staples!

Here’s a shot with the rubber cement on the zipper before I put the pieces together

I’d paste a little and clamp it down.

When one side as all done, it was time to move to the sewing machine.

You want to set your needle tension lighter than you normally use, and your stitch length longer. I used 3 mm when my normal length setting is 2.2 mm. Check your sewing machine manual for the setting for your machine. Use one of the needles designed for sewing leather, and you want to go very slowly with your sewing

I used my machine’s zipper foot and worked up to the clamp and removed it just prior to sewing that section. Here’s a photo with the jacket all done.

Hope this has been useful information for you!

New kitten. She’s 6 months old and been with me for a...

Wed, 20 Apr 2011 17:12:00 -0400

New kitten. She’s 6 months old and been with me for a week now.