Friday shop update, and blog update!

Hello there!  I've just added two new dresses to my shop, don't they look delicious?  Head on over there to check them out if you are in the mood for a bit of Friday retail therapy.

In other shop news I have also just completed and sent a custom order for three t-shirts with balloon holding elephant appliques.  I was very lucky with these as t-shirts are starting to disappear completely from retail stores in favour of long sleeved things.  Ridiculous really when you're in t-shirts probably 9 months of the year here!  I managed to fulfill the request for colour and sizes of shirts and they are on their way to New Jersey, USA.  It always amazes me where my little garments can end up in the world.

And lastly, in case you hadn't caught up with this news already, I thought I would mention that last month I wrote a tutorial for the Imagine Gnats blog on recycling a man's shirt to make a pair of small boys' shorts.

I'll be writing a few articles for Imagine Gnats through out this year so I'll keep you posted here on when they happen.

Happy weekending!

Makes 2013 :: looking forward to 2014

Hello 2014!

I really thought 2013 was going to be a year of change for me, and while it didn't really pan out that way I learned to accept things more and enjoy this moment in time in my life.  Particularly in the second half of the year I realised how lucky I am with my little family and our relatively trouble free life.  I ate better, I slept better, I felt happier, I embraced the every day more and worried less about the "should have, could have, would have".  I was offered a great job and then was un-offered it which was just crushing but it made me start to make some serious plans and find connections that were there just waiting for me all along.  The big changes I was looking for didn't happen but in the end I think I was happier for that.

That said, I hope again that there's going to be a lot of changes for me this year, I'm ready to shake off the full time stay at home mum label, I'm ready to use that teaching qualification I finished four years ago, I'm ready for more sewing and ready for having more fun with photography and I'm ready for a few changes to this blog for sure, nothing like a little shake up and refresh. A new look and a slight name change are brewing in my mind, but I will be tackling that all in good time (I've got my fourth party of guests for the holiday season arriving this afternoon...toilets need cleaning and beds need making!)

Due to a lack of access to my sewing room over the Christmas/New Years break I thought I'd start the year by looking back at some of my favourite makes for 2013 ::

I've never done a recap of a whole year of sewing and making before and I'm really pleased to see it all laid out like this.  A range of clothes for my boys (who says boys are hard to sew for!), skirts, tops and dresses for me, a spot of crochet, one cushion, one daycare blanket, one hat, one toy and some quilt blocks started this time last year that remain unprogressed 365 days later.  I started experimenting with knit fabrics (I'm still in the experimental phase there I think), did a good amount of upcycling/refashioning from found fabrics and op-shop garments and took part in some community sewing events such as Selfish Sewing Week and Kids Clothes Week (which is on again soon by the way, click here to find out more).  I also started making the clothing in my shop to a better standard, taking time to add trims and pockets and buttons that give the items a little more finished and polished look, and I've got plans to sew some new patterns to increase the range of things on offer there.  (I say every year that I must do more with my shop but it never happens, it remains a study in what happens when you put things for sale on the internet and then never promote them! And I'm happy with that right now.)

Here's hoping that 2014 is a happy year for you.

Now, lets get sewing!

Holiday fun :: the end of 2013

Summer holidays are on and we are all at home.  We've been alternating between relaxing together and preparing for the Christmas celebrations.  Interstate and overseas guests are joining us this year so it's going to be a full house of laughter, stories, conversations, music and eating up a storm.  I think this will be my last blog post for 2013, time is sparce for blogging.  I'll leave you with some holiday pictures from the last few weeks:

:: we've been playing and tidying up in the garden ::

:: I've been keeping the kids amused sewing them some new pillowcases.  We went fabric shopping together and found the Christmas fabric to be basically sold out so we went for Dr Seuss and dancing gnomes.  I call this photo "Thing One and Thing Two" ::

:: I also snuck in making a new green pillowcase for myself using some vintage sheet fabric scraps ::

:: and in between all this, and usually at nap and TV time, I've been sewing myself a new dress.  Another Washi dress from this beautiful navy linen, a recent op shop fabric find ::

:: I've finished a vintage sheet dress for the shop ::

:: and a book delivery in the mail has had me doing some dreaming and planning new sewing projects for 2014 ::

Thanks for reading along this year :: have a great Christmas and New Year's break and see you next year!  xx

1000 cranes Tsuru skirt

It's not often I see something on the internet and absolutely must make one for myself but...when I saw Rae's flying cranes skirt on the Made by Rae blog it immediately made it up to the top of my list of things to sew for myself.

The fabric I just fell in love with.  Swoon!  It's the gorgeous 1000 cranes design from the Tsuru range from Cloud9 Fabrics.  I jumped online to search a piece out and found it for sale locally from Funky Fabrix here in Brisbane.  Once that little delivery of one metre of fabric had arrived in my mailbox I picked up a few extra supplies from my local sewing store and set to work.

For my skirt I have gone for a fairly full style with a gathered elastic waist.  I used Anna Maria Horner's free pattern for the Flirting the Issue skirt (it's more instructions than a pattern per se).  I used the whole one metre of fabric from selvedge to selvedge and added a contrasting band of pale pink homespun cotton to the lower edge which added about 14cm to the length of my skirt so it sits around my knees (Rae's skirt is above the knee but I like a little more length personally).

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Here's a few details of the skirt construction:

The lining is a cotton lawn in royal blue. I was going to line it in navy but the cotton lawn didn't come in navy and in the end I realised that was lucky as it would have dulled the white print on the skirt too much.  I think maybe a pale pink lining would have been ideal but I kind of like the unexpected flash of bright blue underneath.  The lining is only as long as the dark blue cranes fabric so as not to affect the pink contrast band with blue show through.

I love a comfy elastic waistband. The waistband of this skirt is really wide (the wider the better for elastic waists in my opinion), but I have to admit that it's construction is fiddly.  You sew four casing channels around the top edge of the skirt and feed elastic into each of them - this is time consuming and hard on the fingers, the more fabric you have in the volume of the skirt the more difficult this task is.  I sewed the four channels and then gave up after pushing elastic through three of them.  I decided that was enough waist elastic for my needs anyway.  If I make a skirt this way again I am going to just put a single wide piece of elastic through the top like I did with my recent op-shop resize.

I attached the contrast band as the last step after constructing the rest of the skirt.  I made the band of pale pink by taking two strips of fabric about 20cms long and selvedge to selvedge wide (112cm).  I sewed these two strips together at the short sides (the selvedge edges) to create one big loop of fabric.  I finished one long edge with a zig-zag stitch to stop fraying and then ironed this edge over 1cm towards the wrong side.  I carefully pinned this folded edge of the pink fabric to the inside of the skirt so that it sat 1cm above the hemline stitching of the blue cranes fabric (the zig-zagged edge was facing the inside of the skirt).  I sewed the seam attaching the band to the lower skirt edge from the inside (see right hand side of the picture below).  Careful pinning here was the key to getting a nice straight finish on the outside.

Then I hemmed the pink fabric to my desired skirt length ( hem on the left hand side of the picture above).  On the outside of the skirt you see two hem lines on the blue which I think is a nice detail (see below) and the pink band looks like it comes down from behind the blue cranes and is not just tacked onto the lower edge of the skirt.

Such a good looking skirt and lovely to wear, it will be a favourite wardrobe piece this summer for sure.

Second hand re-size

What do you do when you find a really nice cotton skirt in the op-shop but it's a size too big?  

Well of course you attack it with your unpicker and your sewing machine to get the perfect fit.

I found this beautiful and light "Colorado" brand skirt in my local oppy and fell in love with the green floral print and the black border.  Despite it being a size 14 and despite it falling off me I bought it anyway.  It sat around for a few weeks while I considered what to do with it to make it fit.  It had a back zipper closure and a lining of white cotton, I could sense possibilities but couldn't quite work out a way forward.  I kept pinching in the sides and knowing that it would look really hack to just sew up the side seams a bit tighter which would have nasty flow on effects for bunchy lining and fabric volume at the waist.  I told myself: "Come on Caroline, you do so much sewing, you can do something smarter than that!"  Then I had a eureka moment and I picked out the zipper and sewed up the lining and the back seams to the waist and then sewed the lining to the skirt front where they met at the upper edge of the skirt.  Now I had a skirt with no closures, but still too big.

Noticing that the facing of the waistband was wide enough to accommodate a nice wide piece of elastic if I made it into a casing, I sewed a seam around the waist of the skirt where the facing met the inner lining, picked open a gap at the back seam and threaded in my elastic.  Adjust to fit, sew elastic ends together, poke back inside casing and slip stitch the opening closed and you have yourself a new skirt with a fit just perfect for you.

A great sense of satisfaction, I love a good save of something old into something new.

Cloud washi dress

Technically this post belongs to Selfish Sewing week, but technically I started sewing this dress before the week started and technically I am writing a blog post about it in the week after.  And, if you are a regular reader you will, technically, have seen a few shots of this dress already - but I thought I would share the pictures my man took of me wearing it on our regular Sunday walk up the hill from our place to the local church.

This little church built in 1867 is a top a hill in Mitchelton and you get a view right over our local area all the way across to the skyscrapers of Brisbane city.  It's the halfway point on our walk it's here we catch the very last rays of the afternoon sun and re-set for the week ahead. We stop and sit on the benches in the cemetery and the kids have a run around on the lawn, then we walk the through-way between the properties down the the street above ours and wander our way around and along back to our house.  Just us four together, nowhere else to be and nothing else to do but just enjoy the walk, its a lovely family ritual - of course made all the nicer wearing a new summer dress you've just sewn up for yourself.

I think that's it for dress sewing for now, the pattern papers are folded away and the left over fabric is in the stash cupboard.  Although, I've got some shorts that need shortening for my littlest boy and the bigger boy wants to make a softie so I won't be away from my machine for long.

Selfish sewing: Tulip Washi Dress

I am half minded to call this post "struggle with a self timer" as there was a lot of to-ing and fro-ing between the camera perched on the top of the boys' plastic garden slide and attempting to pose against my garden fence and get a decent shot with decent lighting...it was not easy.  Plus it was windy, that dress was blowing in all directions while waiting for the camera shutter to click!

I've called this dress my tulip dress, tiny little pink and yellow tulips and daisies pattern this fabric from Spotlight. I bought the last off the bolt and it was a bit less than I actually intended to buy, I think there was only 2.3m left and I really wanted 2.5m.  I thought I would do some pale pink facings to the exterior around the neckline but I managed to squeeze all the pattern pieces onto the fabric I had so I didn't bother with the contrasting facing.  I think in hind sight if I had had more time to spend on making this dress that I should have persisted with that idea.

This is my third Washi dress so I'm feeling quite confident with the pattern now.  The elastic shirring still makes me a bit nervous and I feel like its a miracle every time it works out, I should stop being so surprised shouldn't I?

Selfish sewing: Dandelion top (New Look 6705)

Here's my first post to fully show you the wrap up of the three garments I made during Selfish Sewing Week. The week was perfectly timed to give me that little push I needed to make some summer clothes for my own wardrobe.

This weekend I finished a new top in this lovely dandelion fabric.  The pattern is New Look 6705 - view E on the packet.  I have made one of this style with the rounded neckline before and I had always intended to do another, so here it is.  I even have quite a bit of fabric left over so I might manage to make something else from this material some time down the track.

I popped in this little bit of white trim around the front neckline.  This trim was the last piece of something that I got out of a box of old sewing items and notions that I bought many years ago now.  I've never seen anything like it in the shops - a cotton tape that is open at one side so I presume you could sandwich some fabric between it if you wanted, and a little loopy trim on the other side.  I just sewed it in between the front piece and the yoke - a little bit on a wing and a prayer because I couldn't fully see it as I was sewing the seam, so of course it has a certain amount of wonk factor.  The pain of trying to re-sew it in was above my perfection threshold so wonky it will stay.

Yay!  A new top to grab from my wardrobe to go with my much loved three quarter jeans.

Sewing for me, some progress

I've been squeezing in some time for sewing this week (just).  School holidays, a 7th birthday, head colds for two, chronic rhinitis for one - time for my own pursuits is certainly at a premium this week.  Here's a super quick update to show you what I've been up to for Selfish Sewing Week.

I've made two new Washi dresses for the summer.  Boy, it's been hot already this year and I'm well into dress wearing mode.

The first dress I made in this cute cloud fabric...

...and the second in a small pink and yellow flower print.

Today's contribution to selfish sewing has been a lunch time race to cut out a sleeveless top.  It's pretty windy today, I needed some weights to hold things in place so I just used what came to hand next to me down on the floor...

I've gone back to my New Look 6705 pattern - it's easy to fit, it's breezy and easy to wear, easy to iron, what's not to love?

Two dresses and a top would be a good result for the week, just a few days to go so I'll have to keep my head down in those precious spare moments!

Selfish sewing? Yes please!

I'm so glad to have found out about Selfish Sewing Week from Imagine Gnats and Made wtih Moxie.  Right now I'm hauling my summer dresses out of the wardrobe and either throwing away, re-modelling and making some new.  The only catch is that while in the northern hemisphere the kids are going back to the new school year in September, here in Brisbane the 23rd to 29th September is the first week of school holidays - eek!  Even though I'm ready and willing to sew after an extended break from the machine, will I be able to find the time?

I've been getting a head start of sorts this week by making myself a washi dress - loving this cloud fabric.  I'll be posting my progress in the Flickr group, maybe see you there!

Lemon Washi Dress

Finally, some photos of my Washi Dress that I finished about two weeks ago.  And where else would you photograph a lemon yellow dress but down under your lemon tree?

I made the standard version of this dress with the cut-out neckline and elastic shirring in the back.  It's oh so comfortable and flattering to wear, I'm sure this is not the only time I'll be making this dress, I'm keen to find a nice fabric and try a 3/4 sleeve version now the cooler months are here in Brisbane.

I made this dress out of a "vintage floral" print poplin, I've never been sure about poplin, its a bit stiff and crisp, and crinkles easily if you've been sitting on it, I kind of think of it as a fabric for little girls' clothes.  However I actually don't mind it in this particular project, gives the dress a little bit of body.  I guess it's a learning process to know what kinds of fabrics to use where, that's something I am constantly experimenting with.

Details of this dress are: size XL, bodice modifications were lowering the bust darts one inch, adding 5.5cm of length to the front bodice piece and a corresponding amount to the back piece.  You can read a little more about these alterations here.  Everything else was just to the pattern directions.

Any tips?  Well my only one would be that when adding the bias binding to the inside of the sleeves you should get your iron out and press, press, press those seams so everything sits flat to sew the binding down.  I did this by tiny hand stitches, you can see the little line of stitches in the photo below.  No pressing with my iron meant I got a very puckery finish in that area, not so nice.  In my opinion I've made the best here of a tricky sewing situation (if you've also made this pattern you'll understand what I mean here).

So there it is, my lemon Washi Dress, absolutely nothing sour about it at all.  

Washi dress progress

Slowly, slowly my Washi dress is coming together.  Sticking the pattern print out together and tracing pieces in various sizes sure have taken up time, but a lot of pre-sewing has also been going into this project - to get the most out of it in the end, but also to challenge myself along the way.  A proper fitted bodice and elastic shirring are two things totally new to me.

Making a muslin for a dress with a fitted bodice is a must.  I took my upper body measurements about a hundred times, but facts are facts, I'm wide across the shoulders and above average in the bust, and narrow in the waist and hips.  Still I couldn't quite believe that I was looking like an XL in this pattern.  In Australian sizes I am usually an M - eek!  I was stubborn (and vain!) and made a muslin in size L, nope, tight across the shoulders and the bodice didn't even come down below my bust.  I relented and made a size XL which was better but the bust darts were sitting well above my boobs and I still had waistline issues.  After having a late night Google study session on other people's experiences with making the Washi dress and a crash course in full bust adjustments I ended up simply dropping the apex of the bust darts an inch and adding 5.5cm to the length of the front and back bodice pieces - voila, perfect fit!

I had three metres of a light and crisp pale yellow cotton with small blue flowers printed on it ready to go.

I pinned and cut carefully.

Every day I am doing a few more steps in the process, just where time allows me to squeeze in a few minutes with my sewing machine.

I have waist pleats

and elastic shirring at the back (yay!).

I'm nearly there, today I conquered the neckline and the facings but have the sleeves, sides and hemming to go.  Hopefully I'll be able to wear it for a little photo shoot this coming weekend.

Boy sewing: pants and that hat

Pants making this year has been severely limited by fabric choices - sometimes I can't find colours or patterns I like, yellows look too mustardy, blues too dusky or prints and patterns too silly for my taste.  I waited what seemed like forever for some plain old navy blue pinwale corduroy to arrive in my local Spotlight store.  It didn't.  So when they recently had a % off sale I rang and confirmed that another store had it in and took a trip out of my neighbourhood to go and claim my piece.  I haven't actually made pants out of it yet though.  When I do they'll look just the same as these in style - and thank goodness for good old elephants.

A pair of elephant print corduroy pants for the little boy.  The same fabric I used for a vest for my oldest. I literally squeezed these pants out of the remaining fabric.  I had to add some black trim at the hem to make them long enough, just a cuff of black homespun cotton, worked well.  These are of course the Big Butt Baby Pants pattern by Made by Rae.  I've made heaps of these before, in almost every size the pattern comes in.  This is my "go to" pants pattern of the moment, it will be a sad day when there is no more butt pants making in this house.

Last of all, with left over scraps of t-shirt fabric and polar fleece I made this beanie.  It's supposed to be for the toddler, but he won't have it on his head for more than about 5 seconds.  Put it on, take it off, put it on, take it off.  It's a game that doesn't allow for any kind of artistic or in-focus photography, the hat is practically off before I get my finger to the shutter button on the camera.  I offered to make one for my older boy and he looked at me and said "Why do I need one of those?".  Well, he doesn't, he's right...but I'm not so sure he's got a beanie that will fit for our snow trip later this year so maybe he'll change his mind and go matchy-matchy with his little bro.  Now that will be a photo that's hard to snap!

So that's my last post on boy sewing for a while.  Thanks to Dana from Made and Rae from Made by Rae for hosting their Celebrate the Boy sewing week - it put such a firecracker of inspiration under me to sew for my lovely boys.

Boy sewing: vests

If you've been reading along then you will know that I've been sewing flip vests for my two boys.  I'm just so pleased to have such a pattern in my repertoire, a vest/body warmer is perfect for the Brisbane climate, sometimes you just need something a little extra to wear that's not a full on jumper or jacket. Plus I think they look super cute and can really up the fun factor in a boy's wardrobe.  In just over two weeks I've sewn this pattern five times - two practice runs and three usable garments.

I've already shown one I made for my toddler, and here's a second one in toddler size (2T-3T size on my 18 month old if you're interested).

This vest's made from fabrics I pulled out of my stash, some black gingham and cream fleece.  These fabrics are much thinner than the polar fleece and drill cotton I used in his other vest so it was actually easier to sew, especially topstitching across the bulk of the seams.

I also played around with the pattern a little to make a vest for my older boy.  The original pattern goes up to a USA size 5T, I'm not sure what that equates to in Australian sizes but it looked just slightly on the small side for him (he's six and a half).  In a nutshell I added a little length at the hem and a little width all over, which it possibly didn't really need, but most of all it needed expansion in the arm hole.  I added about 5cm of length to the chest area at the point of the middle of the arm hole, keeping the neck as per the original pattern.

I let him chose the fabric, I thought the gingham was actually going to be his pick, but he went for the elephant corduroy and also chose the grey trim.  It's got teal polar fleece lining and four black buttons down the front.

It's pretty generously sized so it should last a good while - its only March now and the weather will steadily cool through autumn and into winter and then all wearing of vests will be abandoned entirely when spring hits in September.  We have trips to Melbourne and New Zealand on the cards this year too, which are perfect destinations for a bit of vest wearing.