Alterations from the 70's

A few months back, my mother-in-law brought over some old baby clothes... old as in 1979 old. They had been my husbands and she had held on to them for all this time.

Among the clothes were three outfits that all look something like this:

Each one has one shirt and two coordinating bottoms ('cause back in the day, with cloth diapers, a baby was way more likely to need an outfit change on the lower half, or so I was told). I thought the outfits were really neat and I loved the retro colors, but when I put them on the baby, the whole shirt tucked in look really bugged me. So I thought, hey, I can sew! I can alter this outfit and make it look more modern.

(I did opt to only alter one of the three outfits so that the other two kept the full retro look.)

The first step I took was removing the buttons so that the shirt could be on the outside of the pants. Then, without the buttons, the pants needed elastic added to help them stay on.

The elastic isn't the prettiest on the inside, but it works just fine.

Here's the outfit with those two alterations. It would be okay now, but the shirt was still too short (since it was originally made to come only halfway down the belly and the pants would meet it in the middle).

So I took the hem out of the shirt and then zigzagged over the edges to keep them from unraveling. I did also have to reclose the side of the side at the hem.

Unfortunately, in zigzagging, I stretched the fabric some and now the bottom edge has a little bit of a wave to it, and in pulling out some of the original stitches, the old fabric didn't hold up well and now there are three small holes in the back.

I also added the elastic waistband to the coordinating pair of shorts.

I'm not sure if you can see the holes or not, but there they are. I'm wishing now that I had taken a before picture of the baby with the outfit on... the shirt was so short! It barely comes to his natural waist now and I let out a two inch hem.

Here's the same outfit from the front.

Overall, I was really pleased with my first alteration. Some mistakes were made, but the outfit is fully functional and, I think from a 2009 perspective, a better looking outfit for my helping it along.

Algebra, Bears, and Dress Up Skirts

I have been wanting to practice more clothing sewing, but I hate that everything I make still looks homemade, and not in the cute, I could have paid top dollar for this at a craft booth way. I do understand, though, that the only way to get better is to practice. So I decided to start making skirts for my daughter's dress up box.

I recently ran across this tutorial on gathered skirts over at Ikat Bag and I decided that this might actually be a simple enough process for me to make my way through. I was particularly pleased that she used algebra. She called the waist measurement A and the length B and the whole thing made a lot of sense to me.

In my head.

In reality, I made these three skirts for the same little girl:

Yeah, it's like the three bears were doing the sewing. The green plaid is too big, the white one with flowers is too little, and the pink one is just right (mostly).

The green plaid skirt, the one that is way too big, was the one I made using the magical formula from the website, which for some reason or another didn't work for me. Happily, though, I am making these for a dress-up trunk and wanted various sizes and lengths that would work for little girls in a three year old to seven year old range, so the green plaid skirt is still a keeper.

The floral skirt is actually a pillowcase.

I though that since my goal was a rectangular tube that I would then put a waistband on, a pillow case would work well. It actually would have been the perfect size, but I second guessed myself while my model was asleep and brought the waist in a little too much. This one actually does fit, it's just a little snug and for a growing girl, snug won't last long.

But for now, it's cute.

The pink skirt was almost perfect. I was thinking I wanted it a little longer for a dress up skirt, but she likes it, and that's all I really cared about anyway. It's a little lose, but that makes it easier for putting on over clothes while dressing up anyway.

After making those three skirts, I finally found my own magic numbers (which turned out to be more like A + (2/3)A and less of a 2A+1, but whatever) and made this purple skirt:

It has the waist the size of the pink skirt with the length of the floral, so really, this is the "just right" skirt I was looking for... it just took me three tries to get there.

Correction: Four tries. I think maybe this inability to count might factor in with my sewing troubles.

An Apron For Peter

A while back, I made a bunch of dish towel aprons. The directions can still be found at:

http://jas.familyfun.go.com/arts-and-crafts?page=CraftDisplay&craftid=11092

This one is for my friend Kara's son and so it had to be less girly than the other aprons I had made. Since the stock photo on the directions site is of a little boy in a red dish towel and he looked very not girly, I went with the same idea and chose a red dish towel of my own.

I sewed the corners (like the directions said) to put the apron strings through and since Peter is still a little guy, I went ahead and added three pockets because the pockets come out of the overall length of the apron.

Here's the finished product (with a spatula to kind of show where the pockets are, since they are hard to see in the photo):


Once I get the apron to Kara, I'm sure she will oblige and take a picture of Peter wearing the apron for me to add here at the end.

A First Try at Quilting

After making four different baby blankets all the same way... one side a single piece of fabric, the other side a collection of squares sewn together in a way that looks like a quilt, but cannot actually be called a quilt, I decided it was time to experiment with actually quilting a blanket.

I have never taken a class on quilting. I was supposed to do that this summer, actually. With the new baby, that seems unlikely, but I'm sure I'll get around to it eventually. So really, all I know about quilting is this: a blanket becomes a quilt when three pieces of fabric are sewn together with the top stitching. Or something like that. I may be wrong about that definition, actually, but it is with that definition that I proceeded.

I have no idea how real quilters put the middle piece of fabric in their quilts. I wanted to do the whole sew the back and front to each other right sides together and then turn inside out like I did with all of my other blankets ('cause it keeps me from having to figure out how to finish the edges), but I couldn't make a third piece of fabric work with that. So I wound up sewing the middle piece to the top of the quilt, wrong sides together to keep the fabric in place, and then sewing the back on to the double pieced front wrong sides together and then turning the whole thing inside out.

I chose to do the top stitching in concentric squares because someone told me that was pretty easy... you just use the foot to keep the lines the right amount apart.

I'm doing each set of four pieces of fabric with their own squares. The quilt itself is 6x8 little squares, so there will be a total of 3x4, or 12 sets of quilted bigger squares, if that makes sense. I completed the piecing together of the blanket and 2 of the 12 top stitching parts tonight. Hopefully in the next few days, I'll finish the other 10 and then I'll have my finished quilt.

Here's a view from the back, which really just illustrates how much nicer the quilt would look if I would bother to put some sort of binding on the edge, but I think tackling one new technique at a time works best.

A Blanket for Baby

I just finished my latest project: a blanket for the new baby. Ironically, I actually started another blanket before Christmas and still haven't finished it. I guess as long as it's done by mid May, I'll be fine.

For this blanket, I chose the orange because it's the color that I have come to associate with this baby and I chose the blue because I liked the way it complemented it with the stripes and the jungle animals. I was originally going to put blue bias tape around the edges, but in the end, I liked how it looked as is, so even though the edges don't have a fully finished look, I'm happy with it. The back is a solid piece of the orange fabric.

New Pillows

I recently redid the pillows in my sunroom. It felt really good to be able to make these... pillows are strangely expensive and can really change the flavor of the room. Previously, I had a set that were more quilt-looking and gave the room a straight-up country feel. My house, with all of the exposed wood, already tends towards that home-grown country style and I really don't like it (I mean, I love my house, I don't like that country style). I do, however, want the decor to go with the house (so no ultra modern black and white, for example), so I aim for more a mission, Frank Llyod Wright style, or a somewhat French country look.

For the fabrics, I had to work with the sage green on the chair in the sunroom and the cream on the walls. I wanted to use toille because I thought it gave that French country look and I just like it. I chose to use a maroonish purple as the accent color.

This is my comfy green chair -- the one that in about three months I will be sitting in a lot, nursing the new baby. The chair is a little too deep, so I have a pillow for added support. I used the cream toille and a solid cream (on the back) to make a pillow case for a standard bed pillow. I chose to make a pillow case that would come off so that any baby spit-up could easily be washed off.

These are the futon pillows. I used a cream toille, a maroon toille, a stripe, a floral and then a solid maroonish purple for each of these. The solid green pillows that you can kind of see behind these are store bought and had previously gone with the quilted country pillows, but were solid and neutral enough to stick around.


This is the futon as a whole. I really like how the new pillows look with the old ones and with the existing futon cover and wall art.

For contrast, you can see the old pillows here.

An Apron for Suzanne

I was really happy with the way this apron came out... in the end. See, it's the one on the right of the pattern book:

Well, on me, those scallops at the bottom look like huge arrows pointing to hips and saying "look at me!!!" On Suzanne's slender frame, though, they just looked like scallops. I also didn't like the top and modified it a bit, to good effect, I think. The apron is fully reversible with each fabric being used in the opposite way on the other side. Overall, a success!