Special Dresses

Here are Thing 1 and Thing 2, in new dresses, getting ready for their baptism.  I know, you are supposed to do this when they are babies, but I only recently found a church that I actually like.

About a month before the big day, Grandma asked if she could either buy new dresses for them or buy me fabric to make them. Yes! And I immediately knew what fabric I wanted: ruffle fabric! Everyone loves ruffle fabric, right?

I have wanted to sew with this fabric for about two years now, ever since I saw Big Dill's Coastal Curtsy Skirt tutorial, but it's pretty pricey so I waited until I was spending someone else's money (this is the advantage of having clients and Grandmas!). I still want to sew this skirt for myself, but I have about 20 other projects I want to sew first. Ruffle fabric is a stretch fabric with layers of ruffles. I ordered this fabric from RuffleFabric.com, but you can find it on Etsy and Fabric.com and I'm sure other places as well.

The girls had fun picking out what they wanted. I created a pinterest board for them and we pinned all the fabrics and trims that appealed to them.  I made some rules, like, "If you get that lace fabric, you will never be able to wear it to school." and, "You have to pick one trim, not all four." Belly choose the light pink fabric and a black/pink lace ribbon for a belt, and Mooper picked the tie-dye rosettes and ruffles.

The girls then picked out their fabric dresses from their closet and told me what they liked about them.  I made a pattern from the bodice of these dresses and then used Big Dill's very clear directions to make the dress skirts. This skirt is super simple: ONE SEAM. For Belly's skirt, I laid out the fabric so that the ruffles were vertical in front and horizontal in back, and I reversed this for Mooper's skirt. I lined the bodice with a matching knit fabric, but left the skirts unlined.

I love the change in direction in the back!

The one tricky thing I realized about sewing with ruffle fabric is that you have to be very careful when you are cutting to make sure you don't cut off a ruffle accidentally.  I did this in one place on Belly's bodice (you can see it in the picture of the front of her dress if you look near the neckline), but since you won't notice it on a galloping horse (or child), I decided to let it go.  Her favorite way to wear this dress now is with a yellow top, and you can't even see the mistake this way.

I love how the ruffles move!

The girls were very pleased with their dresses and they LOVED getting their heads all wet in church. The day afer the event, I caught them playing baptism over and over again in the bath. One would baptize the other, and the one who was just baptized would yell out, "Now I get to be Pastor Julie!"

More Birthday Twirls

In my last post I mentioned that the non-birthday girl always gets a skirt from the leftovers of the birthday girl's dress.  Mooper wanted to play around while I made help make her skirt this year, so I needed something quick and simple.  I went to my go-to circle skirt tutorial from Dana Made It.  This skirt is fast to make because there's no casing for the elastic - you simply sew the elastic straight onto the skirt.

The only time consuming part of this tutorial is the hem.  Even with a teeny-tiny skirt for a 3-year-old, the hem on a circle skirt can take some time, and I knew Moops wouldn't have the patience to wait.

So I decided to line the skirt, attaching the lining at the hem first.

I cut the lining out just as I did the main fabric and then laid them right sides together and pinned at the hem:

I sewed around the hem  with a 3/8" seam allowance and then trimmed that back to about 1/8" while Moopser did some of her own work.

Next you need to turn the skirt right side out and press:

Then baste the layers together at the waistband:

And finish the skirt as per Dana's instructions in her tutorial.

See the nice crisp hem with no measuring, handstitching, double turns or rolled hems??

The skirt was ready in less than an hour and then Moopsy got her turn in front of the camera!

Birthday Twirls

If you've been following this blog for a while you know that I do very little sewing for my own girls.  They have tons of clothes (handmedowns and grandma gifts) so they don't really need anything, and I prefer to build up my own wardrobe during my personal sewing time.  But I do make a birthday dress for each of them and the non-birthday girl gets a skirt from the leftover fabric.

Belly's birthday is today but I had to get her dress ready for the family birthday party that took place over the weekend.  Belly has a light yellow eyelet dress that was a hand-me-down from someone.  She decided she wanted a pink version of the dress for her birthday this year.  The original dress has princess seams, empire waist, ribbon sash and full gathered skirt. 

Inspiration dress

In drafting the pattern using the pin through method, I skipped the princess seams since their only role was to hold the ribbon sash and Belly didn't want to have to tie anything.  I also decided to make the skirt a circle skirt because my girls are currently in love with twirling.  And there's nothing like twirling in a circle skirt, right?

We couldn't find any suitable pink eyelet fabric, so Belly helped me dye the fabric early last week.  I used RIT fuchsia dye because I hadn't gotten around to ordering fiber reactive dye in time.  She had a lot of fun watching the fabric turn from white to pink.

Sorry for the blurriness - I took the photo while it was still steaming

From this point onwards I wanted to use what was in my stash which led to a bit of a hodge podge construction process.  We decided to line the dress in dark gray cotton lawn except that I didn't have enough of the dark gray so we used light gray for the skirt lining.  I wanted to add piping at the neck, arms, and waist, but I didn't have enough 1/8" cording so I used 1/4" cording for the waist.  Belly had chosen decorative purple flower buttons but I misplaced those in my sewing room (ack!) but she settled for these slightly different purple flower buttons.  And, Watch out! Here she comes!

Check out the twirl!

I did a variety of rolled hems for the skirt: a serged rolled hem on the lining (since it was short enough already) and a regular rolled hem on the eyelet.  It was a little tough sewing the thin hem on the embroidered bits, but no one will notice the bumps on this.  Cora wanted to help with this but she got fed up about half-way through the first pass on the hem ("This is hard, Mama." Sigh.)!

I also made fancy cupcakes for the party and Cora chose popstar microphone cupcakes from the crazy cupcake book:

And today my big girl is 6! 

A Few Finished Skirts

I finished up a few client skirts last week that Carol started for me before the holidays.  My process with Carol has been that I draft the pattern, she cuts the fabric and bastes the skirt together, then I do the fitting and finish it off.  So far this has worked well and it allows me to get skirts out the door a bit faster.

I think Carol did a stellar job using the fabric print on these first two skirts.

This is Kendra's straightforward yoked a-line skirt and the fabric is a stretch poplin I bought from Fabric.com ages ago.  Don't you love the colors??!  Because the yoke is curved, we decided not to try to match the print there.  My instructions to Carol were something like, "Be thoughtful about how the print comes together at the yoke line."  Yep, that's me, super helpful.  And I love what Carol did!

This second skirt is Lisa H's gored a-line using some kind of stretch drapey twill I bought from GorgeousFabrics.com.  Because the skirt has six panels, we knew we couldn't match up the print across the seam lines or we'd run out of fabric (I had three yards, but it was only 42" wide and the skirt is long).  Carol and I took a look at the fabric together to figure out how best to use the print, and Carol came up with the diagonal idea.  When she went to cut it out, she didn't have enough fabric to continue doing this across that back, so genius struck and she reversed the direction for one panel.  Nice, huh??!

Front

Back

This last one took me a while to figure out how to draft.  Lara wanted a pencil skirt with a front pleat, but I didn't want to do panels because the wool had a somewhat looser weave, and I was worried about it getting all stretched out of shape.  I spent a good hour or so reading through the Adele P Margolis book, Make Your Own Dress Patterns, and finally came up with the ideas of inserting a side pleat that ran from the top of the skirt to the bottom, that is sewn shut until about 7 inches up from the hem.  The pattern piece looks kinda crazy:

with pleat un-pleated (disregard length difference between two halves)

with pleat pleated

The lovey wool fabric is from a haul I bought from a woman selling off her stash (thank you, Craigslist!).  I've had this lovely button (from the Eonomy Shop) in my stash for a couple of years now and I'm glad it finally found it's place.  I knew there was a reason I didn't use it earlier!

Finally, I'm happy to report that Mooper eventually decided that she likes her birthday dress (she wore it three days in a row until I insisted that it needed a wash). 

 

 

And check out the pink cowboy boots that Grandmother gave her!  Yee-haw!!

The Rejected Birthday Dress

Most of my sewing is done to fill the wardrobes of my clients and myself.  I have two lovely daughters who barely get a stitch out of me and I have even been known to put needle, thread, and fabric into the hands of the older one (now 5) to get her to let me sew (for myself or a client) for "just a few more minutes . . ."  In my defense, they don't really need clothes from me.  Most of my friends had children years earlier than my husband and me so we have truckloads of hand-me-downs.  And my fantastic MIL had three boys so she and her sister love to shop for little girls.  But each daughter gets a handmade dress and homemade cupcakes for her birthday. 

Part of this tradition is having the birthday girl flip through books to find the dress and cupcakes that she wants.  When I first started sewing, my brother's (now ex-) girlfriend gave me the book Little Girls, Big Style by Mary Abreu, which has some cute, super easy-to-sew styles, and I also have a binder full of patterns and tutorials - quite a collection, considering how infrequently I sew clothes for girls! 

The cupcakes come from a book that my MIL gave me, What's New Cupcake? by Karen Tack and Alan Richardson.  These cupcakes look super complicated but are really quite simple to make using easily found ingredients (Michael's and local grocery store).  Since I am not even remotely talented as a baker, that's saying a lot.  And when I saw that the Meijer's brand white cake mix was on sale for $1.05, I didn't even make the cake from scratch this year.  It made me so happy to take that task off my list that I just might do it again (more time for sewing!)

The birthday girl this time around was Mooper, my baby, who turned 3 at the end of December.  She's had the fabric picked out for months, a discontinued Michael Miller cowgirl print that I bought from a neighbor who used to have an Etsy shop when her kids were young (the fabric for Belly's last birthday dress came from the same source).  Choosing the style was a bit more difficult.  This was our first conversation about it in early December:

Me: Mooper, we need to pick out your birthday dress soon so that I can start working on it.
Mooper: I want a cowgirl dress.
Me: Yes, that's the fabric we'll use, but we have to pick out the shape.
Mooper: I want a round dress.
Me: A round dress?
Mooper: Yes, then it will be an address.

I had her look at the book and binder, but she really didn't get the idea of her fabric become one of the dresses that was made out of a different fabric.  In the end, I went with the dress she seemed to like best.  She picked out the contrast fabric and here's what I sewed up:

Mooper's initial response was humorously lackluster:  "Well, it's in-ter-esting, Mama."  Huh???  She put it on for about 10 seconds and then wanted it off.  I didn't even have time to snap a picture!  She wore a dress that her Great Aunt Wendy found in a charity consignment shop instead.  I'm not sure I'm ever going to get her in this dress again, but I'm hanging onto it for a while in hopes that she'll change her mind.  If anyone out there has ideas about how to help young kids visualize fabric + dress style, please let me know.  Or if you have a pattern for a "round dress" - clearly that's where I went amiss!  Ah well, at least I got to try shirring for the first time.

Luckily, the cupcakes went down without complaint and no one noticed that I'd used a box mix:

The best part for Devon and me was watching Maisey enjoy her birthday present.  We bought her a trampoline and her face at the moment she started jumping more than overcame the disappointment of the failed birthday dress.

Little Clothes

Whew, the past few weeks have been crazy.  I have about five posts in my head (and in pictures) that haven't yet made it to my fingers and keyboard.  And this week I'll be teaching Camp Runway (oh, I can't wait!) so those posts don't stand a chance of escaping from my head.  I'm sure they are feeling cooped up and a little stir crazy (wouldn't you if you were stuck in my head? Shudder.) but they'll just have to stay put.

I've been sewing some little clothes for little people in the past few weeks.  This first outfit is for Helen, the daughter of one of my clients.  She really liked the idea of these ruffle pants and from there we figured out an idea for a top to go with it. 

I had fun with the process on this one.  Helen and Melissa came over to look through my fabric stash and Helen loved the Michael Miller Pretty Birds Dancing fabric (orange).  I put together a board on Pinterest with other possible fabrics and an idea for the top.  She picked out her favorites and I ran with it.  Or rather, clumsily shuffled through it.  The pattern I found to use as a starting point for the top (Peek-A-Boo Pattern's Charlotte Dress) was much more difficult than I imagined.  I think some of the difficulty was due to some awkward construction issues - I'll be tweaking these in the future - and I had to re-do a few things to get it right.  I think the top alone took me close to nine hours to complete, which seems just plain silly.  I do like the design, so I'll likely make it again, but faster. 

Here are some of the lovely design details:

I also made some little clothes for my own kids (WHAT?  MAKING CLOTHES FOR MY OWN FAMILY?? SHOCKING!!).  I usually do this only for special occasions as they really have way too many clothes already.  But with Thing 1's 5th birthday, I really needed to create something special.

I bought the main fabric from a woman here in Berwyn who was clearing out her stash (she used to run a business sewing kid's clothes and baby blankets). It's an old Michael Miller design, and I was kind of surprised that my big girl fell for this one.  She picked out the contrast fabric at Joann's and the buttons were from Grandma's basement.  The pattern is the Addison Dress from modkid patterns.

 

And because I had fabric left over, I had to make Thing 2 something to match . ..

 

So glad we were able to find a coordinating piñata!

And while I don't usually write about food on this blog (although I do have a recipe to share in one of those poor trapped posts), I did want to show off the cupcakes I made:

My MIL gave me a book on decorating cupcakes a few years ago and the tradition we have is that the girls get to flip through the pages and pick out their design.  And since this birthday girl's favorite food is apples, she wanted these (stems are tootsie rolls, leaves are rolled out starburst).  I have to say I'm pleased she managed to thwart the Hawaiian theme.

And I've got some big breaking news (not sure why I'm burying here at the bottom, but there you go - maybe it's the teacher in me making sure you read to the very end).  I'm finally making enough money between teaching and sewing custom-made clothing and bags to afford a day or two of childcare for the little one now that the big one is in school.  I'm excited to see where I can take things with daytime consecutive hours in which to work.  Wish me luck!