Blue Cat dress.

The day before my birthday this year I woke up and thought; I want a new dress for my birthday! Yeah I didn’t give myself a whole lot of time on this one. But to be fair I had planned out the dress well before my birthday, several months before in fact.
I came across the blue cat fabric while searching online for fabric for a baby quilt. I was not supposed to be buying more fabric for myself; I have fabric in my stash that I am supposed to be whittling down. But I didn’t have enough blue fabric for the quilt I was making. That is the only reason I was even looking at fabric. But as is all too common when looking for a particular fabric I fell in love with some other fabric. This time the cat fabric, I wanted it, it needed it, I had to have it, and it had to be in a dress. I thought though it might be a bit of an over whelming pattern for an entire dress though so I came up with the idea of making it a border on a 1950’s style dress and I knew the pattern I wanted to use. Simplicity #2499 it’s from the 1950’s and I have used it before to make myself and my sister a dress.

This pattern is relatively easy to make very straight forward and has a side zipper. I was impressed I had a blue zipper in my stash already so I didn’t even have to worry about the zipper. The lace and ribbon I used it also from my stash.

I ordered the fabric online and was not very impressed with the coordinating solid blue. Online it looked wonderful, it was in the suggestions as a coordinating blue, but when I got it it’s not really a blue I would have chosen in person. I miss the whole shopping in person thing. I had planned on making the dress the moment I got the fabric but when I saw the blue I was a might downtrodden over it and packed it away thinking well maybe in a while I can go shopping in person and find a better color.

As time went by it was becoming more and more obvious that was not going to happen and I had the fabric, and the fabric itself is a beautiful weight. I would buy that kind again it was just not quite the right color (the camera makes the blues look a lot closer than they do in person). I decided to just get over it, I bought the fabric for the dress I was going to use it for the dress even if that particular blue is nowhere in the cat pattern. And I think it looks okay once it’s all sewn up, yeah I would have been over the moon in love with it if it’d been a slightly different shade of blue, but even being the shade it is I love it.

I wasn’t sure I could get the dress done in time for my birthday. It’s been a long time since I did a dress in a day but there is something about having a deadline. I was off that day so I had the entire day to work on it. And it took the whole day. But I got it done finishing it around 9pm. I did alter the design a bit beyond adding the border I gathered the skirt rather than pleating it like the pattern calls for. I don’t think gathering is any easier than the pleats I just wanted it gathered.
The cat border is about 10” wide which I figure is just about perfect. And to finish it off to perfection for this year I made me a matching mask, which will probably get used a lot more than the dress, as I don’t have much of an occasion to wear a cute dress these days. But the days will come, and I will be ready.

A pink bear

For my sister’s birthday I made her a cute little pink bear to match the other bears I have made. So far using this pattern I have made 6 bears. I don’t have any idea of the first two I made even exist anymore, but I do know the latter 4 do. I have plans for at least one more for my mom either for her birthday or Christmas. I have already told her this so posting it where she can read is perfectly ok.

I was a bit nervous about the fabric since its minky and minky can be cantankerous, but this went together nicely. I was impressed, since the white bear I made was also out of minky and it gave me fits. This minky however seemed a higher quality and sewed like a dream. I also find that the more bears I make the better I get at the noses. I think this bear wins for cutest nose. I guess it true about practice making perfect. I really just love the way this bear turned out.

I was kind of sad about making the pink bear this year not because I was upset about making the bear but because I had plans for presenting it I was unable to do.
I had been planning to make this for my sister’s birthday since last year. I was hoping to get together with her, our other sister and our niece for teddy bear picnic day, we would all have our bears and then I would present my sister with hers at the teddy bear picnic. But alas our teddy bear picnic was canceled (the story of 2020 right?) so it turned out to be a quick hand off of the box with the bear and I didn’t even get to see her open it. She did call me after she opened it and said she really liked it though. So plans on for next year, and they will include my mom with her new bear and maybe my cousin if she still has her bear. I think it would be so fun to all get together with our matching bears. And who knows maybe I will make me a cute new dress as well. I am so hoping next year is better I miss seeing my people.

A baby quilt.

Last weekend I made this quilt for a co-workers granddaughter’s baby.
The Granddaughter went to college only a few blocks from where I work and would sometimes come hang out with her grandmother between classes or at lunch so we got to see her quite a bit for a few years.
Now she has a cute little baby boy and maybe one day she will bring him in to meet us all. I am sure they are going to keep baby at home where it’s safe for the time being. But she is sending Grandma pictures which of course she shows everyone, and he is a cutie.
I did a super simple pattern of every other block a solid baby blue than a block of skateboarding dinosaurs.

I used quilters dream poly batting, which I had never used before. I usually go for a cotton batting. I have used poly battings before and struggled with them but I thought I would try this because there wasn’t much to choose from on the site I ordered from, and it worked really well. I will use this brand again. (I am just mentioning them because I liked it no one asked me too.) The quilt went together fairly quickly. It helped to have nothing to distract me. I couldn’t even go outside because the Sahara dust was so thick last week so I stayed in and finished this quilt in time to give it to the grandmother Monday so she could give it to her granddaughter the next time she saw her.

Goldfish dress.

There are times when I spend hours looking at museum sites and peoples’ blogs just too look at all the pretty dresses. I love seeing what others have created and getting inspiration from them. I find myself saving pictures especially from the museum websites. And sometimes I even get the bright idea that I want something like that too. This dress is one of those I saw somewhere, saved and decided I wanted.

I don’t know where I saved it from and doing a google image search yielded no results. I do believe it came from a museum site though. I wish I had labeled where it came from but of course I did not. I did however take the time while saving it to put 1960’s in the description so that gives me an idea of what era this dress was inspired or really copied from. Since I would say I just about copied it.

To get the goldfish design, I did some figuring of about how big it needed to be then zoomed in the picture on my computer and traced it onto paper; Yep a nice and old school way of doing things tracing them on paper with a pencil. I find this is one of the easiest ways to do this. I put the brightness up all the way on my screen, lay a piece of paper on it and trace the lines. I have done this with other things before and it works great.

It took tracing it twice, because I wasn’t quite sure how big I needed it to be and should have measured better the first time. I then laid it on the cut out piece of fabric with transfer paper and traced it with a tracing wheel so the design was directly on the fabric.

I started out with the fish, I had thought about just painting the fish directly on the dress but the idea I might mess up freaked me out to badly so went with piecing them out of fabric which worked wonderfully. The orange part of the fish is cotton that I used fabric paint on to keep the edges from fraying. The black part of the fish is a knit that I also used fabric pant on to keep the edges from curling. I did just a thin line with a paint brush along the edges just to keep everything nice and by matching the paint to the fabric it’s hardly noticeable. I prefer this method to fray check which I think makes fabric look greasy, or folding under the edges because that makes it bulky looking or simply doesn’t work because of all the angles.

Once the fishies where prepped I zigzagged them on to the front piece of the dress, then came the hard part, Appliqueing the black lines.
For this I used an embroidery hoop, my embroidery foot, (on my Bernina this is foot#6) and embroidery floss. The embroidery hoop I used is not for a machine, it’s for hand needle work. I figured it would work to keep my knit fabric taut, it did a good job. Knit has this way of bunching up when sewn, especially when using a zigzag stitch. And yes I had to keep undoing and redoing it as I moved through the design, but it sure was easier than doing it without the hoop
The embroidery foot is something I have little experience with and have never attempted to use for appliqueing but it seemed easy enough and I had used the foot to do a crazy hem with fishing line once, and I have done applique like this without the foot so I did have some idea what I was doing.

The foot though was nice because it kept the floss in the center and I didn’t have to try keeping it there manually like I did when I did this with yarn. The embroidery floss is thin enough to thread through the little hole in the foot where the yarn was not. I know that this is not exactly what this foot is intended for but it sure works well for this. It took a little bit for me to get the hang of what I was doing. I did manage to tangle the floss pretty badly at the beginning and had to remove the foot to pick out stitching that was tangled all around it, leaving me to wonder just exactly what I had gotten myself into. Yet I was determined to go on. After picking out I set the thing aside for a few days and when I went back to it, it went easy peazy. It still took a while, a few hours I guess. But I figured out how to not tangle it anymore so that made it seem easy. The secret \is always keep the floss that is being fed through in front to the front of the foot and held taut making sure not turn it too much or too fast.
Once I had the fish on the rest of the dress went fairly quickly.

For the dress I used simplicity pattern # 8415 view c with a few alterations. The dress I was copying had a dropped waist and I wanted to keep that aspect so I dropped the waist and shortened the ruffle. I also simplified the pattern by making it out of knit so I could pull it over my head. I cut the back piece on a fold eliminating the zipper completely. I also redid the collar making a simple bias strip like on a t-shirt.

When I came across the dress in my saved folder I realized I had knit in the right color in my stash and without adding a zipper I didn’t have to buy anything. The original dress looks to be made out of linen but knit is so much easier to care for, plus I had it. I am trying to come up with things to make without going shopping. And while I do have a lot of ideas of what I want to make including some I have all the things I need. A lot of it is impractical though, and I have nowhere to wear it. I thought this little dress would be cute with leggings and can be worn anywhere even if it’s just being stuck at the house. It’s cute it’s comfy and I love it. I hope it washes well because I want to wear it all the time.

wallet

This year for my niece’s birthday I decided to make her a wallet.
She is at that age where she is growing like a weed and I was scared if I made her clothing she would grow out of it before her birthday. Generally I get her measurements 4 to 6 weeks before her birthday so I have plenty of time to make something. I do try to gauge the amount she may grow and often go up a size so she can wear it all year, but this year I wasn’t even sure going up a size would work, she is growing that fast! And so began the process of trying to come up with something that was not a stuffed animal since that’s what I gave her last year.

I brainstormed with my sister and some friends, everyone had ideas; purses being one everyone suggested. However she already has a lot of purses so I wasn’t into that idea, but the wallet now that sounded like a good idea. Not only did she not have one, my niece is bad to shove her money in her purse and it gets waded up and mixed into everything else she has in there, causing long waits while she paid for her things. Purses are hard enough to keep organized she needed a wallet.

And so I began the task of trying to find a pattern. I browsed the internet for hours trying to find something. But everything I came across either was too bulky or too small. I knew from talking to her about wallets a while ago that she didn’t like clutch wallets, She told me she likes the folding wallets because they take up less room in a purse. So that took out most of the ones I found, And most of the folding were either not big enough to put a dollar without folding the money first, or they were too tall, which in America all of our paper money is the same size so the taller wallets tend to feel awkward. I also wanted something with card holders for her library card and in case she gets gift cards. Card holders were not on most of them. I also wanted the wallet to have a coin purse built in but that was only on one pattern I found. basically I wanted this wallet to have it all and I couldn’t find anything like that.

And so I decided to see if I could copy my wallet which has all those things. I thought I had a good chance of figuring it out as it’s all squares and rectangles and so I began measuring and studying.
Here is what I learned.
Wallets are not easy.
They’re a lot of tiny pieces and getting them put together in the correct order without instructions is hard. You need a slick interior for the card pockets or the cards stick.
The outer part of the wallet has to be slightly bigger then the interior so it can fold. Yeah I had to recut a few pieces to make it work.


I made me a pattern and began the cutting. Realizing as I sewed I had not figured the number of pieces exactly right and ended up having to cut out some more. Good thing I had extra fabric.
I had a really hard time figuring out how to put the coin purse into the wallet and truthfully I have no idea how I did it. It took a lot of tearing apart and putting it back till it worked. I still kinda wonder how I did it, not enough to try again though.
I tried to make the interior of the wallet have more of the outer fabric by making the card pockets out of the outer fabric, but that is how I figured out the cards would stick. I only made one part of the card pockets and was making sure a card would fit before I made the rest when I realized the fabric wouldn’t work. I am so glad I tried it before I made the entire wallet, because that would have made me cry.

I am not sure what type of fabric the lining fabric is. It’s kind of like a plastic-y cotton. It’s not an oil cloth or anything like that and I am not sure where I got it. I just had a misshapen chunk of it in my stash; I think someone gave it to me when I was asking the other seamstresses I know for small scraps for my hexagon quilt that I have been working on for years and am still working on.

It may be a piece of blackout lining but it doesn’t really feel like that either I just don’t know.
The outer fabric is obi fabric from Japan. This fabric was given to me by someone who was clearing out. The fabric was still wrapped in the paper and had the receipt from Japan in it. I thought it was absolutely beautiful fabric and there was about half a yard so not enough to make anything big, but plenty to make a wallet. I used a gold thread to sew most of it together I thought it would be pretty and I had some on hand. The amount of layers in a wallet though was more then I realized and the corners were a bit tough to get through, I managed though I had to use white thread on the thickest parts because the gold kept breaking. I also changed the zipper pull to a gold pull to bring it all together and I thought it looked snazzy.

I really like the way the wallet turned out. As hard as it was to make I am proud of it. The only thing I wish I had done better at was putting the snaps in, they ended up a bit crooked, but hey once they are in they are in and they work so it’s fine.

My niece’s birthday was few months ago, and she was thrilled with her gift, I was hoping I would get to take her out shopping at some point, she is so busy during the school year I thought maybe during her spring break, but as anyone reading this knows that didn’t happen, spring break didn’t really happen. It was more like a spring hide away. I don’t even know when I will get to see my niece again and that makes me sad. She is at an age where she is changing so much and growing into herself that missing even a few months is heart breaking. I know eventually we will all get together again and she will probably be as tall as I am. It’s just hard to live only a few miles apart and feel so far away. Skype is just not the same. I hope though that even through all this we will stay close and keep up some of the traditions we have had over the year. One of my favorites is our annual Christmas photoshoot. We always make a day of it and go out to eat somewhere we have never eaten. Then her parents and all her grandparents get a card of the shoot. I wonder if things will be back by then. Writing this is making me tear up…

I don’t want to end this on a sad not though so I am going to share a cute story about going out with my niece last year.
We had gone out for a day of fun and I had to stick to a very strict budget bringing only what I could spend so ensure I wouldn’t go over budget (this is when my kitty was sick so there were lots of vet bills). We had been out all day and were still an hour from home and not really ready to go home because we were having fun just hanging out. But we were all hungry. I only had two dollars left, my sister had some change and my niece had maybe six dollars total in both wadded up bills and lose change. she dumped out every bit of her purse on the seat of the car to count what she had. I was just going to go home but my niece was like “we can put all our money together and get McDonalds its cheap!” I was unsure about using her money and told her I didn’t want to spend her money she is just a kid so it’s not up to her to feed me. But she told me that since I always buy her food she wanted to help me buy mine and she could definitely buy her own. . In the end we spent about eight dollars most of which she paid for. I thought it was so generous of her to spend her allowance on getting us food. She is so sweet. And we had a blast eating out and joking about her paying. Funny thing is I don’t even remember what we got. But that doesn’t matter what matters is we had a good time, and that really made me realize yeah the kid needed a wallet.

Little mermaid Quilts

Summer before last I had my niece come stay with me for a few days so we could work on her getting some basic sewing skills. we opted to make semi matching quilts.
one of my sisters found a piece of Ariel fabric with four panels at goodwill. she only wanted one to make herself a quilt from, so she asked if I wanted the other three. I thought it would be so much fun for my niece, my two sisters and me to have matching theme quilts. so far its just my niece and I who have them finished, and one of my sisters is currently working on hers. it took a while for me to get them quilted we made the tops and then I had a friend with a quilting machine quilt them for us, she did a really nice job. but it took me a while to get them to her. every time I would see her I would forget the quilts. finally I remembered and she got them done faster then I thought.
my quilt is the one that's a bit more complicated, with the triangle blocks and sea shell and fish fabric. My niece's is the the one with the squares on top and bottom.
the quilt I made is an example of yes eventually I will get to a project even if its years and years later. the brightly colored seashell fabric I used is actually something I bought when I was a probably around 9 or 10.

I saved my allowance so I could purchase the most lovely brightest fabric I had ever seen. I was in love with this fabric and I was going to make myself a pair of pants. that is until my mother informed me I would not be making a pair of pants out that fabric it was entirely too see through. I was devastated, because I had already bought the fabric. a few years later someone gave us the fish fabric and I thought it went well with my seashells and decided to make a quilt. I started it, realized I was no longer in love with the fabric and that was it. it got stuck in a box somewhere to be hoarded for an eternity because I couldn’t bear to let go of something I had spent my very hard earned money on. and lets face it I was still a bit upset about not getting to have pants.
when my sister gave me the little mermaid fabric I dug out the old quilt I had started , which was only a few strips and immediately tore it apart. it was horrible.the “squares” I had cut were not squares at all but rather an attempt at something trying to be a square. but I figure for being a kid when I cut them out, and having no help, or guidance or even a ruler when I cut them out they were a pretty good attempt.


But adult me wanted something a bit more even so I re-cut all the squares to the same size and came up with a pattern I wanted to do. a pattern that I almost got right. I got a few of the blocks facing the wrong way, but decided I was okay with that I’m not entering it into a contest or anything and it shows how I am not used to working with highly distracting children around. which really makes me appreciate parents. seriously parents all of you are awesome. and no she was not misbehaving in the least it was just trying to help her and do my own thing at the same time that got me distracted. we had the best time working on the quilts. my niece listened to directions and asked for help when needed and we talked about stuff sewing and non sewing related we listened to music, and listened to a book By: Matthew J. Kirby. who is an awesome author by the way.
we spent two full days on our creations and we ate really well. I made sure I had her favorite foods like Mac and cheese.(one of my faves too), pancake poufs.
I let her go through my stash and chose the fabric she liked from my cottons and guided her in lets make yours fairly basic since this is a first quilt. and also introduced her to using a rotary cutter so as to spare her from the jagged edges scissors tend to make. we had so much fun.

it was right around last Christmas when they where completely done I didn’t tell her I just told her I had a surprise for her that wasn't a Christmas gift, just a surprise than handed her, her quilt. she was giddy with excitement to see it all quilted, with a fish pattern to match the under the sea vibe.