bluejeans and blue floral shirt

I made this and took the pictures over a month ago, I've gotten very slow at posting things, but I thought it would be nice to post something to get my mind off everything going on in the world right now. so here is to sewing and dragon trees. actually I don't really talk about the tree, I just think it looks like a dragon.

I needed some new pants so I decided to give making blue jeans a try. I have made pants before and put in plenty of zippers so I was worried about it, plus I had some nice denim fabric just sitting around in my stash.

I used butterick pattern # #B5682 for the jeans. I had used this pattern previously to make some yellow plaid pants that I never blogged about, they were made out a very stretchy fabric, what I used for these jeans is an a hundred percent cotton with no stretch so they were very different. I wasn’t sure what size to make because of the fact they were non stretch and decided to go up one size just to be safe. this as it turns out was not a good idea. I had to take up every bit of the extra size. Which means this pattern is sized for non-stretch denim this is something good to know for future pairs.

The pattern was fairly straight forward but it seems like most of them are. I did read the directions which I am trying to do better at. I am so bad to simply cut out the pattern and get right to sewing. for the most part I can do this but I have decided maybe a quick overview of the pattern instructions is a good idea.

I did run into problems with the denim being too thick, which I was somewhat anticipating. my machine went through two layers with no problem and probably would have gone through three layers but it balked at four. I had trouble getting the waist band on with all those layers and decided to try lining the waistband with a light weight cotton rather than the denim. I had previously chosen a a brown with little flowers cotton to line the pockets with and went with that for lining the waistband as well. this worked like a charm and looks cute too.

for sewing the pants together I used regular thread but for the top stitching I used a heavy duty jean thread. my machine takes it well; I do have to adjust the top tension just a bit, and just to be safe I use regular thread on the bobbin. I am sure I could adjust the bobbin to work with the heavy thread but it’s not as easy to re adjust back as the top tension so I played it safe.
now putting on the belt loops on the other hand turned out to be impossible by machine. I did try it, broke a needle right away and thought no way I am ruining my machine by forcing it to do this. And put those on by hand which was not exactly easy but I managed.

the only issue I have with the finished product is they turned out a bit shorter then I would have liked. they look fine standing still but when I move they draw up a bit I just wish I would have made them an inch longer. But they’re still wearable and I do like them. They have become a staple to my wardrobe.



the blue shirt with the lace at the top is Simplicity pattern #8215
I did make a few changes on this pattern. I don’t much care for fold over collars so I ditched that idea and did just a small bias around the neck. I also added a band to the bottom of the sleeve because I thought that would look pretty. Other than that I followed the pattern . it was very easy and making the change to the collar made it all the easier to make. I do have to admit thought sewing with the light weight lace and the lining was a bit like sewing spider webs together. it took a lot of pins and sewing a bit slower than normal but it turned out so cute it was worth it.

both of these patterns where things I can wear for everyday wear and can be mixed and matched with other pieces I have. I really need to concentrate more on everyday wear so I wear what make to places like work. I love to wear dresses but they are not my friend at work (wheels and having to sit on the floor at times doesn’t bode well with dresses) so I need to wear more practical things like pants which means of course I really should make them.




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gray teddy bear

for my sisters birthday last year I made her a teddy bear as she seemed to really like the ones I made for myself and my niece. I used the same pattern as the others but her fur was much fluffier.
I originally wanted to make her a bear in a golden color but the fabric store was sorely lacking in anything of that nature. which I think is sad as it is such an iconic teddy bear color especially if you are going for the old fashioned pooh bear look.
the fur I ended up getting though is extremely soft and plush, because if I couldn’t get the color I wanted I could get the best feeling fur out there. this pattern only takes a 1/4 yard of fabric so the fact it cost 3 times as much as the other furs didn’t matter much. and gray is a nice color too. I am not exactly fond of making these bears as fur is nasty to sew with it gets everywhere, clings with all its might to anything it touches and makes me sneeze, even though its faux fur and not real at all it still sheds like crazy. but they sure do turn out cute so I keep making them.
at some point we are all going to get together and have us a teddy bear tea picnic,and get some better pictures, but we have to wait till the weather cooperates with our scheduling and that can be very hard, very hard indeed.


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a little goodbye

last year was tough. it wasn’t the sewing that was tough it was other things, but through it I tried to keep on keeping on. one thing that was very hard was losing my childhood pet in late October; after a year of her battling congestive heart failure and a few other things that go along with aging. she took a lot of care in the last days and months of her life but I don't regret the time spent with her at all. she was happy content and demanding till the end.

for 21 years she liked to help me sew, (well it was closer 17 years as I wasn’t really into sewing till then, but whatever. she was 21 1/2. half years totally count when your a cat) I used to make her clothes and dress her up like Victorian and Edwardian times. I am sure I got the idea from paintings and photographs of children dressing up cats, toting them around in baby carriages and having tea. the dresses really weren’t good but I thought they were, and she tolerated it well, and we had fun. yes I started sewing making doll clothes which then translated into kitty clothes.

when I started using patterns to make myself things she would help me out by chewing on the pattern paper while I lay out the pattern on the floor to cut out. I would turn around and chunks of my pattern would be slimy melted sludge. I would than try to flatten out and rework them, usually they weren‘t a total loss. After a few years she finally got her fill and stopped doing it, letting me cut out the patterns without fear of the slime.

She then went on to helping me sew by laying on every project I ever did. which meant lint rollers were always used on a finished project. I never cared that she lay on them, she never clawed them or anything she was just “helping” me out. even when her arthritis got to where she could no longer get onto the sewing table, she would let me know she needed to get up there and I would accommodate by helping her up, and then helping her down when she was done. she was tiny bit spoiled.
she spent hours watching me sew, probably wondering why exactly I was doing, till I was done, and she had a new thing to get hair all over.

she tagged along with me outside all over the forest just outside our door. the photo shoots for my Blog very often turned into her photo shoots. I have a lot of great pictures of her, I’m going to stick to the sewing related ones here though.

our last project together was a quilt. one that I was not able to finish before she passed. I knew I wouldn’t as I am sewing it all by hand, I did however finish all the squares, and was able to take her picture with each of them. I will post them when the quilt is complete, which won‘t be for a while. I need to get back to working on it. The entire time I worked on it I told her the quilt was for her, so when I do finally finish it, I will call it her memorial quilt. I got frustrated with it the last time I worked on it though so I set it aside. I will go back to it eventually. I will finish it one day. sometimes though things have to be set aside before they ever be completed.


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Bathing suit

I was invited to spend the day at a lake with some friend with short notice, and realized I didn’t really have a bathing suit. the one I had was a vintage suit with very little to no stretch to it. and even though I love it its hard to put on. so I went shopping, and well I am not shaped for what they sell in the stores. probably if I’d had more time and could have gone to more places I might have found something.
my trip the store was not a pleasant one, Everything that offered any coverage at all was too big, and the rest were so tiny that I may as well not even bother. so I totally scraped the idea of a new suit and wore a rash guard and shorts that day.
I also had a camping trip to another lake planned for later on in the year which I thought I may have time to look for another suit

a month later I was glancing at the fabric section of the store, not intending to purchase any just kinda checking it out in case there was something I had to have. and low and behold there was! it was a pre-cut two yard piece of stretch fabric, navy with orange flowers. it was beautiful.

I had picked up simplicity pattern #8139 on a whim months before, because the fabric store was having one of those irresistible sales of 99 cent patterns that rarely happen and always leave me buying too many patterns I actually have no intention of using. yes I am one of those people who hoards patterns. but at that price its hard to say no.
now the actual pattern calls for using a stretch fabric for the interior part of the suit only and a non stretch fabric, and a zipper for the exterior. I wanted something that was easy to put on and would dry fast, so I liked the idea of the stretch I bought for both the interior and exterior parts of the suit.

however using a stretch fabric on a non stretch pattern causes it own issues. one of which is the fit. I knew I had to make it smaller since with stretch I didn’t want any ease like I might want with cotton. but at the same time the inner part of the suit needed to be made on my normal size and then all of this needed to fit exactly together. but of course that isn’t exactly how it happened.
I made the outer part of the suit two sizes smaller then the inner which seemed like a good idea but when I went to try it on I had to still take it up quite a bit. but that shouldn’t have surprised me because I also had to take up the interior part a bit. I don’t know if its because I was attaching it to a stretch fabric or if I would have had to take up the inner part even with a non stretch., it doesn’t really matter I finally got it right, and it does seem that I make a lot of things twice to get the fit right.

I worked on this suit every evening after work for two weeks trying to make sure I finished it before my camping trip which was coming up fast.
while working on the bathing suit I cam across another problem. adding the elastic to the straps was not going so well. I cut the elastic significantly less then what I needed knowing it would stretch out as I sewed it in; it still turned out wonky. the straps sticking out all weird and the front gaping. I pulled out all the stitching which was not easy as I had put it in with a three point zigzag, a huge mistake if ever there was one. I’d been told that the three point zigzag was a good stitch to use on stretch as it allows the fabric to stretch without popping stitches. however it also stretches the fabric so badly out of shape it wasn’t worth it. then I tried using a double needle. again something that allow stretch . the pattern calls for tunneling in the elastic which wasn’t working, it looked horrible. so I again tore out the stitching and started over. this time I serged the elastic in, then folded it over to stitch it down. and that worked well, though the straps ended up a bit more narrow then the pattern called for, at least it looks good and that is what mattered. I ran into the same issue adding elastic to the legs I fudged it a little in the legs because I ran out of the 1/2” elastic. but it still turned out okay. I also added a liner to the inner suit bottom just for my own comfort and the fact the suits in the store have them it makes me think they are needed. I also added a built in bra, which I could have done better with if I’d had more time. it was basically just a thin padding and elastic which is how they do it in a lot of the of the store bought ones.
I finished the suit with a few days to spare before my camping trip, which I think is awesome.
I like the way it turned out. I think its really cute, and will hopefully wear it for years to come.
I had a fun playing in the lake with friends, I'm not much of a swimmer but I had a enjoyable time bobbing on my noodle. however it was so incredibly hot it was hard to >enjoy the rest of the camping. although we did have some good food and went in a canoe which was pretty fun.


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happy Halloween!

for Halloween this year I decided to be polychrome from the 4th wizard of oz book, “the road to oz”. this as my sister likes to point out to me is a bit on the obscure side, but there is a reason I chose this particular character.
but before I get into that long story I will give a quick overview of making the costume.
the shirt I used a vintage Vogue pattern #1189. I have had the rainbow fabric for years, someone gave it to me, and I have had it so long I contemplated getting rid of it, but then this costume idea came up, which is why its so hard to get rid of fabric, because eventually I will need it one day, even if it take ten years.

this pattern was actually easier then I anticipated. I don't generally sew with vogue patterns and they have a reputation for being complicated but this went together easily enough. the hardest part of the whole thing was cutting out the sequin fabric it made a huge mess, but then I knew it would. my floor was covered with them. I tried at first to serge the edges but all that did was cause three broken needles so I gave up on that idea. I should have given up on that with the first broken needle, but hey I can be stubborn sometimes. I decided though I couldn't afford to lose anymore, as I only had one more needle left for my serger, which reminds me I need to get some more needles.

after breaking the needles I put the garment aside for a few days before deciding on binding the edges with the selvage edge of the fabric. it had a good 2 inch selvage of black sheer fabric which worked perfectly for the binding.
the top zips in the back so I did a lapped zipper, which went in really easy. I was afraid the fabric would stretch as I sewed it but it didn't. everything about the shirt was pretty straight forward. though I did have to re-sew a few of the sequins as they were put on with a chain stitch, and after sitting for years and years some of it had started to unravel.

the skirt was an adventure in itself. it was not exactly what I wanted to do, but I ran into some trouble finding rainbow fabric. which I don’t get since I was shopping during prime Halloween costume making time. I wanted to do more of a circle skirt or a simple gather skirt. I just wanted something easy, so onto Joanns website I go, and search for rainbow fabric, and they have nothing! well they had stuff, they had it listed but everything was "in store pick up only". not a problem I have three stores within an hour or so drive but I did want to be sure they had it before I went because I don’t want to drive that far and then they don't have it. so I check my stores and none of them have it, so I expand the search to within 100 miles and no store within 100 miles has a rainbow fabric and I am not going to drive hundreds of miles for this costume. by the time I discover this though I needed to go to bed and decided I would look around online after I got off the next day I really would rather buy fabric in person I like to touch it and feel the drape, but in a situation such as this I can make an exception if I have too.

on my way home the next day I stopped at a dollar store, (not for fabric) and they had these little kid dress up skirts. I think they were for dressing up like a mermaid? not really how that works for a mermaid, but it's what the packaging said. they were cute fluffy little things but only 10 inches long. which is way short, but they were only $1 a piece so I bought out the store! I bought 10 in all, which really is all they had. the skirts were double layer so I figured I could take them apart and sew them long ways together, then gather at the waist. I think it worked out pretty well, each piece was 54 inches long so I had plenty of length, and I added a different color ribbon to each of the 14 seams, to make it look like I meant to just piece this together the whole time.
I think it worked out pretty well, even for having to re-design the entire thing.

now onto the why I chose this costume.
last year I decided I was going to read all the oz books by L. Frank Baum, and just his,I don;t think I could read all the oz books ever there are just too many. I have not read all the Baum books yet yet, but I am going through them slowly. I am currently reading the fifth one. I like to put some books in between long series though so I don’t bored of them, it will probably take me a while to get through them all.
as I was reading the forth book and came across the character Polychrome it made me laugh. “Polly” as they call her in the book is the rainbows daughter. I think its pretty cool the rainbow has a daughter Actually he has several daughters but Polly is the only one that made it to being a main character. she’s a bit annoying, a little bit on the ditzy side and she dances to keep warm, those are not the things that attracted me to her character though, no what gave me the idea I had to be her was the fact she fell off the rainbow. in the book she is dancing on the edge of the rainbow when bam! she falls to the earth, and her father, not paying any attention to her picks up the rainbow and Poly becomes a poor lost little girl whom Dorothy runs into and agrees to help poly find her way home.

now I am in no exuberant dancing kind of person. however I did once fall off a rainbow.
when I was a child our local park had one of the best play structures I have seen in my life. they had four different wooden buildings that were like forts. they each had two levels to them with platforms and a firehouse pole to slide down. two of them were connected by a bridge that was about 18 inches wide and four feet off the ground. another one had a small slide. there were also swing sets and an awesome 12 foot slide that was open, as in it only had sides that came up about three inches. and there was also a wooden arch that had metal rungs on either side of it for climbing, the very top of the arch was over six feet high, and everyone called this the rainbow.

there were different ways to play on this rainbow and varying views on how it should be played on. one could either climb on the rungs to make ones way over the rainbow, or you could use them like monkey bars and try to make your way over that way. the monkey bar thing though was very difficult and ultimately kids reverted to the climbing over the rainbow.
my mother didn’t like the rainbow for obvious reasons it was dangerous, and I was not allowed to go all the way over till I was bigger. I enviously watched my older siblings playing on the rainbow while never going farther up then the forth rung. till one day I convinced my mother I was big enough and ready to climb over the entire thing... yeah, I wasn’t.
there was a trick to making it over the rainbow, and that trick was knowing where to turn around at exactly the top of the arch so you would go over the other side feet first. I had seen many a child do just this trick, but I misjudged the middle and went to far, which sent me sliding head first down the rainbow. I tried hard as I could to grab on to the bars on either side of me, but I was just going too fast. I face planted at the bottom and was rewarded with a mouthful of dirt. I had so much dirt in my mouth my mother was convinced I had knocked my teeth out. but no they were fine. I was fine, a bit shaken but fine, and banned from going over the rainbow again. this banishment lasted until I was a teenager, actually my mother probably would have let me try again when I was around 10 or so but I was petrified of the thing, so I never asked. the summer I was sixteen or seventeen my cousin, sister and I went to the park one Sunday to do some pictures for our “band”. my cousin wanted to do some pictures on the rainbow and I was like umm.... ok.... but that day was Amazing! because that was the day I faced a fear and beat it. I went over the rainbow,I climbed to the top and turned around and climbed back down the other side feet first no face planting this time, just sucsess!

here I am on top of the rainbow with my cousin. and the weird thing is shortly after I tackled the rainbow they tore it down. they took away everything in that park because it was too dangerous, because it had too much of a potential for children to get hurt. because kids like me face planted off the rainbow. but I was glad I made it over the rainbow



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