Super Secret Project . . . Revealed!

So a little while ago I alluded to a super secret project I was working on.  But I'd given the intended recipient a link to my blog so I didn't want to chance a big reveal flop.  The gift has now been given so I can safely share what all was the deal.

So a friend of mine went back to grad school (again) and I wanted to give her a nice gift bag of stuff as a Good Luck and Congratulations on Going for Your Second Master's gift.  So rundown on the contents, unfortunately I didn't take a picture of everything.
1. orange thyme plant (yes we tested it when I bought it from the farmer's market, it does small like orange)
2. scarf (why a scarf in the summer you say?  well I happened to have yarn in her fav colors and I had time before giving the gift so I went a little overboard)

3. two placemats (but not just any placemats.  These placemats were single crocheted from black organic cotton yarn)

4. two coasters (squares of cork that I drew her initial on with marker in fancy lettering.  Don't want them walking off on their own you know.)

5. a rice heating pad (A nice big one that can lay across the top of one's back and over one's shoulders.  100% cotton toweling and thread so it can be heated up in a microwave or oven.)

6. A tote bag (I needed to give the gift stuff in some kind of container, and I thought a tote bag is also a useful thing.  No pic of it because I made it at the last minute.  Flannel with a green and brown pattern, plastic insert to help the bottom hold shape, and wooden buttons as a decorative element where the handles join the bag.)

Of course after the fact when the gift had been given I thought of all sorts of ways I could have made it better, but isn't that always the way.  She seemed to like the stuff, as eclectic as it was, and I hope they either make her life at school a little easier or at least help her relax a little.

Mom Skirt, AKA Butterick 4817

I had promised my mother as long ago as sometime last summer that I would make her a skirt from Butterick 4817, which she picked out online and I purchased for this purpose.  I had made myself a top for a tea party themed bridal shower.  She loved the fabric when I showed it to her, so I offered to make her a skirt.  I even bought the fabric right away since it was on sale at the time.  I hope you can see the details.  It is black with grey flowers.

The fabric sat in my stash for months and months, through a move that rendered it wrinkled and misfolded beyond belief.  Finally I decided enough was enough.  The pattern pieces were cut out, this had to happen.  Much laborious refolding and ironing later, I was ready to cut the pieces out.  Except apparently I forgot how wide my fabric was, and 45" is very different from 60".  I had 45", but started cutting as if I had 60".  Luckily I realized it after the first cut piece.  So, so creative just-off-grain cutting later and I had managed to get all the pieces out with a foot to spare.

The pattern itself was so simple I wondered why I hadn't just made the skirt back in the day.  Straight seams for the 6 panels, and a simple hem at the bottom.  I didn't do the waistband since it is an elastic waist and my mom wanted to do that herself.  Here is the skirt done and laid out on my floor.  The fabric looks black, but trust me it is the fabric above.

I am sure it will swish nicely, since the pieces curved outward, but the seams were sewn straight down.  Lots of lovely fluting at the bottom.  I hope she likes it.

Baby Bonnet Finished!

I really wanted to finish this baby bonnet, not only because it is promised to someone else and I hate to drag my feet on things like that, but because it is such an easy project that it is reliable gratification.  To recap, I offered to make a baby bonnet for a coworker who is expecting a new niece any day now.  I used a tutorial from Sew Mama Sew that I have used before with adorable results.

Since I've been on a re-use kick lately, I decided to reuse some fabric I had around.  A pair of sleep shorts with a cute butterfly and flower pattern was the lucky donor.  I'm glad I left the center serged seams in place because I would have needed to piece the fabric anyway.  I don't have a serger so I would have been duplicating work.  After carefully deconstructing the garment to save as much as I could, I got to work.  The bonnet has three layers.  The outer layer is the butterfly fabric.  There is a hidden inner layer of a thicker cotton weave to give the bonnet a bit of stability since the outer layer is a worn thinner cotton and the innermost layer is a white cotton t-shirt knit.  Also recycled, but with no body of its own.  I wanted something soft for against the baby's head.  The ties are also t-shirt fabric for this reason.

So without further ado, here are the last few stages in pictures.

This is with the pieces assembled and sewn on 3 sides.  Sorry, I forgot to take pictures of the pieces and intervening steps.  This stage caused me enough headache as I had accidentally piled the pieces out of order.  So when I flipped it to the right sides the interfacing fabric was showing instead of the butterflies.  I had to pick all the stitches out and reorder them to sew again.  Unfortunately I had already trimmed the seam allowances so I had to sew very carefully.

Once that was done (correctly) the next stage was trimming them front edge.  Last time I made this bonnet I was able to just use some wide lavender ribbon from my stash and call it a day.  Unfortunately that ribbon doesn't match this fabric.  The client wanted white trim anyway, but luckily I had some white bias tape in my stash as well.  Bring much narrower than the ribbon, I had to sew it on carefully in two steps.  I sewed it on one side to the inside of the bonnet, then folded it over the raw edge and sewed down through all the layers.

Here it is with the bias tape on.  I also folded over and sewed the bottom edge where the tie will go at the back of the baby's head.  Threading that was a pain.  Lacking also any spaghetti bias tape, which is what the tutorial calls for, I improvised by using more of my white bias tape folded over and sewn through to create a narrower width.  The channel had come out a bit narrower than intended, so there was some trouble getting the length through, but I managed.  I only had to unpick a small section at the end and re-sew it to make the channel a little wider.  Tied up, the bonnet is done done done!

Here it is with the brim forward:

And back:

I hope she likes it.

Baby Bonnet Update with Pictures

So an update on the baby bonnet from sleep shorts project.  Let me tell you, it would have been way easier to just cut, but noooooo.  I wanted to make sure I had enough fabric so all those seams had to be taken out by hand.  Serged seams are doubly a pain.  Plus these babies had a covered elastic waist and trim on the bottom of each leg. 

Finally, though, all the seams are out except two.  I'm waiting on those until I measure to see if there is enough fabric to cut out the pattern sections without piecing fabric.  If I need to do piecing, I might as well keep the original serged seam in place and save some aggravation.  On the upside the fabric is cute, and is growing on me the more I work with it.  I'm hoping to re-use the trim for the ties.  With any luck I'll find another project to use the rest of the fabric.  Zero waste, or as close as I can get, is the goal.

So before decontruction:

And after:

Unfortunately I'm stymied until I find a way to iron the pieces out.  The bottom edge where the trim was attached and the top edge where the waistband were are not going to cooperate for pattern cutting until I can get the fabric to lay flat.  Of course I have an iron, but no ironing board.  Anyone know of a solution to this dilemma?  I'll have to google it at some point and see if I can find an easy way to MacGuyver an ironing board.

At least this is one more step down.  Onward!

Step 3: Iron

Step 4: Cut Pieces from fashion fabric, interfacing fabric, and lining fabric

Step 5: Pin

Step 6: Sew

Baby Bonnet from sleep shorts

After seeing pictures and hearing about a coworker's new niece on the way, I spontaneously volunteered to make a baby bonnet for her.  This offer enthusiastically accepted, I was faced with the prospect of fulfilling this obligation.

Step 1: pattern
There is a great baby bonnet pattern from Sew Mama Sew that I've made before and I love and I totally intend to deploy it for this project as well.  I'll post the link in my followup post.

Step 2: fabric
Little girls need little girl fabric.  I have around 4-5 boxes of fabric under my bed right now and none of it was appropriate.  Then I'm walking past some bagged clothes intended for donation, and there on top is a pair of sleep shorts in a pretty lavender shade with butterflies and flowers all over it.  Perfect!  I'm currently unpicking all the seams to get a sense of how much fabric I have.  I will have to do some piecing to get the right size sections, but I think it'll work out.  I have plenty of white t-shirt fabric for lining and stiffer cotton woven fabric to use as a stiff inner layer.  Yay for recycled fabric.  And my coworker is excited about the eco-friendly use of fabric too, so win!

So I'm currently in Step 2, and since many of the seams were serged, it'll take a while to unpick them.  But I think it will be worth it to have every speck of fabric, even if it just allows for seam allowance.  Plus it allows me to save pieces I don't use for future projects.  Zero waste is the goal.  Re-using fabric is good for the environment and the wallet.

Pictures will follow.

Nifty Gifty

My brother is one of those male animals who is impossible to buy for.  I think he gets it from our dad.  The biggest hits are random obscure kinds of classic things.  Last year for christmas I bought him a box (empty) that had the Union Jack painted on each side.  He loved it.

His birthday is coming up and I'm cash strapped so I immediately started thinking what I could make him.  I was considering a wallet, and indeed had bought the necessary fabric paints to get the design I wanted, when this embroidery thing I've been doing at work prompted inspiration.  I'll monogram some handkerchiefs for him!  The embroidery can't be harder than the little girl pictures I've been doing, and this definitely falls under random classic item he'd probably like.

So, $4.99 pack of 6 handkerchiefs from Target (thinnest handkerchiefs I have ever been able to see right through) and $0.99 satiny rayon embroidery thread (5 little bins for black in the basic cotton floss ALL EMPTY) later I was on my way.  My mom chose the font Old London from dafont.com.  I didn't need to download it since I needed to sketch it out on paper, but I made sure it was a free font anyway.  Sketching the font on the handkerchief was a challenge because even though the kerchief was ridiculously thin, at 100% cotton it bled like crazy.  So my water soluble and 48 hour disappearing markers were useless.  I couldn't get a crisp enough line to follow for the actual embroidery.  I finally had to turn to my iron-on transfer pen.  With that one you draw the design backward on paper (no bleeding!) the put it ink down on the fabric and iron.  A permanent line, but thin enough the stitches would cover it up.

Finally I could get started, but it was so later in the day after all the experimenting I decided to wait until the next day.  Sunday I got cracking early in case I messed up and had to go buy more handkerchiefs.  It was terrible.  That floss was a nightmare.  It frayed like mad.  I only used two threads to keep the embroidery lighter on the fabric, but they would not blend well like cotton floss does.  The thread twisted around themselves so they wouldn't lay flat and made little loops that would not lay down.  I had to unpick stitches and try to untwist the thread and it was crazy.  Finally there was victory (for me) and all three were done.  Three because I had messed up the iron-on transfer and done it to the back of two of the handkerchiefs.  Oops.

Below are the front and back of one of the monograms for you to see.  They all came out pretty much the same so that was good.

So that is how I spent my weekend after buying ridiculous amounts of yarn for my mom who crochets.  She is using 100% cotton yarn called Sugar and Cream right now, which happened to be on sale here where I live.  So of course I volunteered to go buy lots of it for her.  I have two plastic shopping bags stuffed full of yarn in my apartment right now.  She may have yarn forever.

Embroidery Complete

Well, my first foray into the world of embroidery was exciting and pretty successful if I don't say so myself.  I finished the second two pictures for the gift for my grandmother.  That is four pictures in five days.  Not too shabby.

The third picture is below.  I have also included a closeup of the hair because unlike the others, this girl's hair is colored in.  I used two strands of a medium brown and one of a golden-mustard brown for a highlighted effect.  It was the suggestion of one of my coworkers, and I think it came out really pretty.

The fourth and last picture was the simplest in my opinion, which was nice because I was getting a little tired of embroidery by this point.

So there you have it.  Four retro-vibe pictures embroidered with three strands of floss throughout.  The embroidery needle that came with the kit was the size of the tapestry needles I saw in JoAnn's, so not sure about that.  Oh well.

Embroidery? Certainly!

SO my job has been keeping at work late this week.  I knew this was coming so I looked about for some sort of projects I could do at my desk that wasn't too much of a production.  Digging around on my craft shelves I found an embroidery kit I had been given for christmas.  I hadn't ever tried embroidery before, so I thought I'd give it a shot.  Plus, the box looked portable.

It wasn't until I got it to work that I opened it and realized the patterns it came with I (a) didn't like and (b) didn't have an iron to transfer to the humongous piece of fabric anyway.  So what does a crafty girl do when faced with this dilemma?  Apply some internet to this problem.  I found some cute vintage-looking kitchen proverb patterns here that were perfect.  The guide is not good at all, so I went with whatever colors I wanted and used 3 strands all around.  For those who don't embroider, like me 3 days ago, embroidery floss is actually 6 strands woven together.  You pull it apart to whatever thickness you want based on the number of strands you use.

The colors that came with the kit were also a bit bland, but luckily a coworker had a bunch of floss in her desk (I swear she got that thing from wherever Mary Poppins got her carpet bag).  After getting the first one done, I decided to do 4 pictures total on the fabric and then mail it to my grandmother as a christmas present.  That gives me plenty of time to finish.  Pictures 1 and 2 are done, below:

Because I am a sucker for a cute project . . .

So we were hanging out with my boyfriend's family, including his new baby niece, last thursday and mom happened to mention they were going to be at barbecues all weekend and she was worried about the sun on baby's head.  Grandma mentions offhand they should just use a bonnet, to which mom replies, "But we don't have one."  Ah ha moment in my head - I could totally make one!  Rest of evening is me planning said bonnet in my head until they leave and I can get started.

Step 1 - find a pattern or tutorial, preferably free.  No problem.  Gotta love Sew Mama Sew, because they had just what I needed here.  Perfect and so cute.

Step 2 - fabric?  Concerned about baby's skin, I chose some prewashed t-shirts I was looking to do something with anyway that would offer super soft fabric and it was white.  Baby is a girl, so no blue or grey allowed (which happened to be the only other two colors available, so white it was.)  Since t-shirt knit is unable to hold even the mildest structure, I also cut a piece out of a white curtain made of a cotton weave material for an inside lining.

Step 3 - construct.  This tutorial is really good so the construction was a breeze.  Only a few hiccups trying to get the knit to sew straight, but it worked out okay I think.  No bias tape, and no gumption to try and make my own (plus never done it before), but thank goodness I had bought a roll of lavender grosgrain ribbon for another project so I just cut a length and folded it over to take the place of the bias tape edging.  After reading through the steps I figured out what the purpose of the bias tape was so I could make improvise a replacement.  Same on the back.  Reading through the steps, it is a complicated way of saying sew a channel and thread something through to tie tightly.  Again no bias tape, but I had a length of narrow ribbon I could use instead so that worked out alright.  Hooray for improvising!

Step 4 - results.  Below are pictures of the finished product, one with the brim folded back and one with it forward.  No pics of the baby wearing it yet.  Hopefully I'll be able to add one later.  I think it came out cute, but it will depend on what Mommy thought so I'll have to get back to you.

All Systems are a Go

So I finally got my sewing machine running.  Turns out I had the stitch length knob backward with the stitch width knob wondering why material wasn't feeding through the machine.  After re-threading both top and bobbin several times I finally read my manual again and discovered my error.  Of course once I got it working I was afraid to touch it.

First project was a wallet for my cousin using the tutorial here.  The original attempt, also my maiden voyage with my sewing machine looked like this:

You can see the uneven edges where the corners don't match up well at all as well as my wandering stitches.  Not a bad first try, but not gift-worthy.  I talked it over with my mom on how to improve upon my initial attempt.  I decided to increase the size of the bottom pocket row (lower blue row) because while you can't see it in the picture, it is pretty shallow to hold a card.  I left the whole to turn the thing right-side out on the top, but left a wider seam allowance on the top and bottom so I could top stitch on the right side to close the whole once the wallet was turned.  This also doubled as a decorative line of stitching and something to stabilize the top edge more.  Also I decided to trim more of the excess on the sides before turning the wallet right-side out.  And I was more careful to make tight corners and straight seams.  Here was the second try:

Corners match up this time around.  Seams are much straighter and the card pockets are more secure.  The outside edges still look a bit bulky, but some blind stitching to pull the fabric together should decrease that problem.  Altogether I am pretty happy with it.  I just have to buy some velcro to sew inside to make the thing stay closed.

At this rate I might actually try making some clothes now that I've gotten the hang of my sewing machine finally.  I got it for Christmas, but am only now getting acquainted with it.  I am such a slacker.

Valiant Attempt

So I just found out about a baby shower next sunday and I don't have a gift.  Normally not a problem, I could just pop out and buy something.  Two problems:

1. The proud mama has to fly back home after the shower so she has to be able to take it with her in her existing luggage.
2. I'm trying to not just buy things anymore, I'd like to make something if I can.

So was born the Bib Project.  I figured I'd have the best chance of completing something (relatively) simple, and since my new sewing machine is still hostage to the big guy in the red suit, it has to be something I can sew by hand.  I found a pattern here that is looked fairly simple.  The baby is a boy, so I wanted the color to be appropriately masculine, just in case that matters to the mama.  Looking around, I found a red cotton shirt and a bright blue terry cloth washcloth I could cannibalize, so the Bib Project was a go.

And the blue on the red was kindof plain so I attempted to embroider a sailboat on the blue.  Boyfried looked at it and identified it as a sailboat, so I guess it came out okay.  Here is the work in progress so far:

Just have to finish overcasting the edge of the red, attached the blue, and sew on ribbons to tie in the back.  Hope I can finish by saturday - and that it comes out fit for gifting.  Guess we'll see.