Back to School!

by alwaysacraftylady

So, I’m just a little bit behind on sharing projects from late 2018. Moving forward I’ll be intermixing newer projects with older project until I get through the backlog. Today, back to school outfits!

Both of my children wear a uniform for school, but the dress code is not terribly strict. As long as their shirt has a collar and the colors are correct-ish neither school will complain. I usually buy most of their school clothes as polo dresses and leggings as both cheap and easy to acquire, but the first day of school is special and deserves something fun to wear!

For Charlie I went with separates.

This is the Oliver + S Music Class pattern. It’s a great little uniform pattern with a classic blouse and simple skirt. Great for wearing to school and pretty easy to sew as well.

Back when Lu went to preschool I bought all kinds of uniform fabric. I was definitely going to make all her uniforms. Ha! Nope. I had a Charlie a few months into Lu’s preschool years and that fabric has mostly sat in my stash. This fall I used most of the uniform stash to actually make more school uniforms including this adorable back to school outfit.

Charlie likes it pretty well, especially those cat buttons.

Charlie is very obsessed with cats, even though we don’t own one. When I saw these buttons at the Costume College marketplace, I just knew they would bring a smile to Charlie’s face…and they did!

The fabrics are both from Robert Kaufman, but after 3+ years my memory of the specifics is gone. I’m sure the shirt is lawn, but the skirt is…? Who knows. Something sturdy that took the pleats really well.

This little girl is not real fond of school, but wearing pretty clothes makes her happy and that makes momma happy too.

For Lu’s first day of first grade, I used a vintage pattern. I went on a little vintage pattern ebay spree over the summer and this little number called my name as something cute, uniform-ish, and practical. It’s Hollywood Pattern of Youth #1504.

I could not find it on any of the vintage pattern cataloging sites and was a bit hard to date, but I’d guess its from the 1930s. The starlet for this pattern is Virginia Weidler who was born right now the road from us and it best known from The Philadelphia Story and The Women.

Lu was a total ham in this dress. I think she liked it quite a lot, but she really loved those shoes! Too bad they broke on the third wearing and had to be returned 😦 The belt was also a huge hit. I had no idea such an accessory could bring so much joy to a child.

The fabric was nothing fancy. My stash was all really stiff skirting fabrics and so I journeyed to JoAnn’s to find something with a touch more drape. I returned with a rayon blend twill and some white rick rack. The twill was also a bit too stiff for the pattern, but I didn’t want something too delicate.

Neither of their first day of school outfits has made it into heavy rotation. Those polo dresses really so just so much easier to maintain and comfy to wear. That’s okay though. Special clothes don’t have to be worn all the time. Making them brought all of us such joy. They have served their purpose.

16Apr2018

Scroop’s Miramar and Gertie’s Side Pleated Skirt

by alwaysacraftylady

Earlier this week it was 90F here in LA, so here is one last winter post before this space turns into sundress city!

I’ve been eyeing Scroop’s Miramar pattern for a little while. I need more tops that I can wear to work with skirts, but I struggle to find knit styles I like. I don’t want a t-shirt and I already have some wrap top options. Miramar works as something different, but a little more elevated than a basic tee. I also like the dress pattern. I’ve been wearing a ton of skater dresses and I’m kind of sick of sewing the same pattern over and over.

I’m a little torn over how my first two attempts worked out.

This is my first try. I went with the dress version and cut out my size (40B/42W/44H) based on the size chart. In the pictures it actually looks pretty good from the front. The sleeves are slightly snug, but I figure the main problem is the fabric. This is a rayon blend from JoAnn’s and so clingy that I can’t see wearing this as a dress. It needed a slip underneath, but you can see all the seaming and my bellybutton. Boo.

The back view reveals another problem, the massive pool of fabric at my back. This was not a deal breaker since I often need the back length shortened on patterns and a sway back adjustment. Given this was my first try at the Miramar Dress I thought it was a pretty good starting point.

For version two I made a shirt so I could work on the back pooling issue without committing to an entire dress worth of fabric. The shirt only took 1 yard, so I could actually make two of these with the white jersey I’d also purchased from JoAnn’s. But ugh, I hate this shirt.

Even though the fabric had the correct amount of 4 ways stretch, it wasn’t at all a good fit for the pattern. The Miramar directions recommend fabric with a soft stretch and well duh. This jersey doesn’t not have that at all. It is much more firm and that’s why this shirt didn’t work. But it was still disappointing to have it turn out so unwearable.

So I’m still on the fence about Scroop’s Miramar. I don’t think the dress will ever work for me. I’m not comfortable with soft knit fabrics on a clingy dress, even with a corrected back length. The shirt is much more promising in the right fabric, but finding 4 way stretch fabric in natural fibers is not something I’ve done very successfully. I’ve found plenty of polyester, but not many other options. Maybe this pattern gets put away until I find the right fabric to try again. I’ve ordered several fabrics that claimed to have the right stretch and hand but none of those have been true to their description. Boo.

All of these items were made a couple month ago when I got in some sort of craze to make something right this second. I don’t know what processed me. I finished a project and didn’t have the next fabric pre-washed so I launched into making a skirt that I probably shouldn’t have made.

This is the Side Pleated Skirt from Gertie’s Ultimate Dress Book with a waistband added. It is actually a really cute skirt, but it too has a issue. I really wanted to make a skirt with the corduroy, but I had an odd amount. There wasn’t enough for my plan A or B. I even had to majorly alter the width on Gertie’s pattern to make it fit 45″ fabric. This should have been a sign to walk away, but instead I persisted.

The corduroy fabric clings to everything including itself. It is really annoying to wear. Wearing the Miramar dress tucked into this skirt does actually help some. And when I wore the ensemble to work I got a lot of compliments. But the color combination feels more November-February than April so off to storage it goes. I guess I’ll wait and see how I feel about both pieces in the fall. The white shirt is a definite no. But white jersey is good to have on hand, so it’ll probably live again as a kid garment.

22Nov2017

Halloween 2017

by alwaysacraftylady

It’s been a little while since I paid a visit to this space, but I’ve been busily working away. I’ve been spending a little less time on the internet lately and a little more time sewing, knitting, and volunteering including joining the editor pool at the Curvy Sewing Collective. We’re also well into the busy season at Heritage Square Museum. Lots of commitments to my time, but in a good way.

When it comes to Halloween I try to keep my sewing to a minimum. I’ll make one piece for each child and then buy or find the rest of the pieces. Its worked really well so far! This year both girls wanted to be fairies, or I should say that Lu wanted to be a fairy and Charlie wanted to be just like Lu. Lu picked her costume months ago so I had plenty of time to think about how I wanted to make a couple of fairy costumes.

I spent a bunch of time looking for a fairy costume pattern, but most of the Pinterest ideas were geared more towards the occasional crafter. I just wasn’t interested in tube tops and tying a ton of tulle strips to elastic. Both of my girls love to play dress up so I decided to make something built to last rather than for one day.

I settled on using Rae Hoekstra’s Flashback Skinny Tee for the tops and drafting my own circle skirts for the bottoms. I did not tell the girls my plan. If I had they would have thrown a fit of unhappiness. They wanted frilly collars like the fairies in their activity book. Instead we took the girls to JoAnn’s and planted them in front of the athletic sparkle fabrics. Then I gentle steered them towards two fabric that came in multiple colorways. Lu immediately latched onto pink! Charlie took some convincing, but we got her to agree to gold.

That one trip to JoAnn’s ended up supplying everything we needed to produce two fairies. While I waited in line to get the fabric cut, my husband and the girls ended up finding the dress up clothes area and procured 2 sets of wings and 2 sequin crowns. Not a prefect match to the fabrics but they worked out perfectly. With an armful of sequins we headed to the register and all our Halloween costume shopping was complete!

The dresses were so easy to complete. Not my finest work, but perfect for the holiday. Charlie’s also served as her birthday dress. Her birthday is right before Halloween, so we threw a costume party at the park and our newly 3 year old daughter was super happy. It was also impossible to miss them with the sun shining off all those sparkles!

As a wonderful bonus, we had a super generous employee at the fabric cutting counter and I now have enough left over material to make the girls something else as well. I’m thinking coordinating gymnastics leotards would be super fun. Now I just have to find time to actually sew them up!

1Oct2017

Hand Me Down Dress

by alwaysacraftylady

My sweet baby. She’s on the cusp of turning 3 and becoming more independent with each day that passes. In this dress she looks like an angel.

The dress pattern is Simplicity 9605 which was published in 2001, but this style has been popular for decades. In fact this dress is 15 years old. I made it back when I was 20 and my cousin was 2! My aunt held onto it for all these years hoping I would have my own daughter and she could pass it down. Luckily she found it before my girls grew out of it!

She’s also lucky my kids grow slowly as I made a size 2. My cousin was also quite a tiny toddler. As you can see this dress is likely to get a lot more wear. YAY!

Oh sweet goodness. Look at that Joann’s quilting cotton. 15 years ago that’s pretty much the only fabric I used to sew clothing. Most of the rest of the store was filled with polyester (not much has changed) and the wall of pretty cottons was so much more appealing to both my wallet and my taste in colors.

Heart pocket! I’m thanking past-me for adding this sweet detail.

Underneath is a full petticoat in the same pink cotton. All these layers give the skirt a nice body that is missing from a lot of other patterns.

It was so fun looking at the guts of the dress and noticing which techniques I used finish seams and such. I don’t usually bother with much finishing work on clothes for myself, but gifts are a different story. I always make sure everything is neat and tidy. In this dress it looks like I tried to use the selvedge of the materials as much as possible. I didn’t own a serger or pinking sheers at the time.

Charlie loves this dress. We started going to church over the summer and she always wants to wear her pink twirly dress. It is just perfect for wearing to service even though she mostly goes to the toddler room. In my opinion, one should always dress for church. And nearly every week one of the older ladies stops me to comment on Charlie. So many of them made dresses like this for their own daughters and it warms their hearts to see that someone still sews up these styles.

Now I’m contemplating making this pattern again. I have some vague memories of it going together well even if more involved. I’m thinking it would make a perfect Christmas dress for Charlotte because she’s too old for the style. Maybe I’ll make something similar for Lu. Is five too old for pinafores?

17Mar2017

A Very Disney Birthday

by alwaysacraftylady

Five feels like such a milestone age. Five! A year of transition as Lu moves from toddler to kid and preschool to kindergarten. She’s learning to read and makes some rather fantastically creative art work. To celebrate we treated the girls to their very first trip to Disneyland.

Sure, I could have bought them t-shirts at Target or grabbed something from their dress up closet, but where’s the fun in that? Naturally the sewing momma had to make them something special.

First up, the birthday girl’s dress.

I started with the idea of a dress with a circle skirt and a big ruffle. The base is my favorite girl’s pattern the Geranium Dress from Made by Rae. The bodice was lengthened and the skirt swapped for the circle. I grabbed plenty of this Princess Emoji fabric from Michael Levine’s one rainy lunch break. I find a lot of licensed Disney fabric to be pretty ugly, but this was cute and some quick texts to my mom for her expert opinion confirmed I was making the right choice.

Lu’s dress was tricked out with rick rack and piping at the waist and hem. Quite cute! I had a hard time picking trims without spending a small fortune.

I purposefully picked something sleeveless because March is really hit or miss weather wise. Two days before out trip it was over 80F, but the weather cooled drastically by our trip to the park. Thank goodness I also grabbed some organic cotton knit in bright pink to make a t-shirt and leggings. Poor birthday girl would have been cold without them.

So, what about that ruffle I mentioned? Lu didn’t want it! I was left with about a yard of leftover fabric! Naturally that meant Charlie got her own dress too. I made a really basic Geranium dress for her as well and dressed it up with a little rick rack I found in my notions box. Lucky little sister. A red school shirt and pair of tights rounded out her princess look without needing to spend anymore money. Hooray! Disney is expensive!

Lucy showing Sleeping Beauty the Aurora emoji on her skirt, priceless.

Those dresses would have been enough, but I still have a couple more tricks up my sleeve.

This sweet little dress was made for Valentine’s Day. Charlie loves Minnie Mouse, so she was wild for the fabric. Plus she’s decided her favorite color is pink just like Lucy. Charlie’s in a sister worship phase that is so cute and sometimes frustrating.

The pattern was the Geranium Dress you’ve seen a million times and the fabric was from JoAnn’s. Just a nice basic yet fun dress she can wear any day of the week.

I made Lu a Valentine’s skirt too, but she didn’t get to wear it since her school requires uniforms. The Doc MsStuffins’ tiered skirt came in handy for our day at California Adventure. It rained sideways for two hours, but I don’t think Lu even noticed after meeting 6 princesses at breakfast.

I never did get a great picture of her outfit, but she is wearing a hand knit sweater with her new skirt, so plenty of mom-made clothing on display.

Our trip was wonderful, if exhausting. Special shout out to my mom, sister, and brother in law for tagging along as well as my husband for wrangling the two year old so I could geek out with my newly 5 year old girly girl Lu. It was totally magical.

In other sewing news, I’ve been working on a big project for myself, a new sloper. The sloper itself is done and just needs a write up and my first dress using it is in the muslin stage. Exciting, but slower work on top of the never ending cold I picked up at the Happiest Place on Earth.

16Jun2016

Upton 2.0

by alwaysacraftylady

This week I decided to tackle the Upton Dress again. I thought my last version was too big so this time I went down one full size to a 12 in the shoulders/bust and a 14 waist/hip. But before I talk about the outcome, can we admire my fabric choice?

I looooooooove this fabric, a cotton sateen I bought on sale at JoAnn’s. It’s not often that I find something so wonderful in that big box filled with disgruntled employees. In fact I’d been all ready to compare JoAnn’s to purgatory, but then I had the best visit I’ve ever had. I found this fabric, the customer services was down right friendly, and they actually had almost everything I needed in stock.

Anyways this is a stretch sateen. It was marked hand wash/dry on low and I almost passed it by because I’m not hand washing my dresses. But it was inexpensive and I decided it wouldn’t be a huge loss if I washed it and ruined the fabric. Thankfully it survived the maiden journey just fine.

And the dress turned out quite lovely, but I have a couple grumbles. This is the smallest size through the shoulders and still feels wide. I know others loved the open neckline, but its maybe a touch too much for me. It is still a hair too wide in the back.

My other grumble is the skirt feels much narrower than 64 3/8″ through the hip. I roughly measured and it came up more like 58″, but I’m not going to stress about it. As you can see in the photos it looks good. But it feels constricting though the stomach even though the fabric has good stretch for a woven. What is likely the issue is that my hips go out in a dramatic fashion. Much faster than the hip curve of the pattern. And most of the tester versions I’ve seen are on ladies who have slimmer hips than my build. So the gored version just isn’t as nice to wear as the pleated skirt.

The back turned out totally awesome. I’ve really been nailing the invisible zip installation recently and I’m a huge fan of the V neckline in the back.

So I’m going to wear this a few more time and see how I feel before I made another. I have a few yards of some linen that would be just perfect for this pattern, but I want to feel more confident before breaking it out. Maybe the solution is a 12/14 back and a 12/16 front. I think also a different dart shape for the front lower bust darts. All easy fixes when I’m ready.

Also, I realize I’m nit picking. This dress is about 1000% better than anything I could buy commercially. We went to a party last night and someone who works in fashion complimented my dress! It was really exciting.

25May2016

Art Deco Separates

by alwaysacraftylady

My love affair with separates continues! And mostly it is thanks to the patterns from Sewaholic! Having skirt patterns pre-drafted to a pear shape is making my life so much easier! I have many pretty blouse patterns I’ve never made because finding commercially made skirts is so frustrating! I’ve tried making skirts too, but the all too often looked homemade. This is the year I change that trend.

This is the Gabriola skirt. You might not recognize it because the pattern is for a maxi length skirt and its supposed to be made with a drapey fabric. But I like to make things my own, so I hacked a ton of length off the bottom and made it in denim. Rules? What rules?

And because my goal is to make my skirts appear less homemade I put in an exposed metal zipper. It is not my best zipper installation of all time, but it looks pretty good. Then I top stitched every single seam. And I love the lines of the skirt! It reminds me so much of those 1920s and 1930s bias cut dresses!

Here is where you can see the combination of denim and this front point isn’t perfect. But whatever. Most women seem to think leggings are appropriate to wear out on public, so I’ll forgive a few oddly draping spots in my skirts. Still way way way better than anything I’ve seen in a store in many many years.

And I’ve wanted a jean skirt for quite a while. Summer at my job is very very casual and heck even during the year a dark denim skirt wouldn’t be out of place. So I picked up this fabric at JoAnn’s on sale figuring I could use it for another Hollyburn skirt. But recently I’ve really enjoyed wearing skirts that fit closer through the hip. It seems more flattering to my shape. That’s when I decided to go for the Gabriola instead.

The blouse is also new! It is Jennifer Lauren’s Afternoon Blouse and another lovely nod to retro shapes. The hardest part of this pattern is taping all the pieces together! Sigh, I love a printed pattern so much more than a pdf, but this pattern kept calling to me, so I took the plunge. So glad I did. Jennifer currently drafts her patterns for a D cup, so I cut a straight size 18 and it worked perfectly. Plenty of room in the cut on sleeves (so rare for me) and I’m happy with the fit for a casual summer blouse. The fabric is from the collection London Calling from Robert Kaufman. I’m pretty sure I bought it to make the girls something, but too bad. Mine now.

I’m tempted to make the dress version, but I can’t decide if it will just end up looking like a tent. I’d say I should try it for a weekend dress, but I have plenty of those already. I think I’ll ponder a little longer.

Really I like both of these pieces a lot and I know they will get plenty of use once our weather warms again (its only in the high 60s right now). I have some striped chambray set aside for another skirt and some Liberty of London yardage for another blouse. I’ll get to them eventually.

And hey! The outfit even gets a thumbs up from Charlie!