Procrastinated green

Well, the making of this was not procrastinated, but the posting of it was...although...maybe "forgotten about for a while" is more accurate than "procrastinated"...

Anyway.

We've established that my go-to clothing items to make for the kiddo, in terms of "things he will wear," are jackets, yes?  So, hey, guess what I made for him...

And, yes, it's green.

Blue Cat

So after I made this jacket, the kiddo thought it was great fun to pat the fluffy sleeves.  I had a bit of the blue left over, so I asked if he'd like me to make something for him from it.

He said a jacket.

I said there wasn't enough for that.

Then he said a blanket.

I said there definitely wasn't enough for that, although maybe there was enough for a scarf?  He was not impressed with that idea.

Eventually I thought of making a plush of some kind and asked if he's like a blue kitty.  He did indeed like that idea.

I initially thought I'd use the old teddy bear pattern, copied ages ago from a 1980s craft book, that I've been known to make the ears pointy and add a tail, hey presto it's a kitty.  It's not very large, though, and I'd still have lots (relatively) of the cloth left.

Then I remembered the Nunodoll cat pattern that I'd enlarged to 150% a few years ago...  I had to get creative and shorten some bits and ignore the nap on other bits, but I made it work...more or less...

I improvised the "eyes" and nose, and, yes, that nose and the insides of the ears are made from the pink velour used for the same jacket.

This pattern looks a bit daunting--at least for me, who is most definitely not inclined to making plush animals--but it's well-drafted and goes together easily.  I had to fold a bit of length out of the neck/shoulders area (and corresponding part of the chest piece) and didn't make the fold transition as smooth as it could've been, so there's an awkward angle in the back that I didn't notice until I was in the stuffing stage, so I decided it didn't bother me enough to fix (even though it would have been very easy to fix...)

 

The ears are hand stitched--I've tried, in past iterations, sewing them into the head seams.  The result is a bit too dog-like, so it was worth it to do the hand stitching.  I also machine sew a bit of the head to the neck, just so I don't have to hand stitch all the way around, because I am me.

It's a bit large for that actual pet collar, but I did print it at 150%, so that's not surprising.

 Chip wants you to know he was in the sun first.

Roll over the new year

I'm making an effort to actually, y'know, sew from my stash (this isn't a new year's resolution--I don't do those...partly because I still haven't broken the resolution I made going into 1987, which, made to annoy my cousins, was to not watch Top Gun.  So.)  I have another hoodie for the kiddo lined up to make, but I decided to do a ridiculous jacket for myself first.

At the end of November, I thrifted another grab bag of cloth.  It was mostly woven cotton quarter yards of various shapes, plus a bit of upholstery weight cloth and an abandoned baby blanket (probably) project that consisted of a square of pre-quilted brown sewn around the edges to a square of minky dot in...let's call it aqua.  (Sky, turquoise, robin's egg, or light teal are also possibilities.)  I picked apart the stitching and have been thinking about using the quilted brown in a coat for the kiddo (there's...there's not a lot of variety out there when it comes to sewing for boys, and he really likes jackets, anyway), but had no ideas for the minky dot.  I decided I should use it soon, somehow, just to get it out of the stash--bulky minky takes up lots of room, after all.

There definitely wasn't enough of it to use alone in a jacket, so I shuffled through the stash and ended up with some pink velour that was thrifted a while ago with, yes, no clear idea what would be done with it.  So!  Together they'd go.

But what about a pattern?  My initial idea was for something that would have the minky as the sleeves and also across the chest, and, while I do indeed have a pattern or two that do that, they were more complicated than I wanted for this project.  Raglan sleeves, though, I decided, would be just fine.

'course it turns out that the only raglan sleeve jacket pattern I have

does not do anything else I wanted.

However...the shirts in this same envelope...