Simple little zip bag

Me being me, it got more complicated the more I worked on it, but it's not the level of refined complexity I see on some of the blogs I follow.

It's roughly 9"x5.25"x1", made from the two coordinating bird prints given to me by CheshireTiffy, and the softly splotchy pink and purple was in one of the cloth assortments I thrifted in recent years, plus one of a gazillion yellow zippers from the enormous package of yellow zippers Mom bought somewhere around 1980 (there are 19 left.)  There's iron-on medium weight nonwoven interfacing on the back of the pink strip on the outside and a sturdy nonwoven behind the pocket, too.  No pattern involved, of course. (See: me making things harder than they should be.)  There wasn't much more of the bird prints than seen here, so I'm happy with that tiny bit of pattern matching in the first picture (as unnoticeable subtle as it is.)

Making this was really just an exercise in using the bird prints, so I'm not sure what I'll do with it--it's very likely it'll end up as a teacher gift next school year...

I tried to get all of the cat hair off for the pictures, but I can see that I missed a few.  Things like this don't help.

Little Weekend Sewing

Sewed some doll dressed over the weekend, a simple shift for the big dolls (which was ironed, really it was) and a frilly froufrou dress (hooray for fork bows) for Barbie size

I also made two Blythe-size dresses, not shown here because they're VERY BELATED birthday presents for a friend.  I started a patchwork zippered pouch that I should be able to finish today--going to go try to make some black eyed pea/spinach sabzi first.

So, what to make next?

I was ready last night to jump in to cutting something out, deciding to do an idea I'd had for a while...then realized that the reason I hadn't made it yet was because I hadn't yet prewashed the intended cloth.  It was late, but there was enough time to get it washed and into the dryer (note: we currently live in a HOA-controlled subdivision, clotheslines aren't allowed, sigh.)  I pulled out a stack of vaguely similar color prints and got them all into the washing machine and out of the dryer this morning.

(Picture taken pre-laundering.)

Will I now proceed to use them all for projects in the near future?  Ummm...

But

Whenever I do decide to use them, they'll be ready!

Swirl Skirt Activate!

Oh so serious

Cat makes it better

Cat always makes it better

Swirl Skirt, Final Form

Have I mentioned that I'm good at making things more complicated than they need to be?  Because I'm good at making things more complicated than they need to be.

The first overcomplication with this patchwork bias swirl skirt project was probably, technically, deciding to make it patchwork.  The next overcomplication ended up being deciding that the bias swirl skirt pattern I already had wouldn't do, because it was for too-small a size and because I wanted the swirls more swirly, so I messed around with modification, eventually getting a nice swirl and realizing that I didn't need to make the pattern width wider--just make more of them instead.  So I decided to make a (wearable) muslin!  I have a history of just jumping right in, so the "no, actually, you really should do this with every new pattern" step of muslin making seemed like another overcomplication...until it was being finished and I remembered why I dislike hemming scalloped hems, so I made modifications and another wearable muslin and ended up with a great pattern.

Which I didn't use after all.

I went back to the original Simplicity 6261 pattern, assembling a first panel (patchwork, remember) with a tweaked hemline, and proceeded to use that pattern piece to as a guide for assembling and cutting the rest of the patchwork panels.  I do still prefer the look of the more extreme swirl, but I thought I would be more likely to run out of the prints I'd chosen for the patchwork if I needed to assemble panels that wide.  Enh, well, turns out that probably wouldn't've been a problem, especially since I used very little of the "I have several yards of this print and I'll probably have to use it when I've run out of all of the smaller pieces" cloth.  (This may be a recurring issue with me and unplanned patchwork.)

And all of the pieced panels went together surprisingly quickly and all of the panels got assembled surprisingly quickly and the waistband went on with very little fuss and then I remembered that my legs are much shorter than pattern illustration legs and the skirt was much longer than I wanted.  "No problem," I thought, "I'll just make an extra deep blind hem."  So I started that, and I know deep blind hems can be made on flared skirts, but I always feel like I'm just making a huge mess when I try, so that idea got nixed.

Sh...should I cut it?  Cut off all that patchwork work?  Well...if I wanted it significantly shorter, then, yes.  So I measured 18" down from the waistband all around, marking with a chalk pencil, then running a line of stitching on either side of that marked line and cutting between those (so the stitching would hold the patchwork seams together after they were cut.)  I then cut that cut-off piece in half along its length, cut it so it was no longer a loop, then sewed one end of one half to the end of the other half and proceeded with making a ruffle.  First I finished what would be the hem edge, then ran the whole thing through the beloved ruffler foot contraption--I made a good guess on where to set the ruffler control screw, and ended up with the ruffled strip being about 8 inches longer than needed, which, if you have experience with these things, you know that "a little longer" is way better than "a little short."  I sewed the ruffle to the hem, leaving a bit unsewn at the beginning so that, when it got all the way back around, I could sew a seam and make it look like I was more precise than I am.  (That...that might be a good summary of my approach to sewing in general...)  Then serged the seam allowance, pressed that hem, and...done?

Was it worth the overcomplicated effort?  I'm not sure yet.  I have no idea if my vague original idea of "patchwork loli garden witch style" is even a do-able thing...

Oh, yeah, the cloth!  It's a fun mix of yardage I thrifted, some pieces that were given to me (thanks again!), a clearance print, and that rarest thing, a print I acquired intentionally (the brick print, which I bought to use for doll diorama backdrops, once upon a time.)  I do love mixing things that were never intended to go together...

Swirlificity

Made some progress on assembling another swirl skirt today--the big thing was starting with the decision not to use the pattern piece I worked out before, since that seemed like it would start to use more cloth than I had chosen for the project.  (In retrospect, nah, it would've been good.)

Chip was very cat about it.

Little Refreshes

So, Tumblr user FallenWithStyle posted a picture of her adorable cat flopped on her ironing board, and I noticed that we have the same iron, which led to follow up pictures of the fortune cookie slips she taped to the iron (no, really, it makes complete sense), which led me to decide that it would be fun to put stickers on my iron.  Which I did today.

And then I decided that, if I wanted to take pictures of this iron in its native habitat, then I really should make a new ironing board cover .  The cover I'd been using was not only stained, but it also didn't fit with my current aesthetic mode and it was just a pillowcase sloppily safety-pinned in place, anyway.  Heh.  So I cut it off in a way that could be used as a pattern and improvised my way into a new, neutral, elasticized replacement with which I'm very happy.  (No pictures of just the cover, though.  That seemed a bit too boring even for me.)

Then, since I had the stickers out, it seemed like a good idea to replace some of the worn and faded old stickers on my serger.  I had, once upon a time, thought about removing all of the stickers, but they've been on so long that the bare plastic is more or less its original color where they were and yellowed where they weren't.  So, hey, since it's splotchy anyway, might as well add more stickers, right?

I'm still working on removing dried paper and adhesive residue where one sticker wrapped around a corner...and then probably a lot more stickers that aren't visible here, because I've learned that paper stickers don't always hold up well--clear plastic and holographic foil stickers are the way to go. *nods*

As long as I was taking a picture of the serger, might as well take a picture of the lockstitch machine.

I thrifted this machine almost three years ago and still adore it.  The bobbin area is very quiet--I tend to think it's out of thread when it's not.  (The noisiest part of it is the badly-designed-attachment of the plate on the handwheel side, which wants to rattle/buzz alarmingly at certain speeds.  That was solved by strategic application of a length of washi tape.)  When the bobbin does start to get noisy, that means it's time to clean out the lint...

And, finally, I took a picture of this just 'cause

It's probably one of my favorite sewing gadgety things.  Does anyone else have one of these?

A big shirt for a little boy

This is the first time I've used McCall's 9240 to make a shirt for the kiddo.

I managed to just barely squeeze the pieces (with nap) out of the one yard length of cloth he picked out when I went through a period of making shirts for him three years ago.  He's...a bit larger now than he was then.  Turns out, though, that this pattern makes a really long shirt (which is obvious, looking at the pattern envelope photo now), so there won't be any problems with, say, shaving length off of each body piece in future iterations, if needed.

I used a stripe print for this first version

because, since it was such a tight squeeze, there wasn't a lot of room for pattern matching across the front opening.  (I'm usually excessively concerned about pattern matching because something that, to me, is a huge giveaway for a home-made item is when the pattern repeats or almost matches on either side of a prominent seam or placket.  I like to avoid that.)

And I finally tried the method for attaching menswear-style sleeves as illustrated on the Male Pattern Boldness blog last year.

I'm very happy to have seen this method, because I like to TOPSTITCH EVERYTHING, but attempting to topstitch sleeves sewn in the way I'm used to always resulted in a rumpled mess.  I also got ambitious and flat felled the side seams.  (Don't look inside.  I haven't sewn a flat felled seam for...um...20 years, so I'm more than a little out of practice...)  And I found fantastically neutral-but-yellow buttons to use...then discovered that I don't have a ¾" template for my buttonholer, so made the holes probably larger than they should be, instead of, y'know, picking out smaller buttons.  And then I remembered why I prefer two-hole buttons.

BUT THAT'S ALL OK BECAUSE I FINISHED IT AND I'LL KNOW WHAT TO BE CAREFUL OF ON THE NEXT SHIRT MADE WITH THIS PATTERN and as soon as I showed it to the kiddo he stripped of the shirt he was wearing to put this on. *thumbs up*

Swirl Skirt In Action

I wore one of the swirl skirts the other day

I'm impressed that I managed to finagle things just right so that the lines of the plaid are nice'n'flat in spinny/fully extended mode.

I'm probably going to sew a button-up shirt for the kiddo next, because I have a print (that he picked out...um...two years ago) that will work with blue thread that's already in the machine.

Squares

I forgot that I'd posted the beginnings of the Creeper blanket, but not the result, and definitely not the Minecrafty pillows, so...

Floofycat shown for scale.  (The Enderman has a bubble print cotton on the back and the Creeper has a firework print...)

Experimental Swirl

I mentioned in the last post that I had an idea for a bias swirl skirt, but needed to experiment with the pattern piece before I committed the Chosen Cloth to it.

The first thing that needed experimentation was the pattern itself, because this is the bias swirl skirt pattern I actually already had

 and at no time in recorded history have I had (or do I ever plan to have) 34½" hips, so that needed to be rectified.  Plus, the shape of this skirt-as-sewn is an A-line, and I wanted something significantly fuller.  PLUS plus, I wanted the swirl shapes to be more extreme.

So, after determining that the three skirt swirl pattern pieces as given were actually identical (my guess is that it was repeated three times to help people figure out if they had enough fabric or not...), I traced off one and started working with extending the swoosh.  I also tried widening the piece, so it would create something that actually fit  over my hips, but I eventually realized that the overall enlargening could be accomplished by simply cutting more than the original six panels, which would also add to the fullness and end up with a gathered waist instead of a fitted waistband.

On to the weird prints for the first experiment skirt...

*tumbleweeds*

Yes, I know, no-one reads this, so no-one noticed that I haven't posted for a long time.  Not to sound whiny, but I've been low-grade sick since December, which might be the reason I've put on juuuuust enough weight that none of my tried'n'true patterns fit properly, which can kinda destroy the desire to sew things with those patterns. (We have acquired a second-hand Xbox 360 and Kinect, so I've started using those for exercise and dance games, when I don't feel too icky.)    A thing that also happened and is probably related to other aspects of feeling no motivation:  My Dad died just before Thanksgiving.  So.

I've only sewn three clothing things in that time (I did sew a few teacher gifts--but no photos--and surprisingly few doll items.)

This simple shell is made from two cotton prints sent to me by a doll friend, using vintage Simplicity 3263

This is made with my heavily altered New Look 6217 (I fused the front pieces into one, with a really deep dart.)  I bought the cloth in a thrift store, but I think it's currently available in JoAnn Fabric.

I still can't decide if it's ~cupcake cute~ or ~aggressively quirky middle age woman~  Go Me on the pattern matching, though.

The last thing I sewed was an experimental mash-up of a couple patterns...which didn't end up the way I envisioned...which is only a technicality, since I can barely get the thing zipped right now.

It was eked out of right around 2 yards of a (thrifted) border print.  I do think there's still potential to the idea, although who knows if I'll ever try it again.

And I cut out pieces for a wearable muslin of a skirt idea I've had for a while--a bias swirl skirt, but compensating for the fact that the 'real' pattern I have is way too small (I wanna lose weight, yes, but not that much weight), and I wanted a more extreme angle to the swirls.  I might be able to convince myself to start sewing it together today...