Gray A-Line Fix Fix

About two years ago, I sewed a gray wool blend A-line skirt.  It's a good basic piece that was too small at the waist.

I decided at some point to 'fix' that...and managed to make it too large.  Things weren't helped by my brilliant idea to make the newer, larger waistband from a nice soft knit.

Now, I lived through the late 90s, so a skirt that sits below my natural waistline is not out of the question, but the effect of this one doing that was that the hem landed at a rather dowdy length.

Plus, I had applied that soft comfortable new knit waistband in my usual "sew to the back and flip around to the front, where the edge is stitched down" way, and that does not work as well on a soft floppy knit as it does on a crisp, interfaced woven.

I finally sat down and really fixed it.

Once Again: Doll Clothes

It started simple, with putting fabric scraps into a better storage situation, and happening to notice a few pieces of a print I thought I had completely used up long ago, and it looked like there was just enough to make a dress bodice

 However, while looking for a print to coordinate with it, my brain veered off into thinking about using textured fabric.  Which I didn't do for this dress (although the alien print is a very lightweight twill), but I tried, to varying degrees, on a few other things

Back to Clothes (kinda)

A local Walmart remodeled, and had marked some of its mill-end precuts down in preparation.  I picked up a roll of a very loose (and very synthetic) off white and teal stripe knit, with pale gold metallic fibers, for 75¢

The only thing I wanted to make from it was cut and sewn tights, and I finally did that.

Badly.

Because it didn't stretch quite as much as my pattern wanted, so I cut the legs off of my first attempt and made a new upper part, with some leg on it, to sew the cut-off legs to.  And the fabric I chose...also was not as stretchy as needed, so I re-cut that part with my leggings pattern.  It's not pretty, but the solid contrast will be hidden by skirts and the legs are no longer too short.

Then I thought I could eke out another pair, making the legs a few inches longer to compensate.  That also did not go well.  I ended up sewing the inseam higher, then sewing that now-short top part to the top part cut off of the first attempt pair.  Also not pretty, also never will be seen.

also still hard to photograph appealingly

Then I sewed the large remaining strip into a tube with cluny lace on the ends to make a scarf.

 

This already has so many picks in it...  It will be months before it's cool enough again to wear the tights or the scarf, so we'll see how long it takes, then, before they all become masses of picks and pulls.  I hope I can get my 75¢ + labor out of them.  At least this fabric is out of the stash now.

North Sink Window Curtain

Finally, the last curtain for this project!  I had not made any plans at all for this window, because I knew I'd be dealing with scraps at this point.

I had initially thought I'd have a few inches of the brown and brown plaid left, but I did not.

I had initially thought maybe I'd have enough of the large floral--in the form of the fabric cut to form the arches on the door curtains--to make another curved valance for this window.  I did not.

I finally went with a simple short panel, gathered onto the curtain rod.  The length was determined by pieces of the large floral, which I had to piece to get enough width to gather nicely, and that width was determined by what was left of the sheet lining fabric.

 

I sewed the floral to the lining, right sides together and leaving an opening to turn, then stitched all around the edges (which is how I closed the turning opening), then pieced rejected poplin strips that hadn't worked for rod pockets on other parts of this project and sewed that on and the whole project was done.

I know I will only like them more as I start to forget how annoying they were to make.

Door Curtains

I was very happy with how the curtains turned out for the east window, so I jumped right into making the panels for the back door.  That enthusiasm did not stick around for the whole project.

Nothing was tricky or hard, it was just all so boring.

 

East Curtains

I had started with around four yards of the 58" wide secondhand heavyweight cream and espresso plaid (trying to think of a charitable way to say "brown and brown.")  The fabric had been in the stash for years, thinking it would be a...cape?  So it was a surprise when I recently realized I could use it for interior decorating purposes.  It was definitely interior decorating weight, and I suspected it was from the 1970s, if not earlier.  Pressing it with a hot iron yielded a smell that backed that idea up.

I knew that wouldn't be enough on its own to cover everything I wanted to cover, so I got into the stash and pulled out a heavier cotton chintz-type floral print (it's unglazed, so it's technically not chintz.)  There was three yards of 45" of that, which made a possibly more suitable amount of fabric for this project, but I wanted more to make sure. After poking through the stash more, I settled on what was left of the small floral poplin from another project where I (unexpectedly) also needed more fabric. That brought me to a bit over eight yards.  I threw in a twin size cotton sheet--bought ages ago to be potential backing for a quilt--to use as lining, and was  ready to start.

But First, A Tablecloth

I was ready to start making new curtains for the door in the dining area, and the two windows in the kitchen, but, first, I wanted to make a new tablecloth.

It was right around a year ago that I covered the table with some brightly printed Mexican oilcloth.  I do love how easy it is to clean, but I was mildly annoyed by how easy it also was to rip/cut, and multiple people were annoyed by how the print was so busy that every small item laid on it just...disappeared.

I did like how nice and neat it was to have the tablecloth wrapped around the edges and stapled in place.  I wanted to keep the fabric tablecloth able to be removed and washed (and I did pre-launder the fabric this time unlike the last time I sewed a tablecloth, which ended up being so off grain and shrinky that it was not really usable after being washed once), so no stapling this time.  I figured running elastic all around the edges would provide the same effect.

It did not.

So, after accepting that the elastic was just making areas bulge strangely, I put the least amount of thought into it as possible and just removed the elastic and hemmed all the edges, letting it have a dinky little 3" drop.

The dinky little 3" drop doesn't look as silly as I thought it would.

After finishing the tablecloth, it was time to cut up the rest of the plaid fabric and start figuring out what to do for the curtains

I had...vague plans.

One Curtain At A Time

It had been long enough since I last made curtains that I had time to forget how much I don't like making curtains, so I decided it was time to make some more curtains.

I started easy, with the exterior door in the basement.  The curtain I replaced was something I had made...15? years ago.  The fabric was from the old Walmart $1/yard mill end tables; it was a very 1970s kind of multi greens acrylic yarn open weave TEXTURE fabric, which I still think is hilarious, but it hasn't been my personal style for a while.

I had a few lace curtains in my fabric stash, including a coordinating valance and curtain panel that seemed just right.  There's only on curtain rod on the door, though, so I decided to gather the valance to the width of the panel and sew them together above and below the rod pocket.  I was pretty proud of that solution.

Turned out the lace curtain panel was ten inches too short to cover the entire door window--in retrospect, the valance was probably intended to be hung at the top of the window, with the panel hung about halfway down.  I had forgotten people did that with curtains until I started looking at references.

Since the whole point of having a curtain on that door was to make it hard to see inside, any kind of gap was unacceptable.

I did have another lace panel, with a folded-over top section to simulate a valance.  Turned out that it was about twelve inches too long. It also had a small stain on it, so I started to put it away, thinking that, whatever project I ended up making with it, I'd need to cut it

wait

...I could cut it...for this project...

So I cut off the fold-over top part just below the bottom of the panel side of the rod pocket (I'd picked out the rod pocket stitching years ago), then measured up from the bottom and cut the panel there.  I aligned the top of the cut edge of the panel with the upper fold of the valance, then stitched above and below the rod pocket lines.

Just right.

And I can still see out clearly enough to watch the groundhog family that lives just beyond our property line.

An Apron Years in the Making

I thrifted the cloth years ago and got the pattern years ago and bought a bias tape maker years ago and got one of those sewing machine presser feet to help apply bias tape years ago and cut out the pattern pieces years ago

and let it all sit. For years.

I finally decided I would finally make it, view C of Simplicity 8904

Only, of course, I had to make some changes.

So. I make doll clothes.

And I've decided to post about them here more than I used to, mostly to account for my time.

And, oh, what time I put into these

I have not yet, however, put time into photographing them individually. (I hadn't even found shoes for all of them when I took the photo above.)  I started sewing the raindrop dress, on the Barbie in the center, on Friday afternoon, and finished with the patchwork dress at the top on late Sunday.  I had only planned to make the raindrop dress and the pink and white dot dress on the Momoko in the lower right corner.  But.  I kept having ideas.

And while I definitely did not pace myself while making these, I am attempting to pace myself when it comes to photographing them, because I know my natural inclination is to photograph and edit and post them all at once, which would probably take an entire day.  I'd like to do other things...

It is. So boring.

Free motion quilting, that is.  I suspected I would feel that way about it, and, yep!  I worked on quilting this on and off for what seemed like forever, but was actually only 3½ hours of elapsed time.  I don't know how much more on than off it was, either--there were lots of avoidance interludes.  And snacks.

Not Doll Dresses! Not Human Clothes, Either

(with the caveat that I did sew a few more pieces of doll clothes today, but I gave them to someone and did not take photos.)

Poking around in the archives here will show that I do like making patchwork, but have pretty much never made a quilt (with one single straight line exception.)  I have had a stash of pieced quilt tops in my closet for years; some I took a good look at it and said "It was fun to make but I am never going to finish that" and donated some to the craft thrift store.  I still had the stash of pieced quilt tops, it was just a smaller stash, somewhat more aligned with my personal tastes.

A big part of the reason I hadn't finished them was because...well...batting is expensive. So, when one of the local Walmart stores remodeled somewhat recently and put two rolls of batting on clearance, I snapped those up.  And then they sat in the closet. For quite a while.  Kind of in the way (I had to move them every time I wanted to use a backdrop for doll photos that wasn't the painted stage backdrop.)

So, instead of realizing that I could just put them in the top of the closet where the quilt tops were, I decided that Now Is The Time To Make Quilts.

Which required finally acquiring a quilting/darning foot, which I got cheap via eBay.  I absolutely do not plan to make quilting something I do regularly, so cheap is fine.

And I do understand that I will probably never do enough free motion quilting to be anywhere near good at it, but I did want to practice on something smaller first.  I got into the unsorted scraps from relatively recent projects and chose a pink chambray and a green plaid, and added a thrifted floral that I didn't have a lot of

Then I cut 96 little triangles that I sewed into 48 squares that I sewed into chevrons.  I loosely stitched some batting off-cuts to roughly the same size, then made and pinned the quilt sandwich with more of the floral as the backing fabric.

I moved my sewing machine to the end of my sewing table, and put the ironing board next to the table (where I normally sit) to help support the thing--it's 16" x 21" so I probably could have worked with it with the sewing machine in the normal place, but that won't be an option for anything larger so I wanted to get a feel for the new position.  I still haven't figured out the best place to put the lamp, but, overall, it worked.

So. More doll dresses.

At the end of the previous post, I mentioned that I was thinking about updating the pattern I used for those dresses, and I have now done that

 

 ...and then some