Tulle Star: In Action!

 

Shirt

 Not-really-corset

Skirt (later slightly modified)

 

 Special guest: Neighborcat Tyler

Burda 6800--finally!

In late 2014, I decided I really wanted to sew a motorcycle jacket from a chintz fabric that I had recently thrifted.  In early 2015, Burda released this printed pattern AND THEN Joann actually had a Burda pattern sale, so I bought this right away

And then I did nothing with it for nearly five years

Duvet Retro

I am one of those people who likes a lot of blankets, while the other person in bed...not so much.  So, ages ago, I made a just-for-me comforter, two yards by 40"

I recently took a good look at it and realized that I had worn it threadbare in many places, as well as being reminded of the random holes and popped seams, and also the colors were very much not my thing these days.

But, it still worked perfectly well as a blanket, so I decided I'd make a new cover for it, and I decided to go ahead and make it a duvet cover.

Impulse Curtains (and tablecloth and more curtains and a windowsill runner and oh look another curtain)

Two days ago was the first Saturday of the month, which--around here, at least--is "half off everything in the store" day at all the Goodwills.  I have recently taken back up with houseplants again, and had the idea I could go to the Goodwill that I hadn't gone to earlier in the week and grab some cache pots for cheap, and also maybe find a mirror to put behind the shelf recently installed in here to hold houseplants.

I did find a few cache pots, but no suitable mirrors.  And I also saw this

Marked $9.99, so $5, with indeterminately many yards rolled up in the tube, and with stripes in a nice watermelon-y pink color.  At first I scoffed, because what use would I have for so much interior decorating weight cloth?

Last Big Project of the Year

Not 'complicated' big as much as '90" square big, plus matching pillow shams' big.

So.

Many years ago--but I'm not sure exactly how many, because I seem not to have taken a photo of it when it was completed--I made this patchwork bedspread and matching pillow shams for our bed

 And I still like it!  And it is mostly still in good shape...mostly.

Another Quick Pillowcase

Not as quick as the last quick pillowcase, because this one involved a zipper.  A zipper isn't an issue, but there was an unexpected obstacle

 Can you see the problem?

Maybe a different angle will help

If You Sew It Together, It Goes Together

For years I've been sewing doll clothes with mixed prints.  I used to have a list of rules I'd use for choosing what print went with what other prints, but, sometimes, I'd notice two prints next to each other in the storage spaces and think they looked good together.  Whichever way, I always got compliments on the finished doll clothes.  (I used to sell a lot, before Etsy went evil, so the compliments were often backed up with purchases.)  So, eventually, my A #1 Rule For Mixing Prints became: If you sew it together, it goes together.

People might question separates of mixed prints, but, if the different prints are sewn together?  Who are they to question the designer?  Humans are all about pattern recognition, too, so they can find ways to make the prints coordinate, if they really want to think about it.

Now, another thing about my attitude toward mixing prints is this: if you can easily give a name to the entire class of one of the prints, then the brain parses it as A Whole Thing, and it might as well be a solid.  Stripes, checks/plaid/gingham/madras, dots, leopard print, camouflage.  But not florals (and I haven't quite figured out why)--florals, however, will easily mix with all of those others.

So, yeah, I'm sitting here now wearing a dress I sewed with a mix of a madras plaid and a Star Wars print and really feeling like it's not much of a pattern mixing achievement, because, pfft, "plaid" is neutral.

But, I wondered...could more aggressive print mixing work on a grown human, or is it something I should keep for dolls (and small children)?

So I made this

As far as I can tell, yeah, it does totally work.

Meows Revisited

Finally got a backing on the cat patch test quilt top!  There's no batting, just a layer of double knit cream (which I didn't even realize could be a considered a pun--cream? cats?  yeah--until typing this) polyester on the back now, courtesy the thrift grab bag cloth I'm trying to sew away. (There's still about a yard of the cream double knit left...)

It's been cold and windy so I wasn't sure when would be a good time to get photos...then I walked past the kiddo's room, with the blanket on the bed and The Floof on the blanket...

Great pictures of the blanket?  Nah.  Great pictures of the cat?  Yep.

A few pictures show the backing, and where I did do some super simple quilting to the upper layer, but I know you're looking at the cat.  That's completely understandable.

Meows

I wanted to combine some cotton prints that people had sent me--my usual vehicle for that sort of thing is in doll clothes, but there were larger amounts of these, so my brain said "Hey how 'bout some patchwork?"  And then it said "Not the usual complete randomness pulled from the scrap bin, either--let's try some proper blocks!"  followed by "And it'll be the cat face block you made up a while ago!  Only lots of 'em this time!" (There's a caveat here that it's very likely that this block already exists and I just haven't seen it elsewhere, because it's pretty logical.)

So I made up 16 of those blocks, but didn't sew on the lower corner pieces until the whole thing had been laid out and I figured out which non-block prints would be between each of them, and I laid them out so they were offset from each other in each vertical row.  Then I sewed on the lower corners and proceeded to sew the completed blocks to the appropriate prints.

Like this!

The whole thing ended up being about 36" x 54", so I added enough to the edges to make it about twin size.

Like this!

I chose that particular star block for the corners because it used the same "half triangle + quarter triangle of the same color + contrast quarter triangle" shape that makes up the cat eyes and nose sub-assemblies.  The gray floral used for the cat faces was used again in the border because I have so much of it, and the green check floral was used because it had been in a grab bag I'd thrifted (solely because the grab bag had 14(!) feedsacks in it) and I wanted to use all of this print up (I came close, but at least  the small amount left fits easily into the doll cloth dresser.  Have I mentioned that my 'big pieces of cloth' cloth shelf kinda broke a bit?  So 'storing less cloth there' is something of a priority right now...)

The kiddo claimed this for himself while I was laying out the cat faces on the kitchen table (he declared it to be lit) so it's fine that there are design decisions that bother me now--I want to make a template for a single piece to replace the triangle-square-triangle bits that go between the ears and eyes, and then I want to use that in the blocks at the tops of the rows that use the plain piece to offset the cats (sorry, I can't think of a way to phrase that better right now), and I also want to add ear triangles to the plain offset blocks on the bottoms of the rows.  I probably won't bother with batting and quilting--the kiddo doesn't lack for fluffy patchwork blankets, so a 'good for summer' thinner blanket will be just fine!

...if I ever actually finish it...

(and of course this happened)

Oh!  And!  I did make a doll dress from the two prints that started all of this

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.

It's Easy Being...Red

I volunteered to chaperone the kiddo's field trip to a science center, fun!

But.

Everyone had to wear a red shirt, or "as close to that as possible."  I delved into my closet, pretty sure I didn't have anything red, but was surprised that I didn't even have dark pink.  Huh.  So!  A trip to the thrift store on 99¢ day and I was able to find a short sleeve button up woven shirt that I turned into...

The 1990s, You Say?

I wanted to do something quick, and with a...somewhat out of date print synthetic jersey knit--so, hey, why not use an outdated pattern, too?

I've gone up a pattern size (...um..at least...) since the last time I used this pattern, but I'd apparently only used the higher neckline view then, so I was able to cut out the lower neckline in a better size, then added tissue to the edge of the back piece to grade it up a size.  I left the sleeve cap alone, and it  fit well enough that I'd forgotten that I'd forgotten to alter it until after the sleeves were sewn on, so...that worked out.  I did make the short sleeve shorter, for purely aesthetic reasons (as opposed to my usual "the sleeve is shorter because there wasn't enough cloth left to eke out the length shown" reason.)

And I made the whole dress shorter, too--again, for aesthetic reasons, since there's still a lot of this cloth left, so no need to scramble around limited resources.

I did a Meh job on stitching the hems--I'm so much more accustomed to facing necklines, instead of just plain turning 'em.  And I remembered to press the sleeve hem allowances before attaching them to the dress, so I wouldn't have to wrestle the whole assembly around while trying to measure and iron things.

The result is not great, but it's definitely acceptable

I feel like I was dressing the way I often dress my dolls.

Speaking of dolls, I used a bit of this giant gray floral print to make a doll dress

 ...and Chip is always around...

My Stash to Bust

I took some quick pictures of the condition of my cloth stash storage, which I keep intentionally (kinda) small.

In the closet is a bookcase...well, actually, it's an abandoned retail display case, so it's sturdy enough to hold the cloth on its commercial-grade shelves.

And...yeah, it's pretty packed.  (Above is the bin of scraps, next to the  suitcase full of lace and trim and bias tape.)  This shelf is for pieces that are a yard and larger (with a pair of rolls of fabric leaning beside it.)

Smaller lengths of cloth go into the dresser

Almost everything in here was acquired with doll clothes in mind, top two drawers for broadcloth, bottom drawer for knits, other drawer for random whatever else.  The top two drawers used to be much fuller, until I decided the density was annoying and started pulling out coordinated sets of prints, some of which got combined with pieces from the shelves to form this pile

There are eight different groups of cloth here, most of which may be enough to use for blanket tops?  I'll find out eventually...

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.

Swirl Skirt Activate!

Oh so serious

Cat makes it better

Cat always makes it better

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.

As if that weren't enough

I also started today on putting together the patchwork creeper blanket I'm making the kiddo for his impending birthday

WRONG WRONG WRONG WRONG

Or, the way I do all-in-one facings on sleeveless bodices without center seams, because I dislike hand sewing.  (Although I don't dislike it as much as I used to...maybe someday I'll start doing this the way the patterns tell  me to.  Maybe.)