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