Sewing and soil

First batch finished. Little Lady is already wearing some of them and while she doesn't want to stand still for a picture she does like wearing them and they thankfully fit well.

For Little Lady:

I also made a t-shirt and pants in both the green and what looks like spotty blue but is actually little blue flowers - green set are in the wash and she's wearing the blue flowers ones right now.

For Little Sir:

My favourites are the animal ones in the middle. He's still in his all-in-ones to sleep for now so I only made him one pair of pants. Still got 9 more sets to do but they're going much quicker now.

And in the middle of all this sewing I managed to do a little gardening today. Something has decapitated virtually all my vegetable seedlings which is really disheartening since I spent a year working organic material into the soil which was a solid slab of clay and that's no exaggeration. One metre down and counting and I was still slicing clay off to get it out of the ground. One thing that has grown and not been eaten however is my grandmothers oregano. Legendary stuff this and in our family like liquid gold because it is the most pungent, flavoursome oregano plant ever. I've tried buying oregano plants in the past and they just can't compare to my Grandma's plant. She had to let her stash die off because she can't tend it anymore and now that mum has killed her plant, I'm the sole guardian of this treasure. In my house it is THE herb to use on steak, a little in scrambled eggs sprinkled with Bulgarian feta, on fried mushrooms with garlic, and in my awesome meatballs in homemade spaghetti sauce, in fact anything to do with tomatoes at all. Looks like a weed in this pic but I love it. Culinary heaven.

The Pyjama Sweat Shop

It's been a steep but thankfully speedy learning curve, this sewing actual clothing thing. My babies can't wear polyester and do you know how many 100% cotton pyjamas are out there for little ones, reasonably priced ones that is? I'm a Target girl not Country Road. 10 pairs? 2 pairs? None, nadda, ziltch. I haven't been able to find any at all. Everything is a polyester blend which means my 2 monkeys will sweat and itch and break out in eczema after just one night wearing them. So I opened (temporarily) my own little sweat shop. Thankyou Spotlight for your recent sales which made it all so much cheaper. Now if I could just win that $20,000 which I have been faithfully presenting my VIP card for for years now I'd be eternally grateful. Imagine all the fabric I could buy with that!! But I digress. Pyjamas.

I couldn't find any patterns I liked online, free or otherwise, and even less when flipping thru the pattern catalogues at Spotlight (as usual- are you starting to see a pattern here? Now you know why I so egotistically called my blog/scrapbook M-A's Designs. I'm very rarely happy with other peoples designs, constantly chopping and changing, and brainstorming my own). So knocked up my own based on the kiddies t-shirts and trackies/shorts which I know a lot of other people have done so that's nothing new. I adjusted lengths, widths, sleeves, waists and necklines to give a more comfy fit for sleeping in and then spent 3 days cutting out them all out.

This and this were an enormous help for a newbie trying to figure out how to do the neckline binding and this for general sewing tips on how to sew a t-shirt. I had already read that pants are sewn front and back first then inside leg as a single seam so just winged it. Note to self: used an 80/12 jersey needle which worked really well on the knit ribbed and cotton interlock fabrics. And tho it's all knit fabric I broke out my new overlocker anyway to neaten all seams before top-stitching anything that needed hemming or reinforcing like the shoulder and crotch. I'm now onto day three of sewing them together and should have half of them finished today. In all I will have made 9 pairs of pants, 19 pairs of shorts, 10 tanks tops, and 21 t-shirts. If my models are willing to stand still for 2 seconds I'll try to post pics of some of the finished pieces once they're done.

Little Lady's Adjustable Apron

My little miss loves to 'help' me in the kitchen. Washing the dishes usually involves pouring water from one cup or bowl into the next but she usually winds up absolutely soaked. Cooking means baking peanut butter biscuits or crumbing chicken and it's incredible how much flour she can embed into her clothes. Solution - an apron that will repel water and food. There are loads of patterns available but I wanted one longer and wider, particularly across the chest. Frankly I just can't leave alone when it comes to following someone elses pattern. I also wanted an apron that would grow with her so I drafted my own pattern of one that completely covers her chest and wraps around her sides with loops at the waist and very long shoulder straps to create an adjustable apron.

I used a cotton print layered under thin PCV with some double fold binding made from the same print material to hold it together and finish the edges.

I added a pocket this morning which helps hold the layers together. It looks huge on her but she's defnately covered. And she loves it.

Christchurch earthquake quilts

Deb from Works in Progress is putting together a few charity quilts for some families who lost their homes in the recent Christchurch earthquake. I've been hoping that I can steal some time away to make a couple for her as when we had the Black Saturday fires back in Feb 2009 I felt quite useless that I wasn't able to offer the same help to all those people who lost everything, especially since the fires came within 30kms of my home. So here's my little contribution:

The New Emma Quilt

I finished the original Emma quilt a while ago and have been working on the matching changemat which has stalled again because I'm not sure how I want to tie it up. I bound both with a crazy patch binding to match the crazy blocks. Took some time sewing the binding together before I could add it to the quilt but I'm really happy with how it ended up.

 It was quilted in straight lines of alternating green and orange thread. Not so easy to see with this pic but you get the idea.

And then I decided that it was a bit too gender neutral for pretty little Emma and she's probably sitting up by now so a small floor quilt won't be as useful as it would have if I'd finished and given it to her when she was born so she could lay on it and play. And really who needs an excuse to start another quilt.

Then Kelli posted this and I fell in love with the Freckled Whimsy Charm Pack Quilt. I played around with the layout a little and came up with this

which I'm planning to do with this

It'll be my first attempt at half square triangles but KarrieLyne's instructions are really clear and easy so I'm not expecting any dramas...famous last words no doubt.

Pretty in Pink Girly Twirly Skirt

Reading through some of the EB girls blogs a while back I came across this cute little girls twirly skirt made out of a massive circle of fabric and some elastic and with my limited experience sewing clothing I figured it shouldn't be too difficult to try. I used some pink star fabric that I picked up in a clearance at Big W of all places which was too light to be suitable for quilting since it was a little see-through. I measured the waist and length off an existing skirt and used it more as a guildline rather than actual measurements (read: I added an inch or 2 here and there and figured it was better to be too big than too small as I could always cut it back).

Short(ish) version, I cut the circle and folded the waistband to create a casing which I threaded elastic through, and then finished off the hem properly and tried it on the little one. She loved it and it was a little too long but I wasn't allowed to take it off at that stage to fix the length. I did notice that while it fell exactly as I wanted it still was quite see through so when I finally snaffled it back I decided to glam it up a bit by adding a ruffled layer of tulle which had it's own ruffled layer of tulle attached midway down. Then with some of the left over fabric I cut 2 long rectangles (couldn't tell you how long, just as big as I could get out of the remaining material), sewed them at both ends to create one wide tube and gathered the top of this too.

I put all three layers, (ie original skirt with the waistband unpicked, tulle, tube gathered skirt) together with another strip that would become the waistband, and sewed them all together. I then folded over the new wasteband to the right side and sewed it down and finished off the waistband by topstitching the very top. Threaded through elastic again and this is what I had....

The response...."E don't wuck it". Translated: "E don't like it" (she refers to herself in the third person and can't pronounce her name properly so E it is.) So it sat in her draw for about a week until she decided today that she just had to wear it.

Yeah, it's a little big but that's not a bad thing since she can wear it for a while yet. And the blue socks and 'stwipy leggins' apparently make the outfit. Ahh, she wucks it again and I am complete.

Bibs for self feeding

Little Sir hasn’t let me feed him anything other than yogurt and cereal for a couple of months now. Very independent eater which he loves and so do I as it frees me to organise Little Lady’s meals and my own so that we can all sit down to eat together. However, the mess is quite astounding, particularly since Little Lady was such a neat self feeder by comparison. I have a mountain of teatowels that I use to tuck around his belly and over his legs to catch the worst of it but he’s loves playing peek-a-boo with them and typically has no interest in having his clothes changed after each meal. So I needed something less removable to cover him with.
I had a rough pattern that I’d taken from a similar bib I was given as a gift when Little Lady was born. The only thing I really kept was the raglan sleeves – I changed the length and width of the sleeves and body and back fastening. The first one I made was a little short (the grey on the left) so I adjusted the length and also added a second layer if flannel to the body to help protect his clothes from more liquidy foods like custards and yoghurts. Once I had the measurements correct I made 4 more in varying colours. Oh, and they’re just made of jersey as I wanted something soft with a bit of give and it was on sale at the time.

They fasten at the back with velcro and wrap slightly around his sides. How this child winds up with food in his armpits I’ll never know. Talent, I guess.

The wrists are elasticised which was a learning curve for me. Initially I was sewing the hem and threading elastic through, sewing the ends of the elastic together then sewing shut the gap in the hem but with such tiny little wrists it was a real pain and very fiddly. In the end I cut a length of elastic just long enough to wrap around his wrist and stretched it while sewing it with a zigzag stitch to the seam allowance of the cuff, then folded over the cuff hem and sewed that down before sewing the inner arm seam. Just thinking about it now tho, next time I’ll zigzag the elastic on, sew the inner arm seam then fold the cuff hem and sew, that way there is less bulk to irritate his wrists where the seams meet…. just rambling to myself.

I finished off the edges with some bias binding - my first attempt and I think I did a pretty good job.

Finished and ready for mess.