A Frock for the New Girl

A new girl just moved into our congregation a few weeks ago. She is a sweetheart, and (bonus!) speaks the same Chinese my family does. That made her an instant bestie. Just to make sure her move was as non-eventful as possible, she happened to time it within weeks of her due date. As in…she is expecting her sixth! child! any! day!

 

Never a group to miss a party, a few ladies sprang into action and put together a baby shower. (Even though this is her sixth child, it is a girl….and her last girl was born 9 years, and three boys, ago. She gave up hope somewhere along the way, along with all of her daughter’s baby clothes.)  Friends in her previous congregation had already gathered stuff for her, and given her lots of hand-me-down baby clothes, so she requested that if we were inclined to bring gifts…..could they please be things for a slightly older girl?

 

Originally, I intended to make one of Made by Rae’s Itty Bitty dresses, but I couldn’t find my pattern. (The pattern, by the way, is a free download on Rae’s blog, and is SUPER adorable. It is a dress that will fit right at birth, hence the itty bitty part. A few readers enlarged the pattern and sent it back to her, so now it goes all the way up to 3T, I believe. Anyhow, it’s an adorable, and simple dress!)

 

My train of thought went something like this. I’ll make Rae’s itty bitty dress! Oh, I can’t find the pattern. I could probably make another pattern from memory…I can find a small t-shirt and make the pattern from that. Hrm…making patterns. That reminds me…I DID make a dress pattern a few years ago!

 

And thus, I made one of my Pretty Frocks for the new wee one.

 

This was made from one of my husband’s cast-off dress shirts. I experimented this time, trying to keep the shoulders a little wider. In past versions, after making a rolled hem on both the neck and the arm hole, the resulting shoulder bit was only about an inch and a half wide. This time, I used some binding that I had leftover from a small quilt to bind off the neck. The arms were still a rolled hem.

You can see here, on the back of the dress, the original button placket from the shirt.

 

I lined some of the more ticklish seams with binding.

 

The dress, honestly, came out quite a bit BIGGER than what I imagined it would. The pattern was drawn up to be 2T, but…it still managed to button around my 4 year old. Oh well – the new little one can wear it for YEARS. Heh. (Kim, if you are reading this, bring the dress to me when your daughter wants to start wearing it, and I’ll hem it to the right length!)

LoLoTute: Sew Yourself a Door Stop (a tutorial!)

First off, a big congratulations to “Andy and Melissa”. You won the pillowcase set! Shoot me your info and I will get your pillowcases off in the mail.

&*&*&*&*&*&*&*&*&*

When I think of door stops, I generally think of unsightly, and very heavy, pieces of art that you aren’t sure what to do with. It’s kind of a joke, right? Hey! That would make a great door stop!

So, when my father (in all seriousness) requested a pair of door stops for Christmas, I was stumped. He suggested a bean bag, since he knew that a certain little grandson (*ahem*SIUJEUN) would most likely throw them if he could get his hands on them. (And he would be absolutely right.)

 

So, after a little searching online, and a little wracking my brain, and a little sewing (and a little seam ripping and tweaking), I have come up with a doorstop!

(My tutorial is based on the one found here…altered by me to fit my own brand of crazy. Proceed at your own risk.)

Supplies:

Décor-weight cotton fabric

Filler (rice, wheat, beans, etc.)

1 freezer-weight zip-top bag (sandwich or quart size)

fiberfill

 

Tools:

Sewing machine

Iron

Chopstick

Measuring cup with a spout, or a funnel

 

You’re going to start off with two pieces of fabric – one 16.5” x 9.5” (the body of the bag) and one 4” x 9.5” (the handle). (Alternately, the handle could be a 9.5” piece of webbing, or bias tape, or rope or whatever else floats your boat.) Just to make things easy, make sure both of your pieces are pressed flat. I used décor weight cotton, from IKEA. (A thick cotton is necessary to get a really crisp and sturdy cube.)

Working with your larger piece of fabric, fold it in half (right sides together, short ends meeting) and sew up matched short ends with a 1/4” seam allowance. Congratulations – now you have a tube! Add a matching 1/4” seam along the folded edge. (Just trust me on this. It makes your cube more…cubish.)

 

Now, shift your tube around so that the two seams are matched up, and centered.

Now sew two more 1/4” seams, one on either side, along the fold. (You don’t need to worry about backstitching, or trimming your threads neatly. They will all be hidden and sewed inside other seams.)

Now, shift your tube again so that you have two matching, and stacked, sets of seams. Sew a 1/4” seam along one of your open ends. Leave the other end open for now. Now? Your tube is a bag.

And if you stand it up, you’ll see that you’ve made a sweet little grocery-sack type thing. Carefully flatten out the bottom so that the bag will stand up on its own. You will end up with small triangles of fabric sticking off to either side. Finger press those, then mark the fold.

Hold up the bag to make sure that your first triangle is even, centered, pretty, and all that jazz. I like to sew just outside of that seam that runs cross-wise through the triangle. It makes for neater corners. Once you have sewn up the first triangle, you can use it to match up the second triangle. That way, they will be identical. Sew that triangle off as well.

Now, let’s turn our attention to the open end of your sack. You need to leave a gap so that you can turn your bag right side out, and also insert your handle. Following my marks in the picture, sew two seams, each one starting at the pink hatchmark and going out towards the outside corner of the bag. (When I sewed this up, I found that I had made my opening a little TOO small. If you think you might have issues, just make the gap bigger, but don’t OUTSIDE the matched seams. You need that part sewn shut.)

Now, set that aside and pull out your smaller piece of fabric. To make it into a handle, fire up your iron. We’re going to make binding! First, fold your piece of fabric in half, lengthwise, and press. Open it up, and fold each long edge towards the center, wrong sides together, to meet in the middle, right above your pressed crease. Finally, fold it back in half along the original crease and press again. Voila! Head over to your sewing machine and run a seam along the open end, as close to the edge as you can get.  (About 1/8” for me.)

Here’s where it gets a little odd. Grab your (still inside out) bag and (using one of your already-sewn corners as a guide), pinch off a third corner. Holding that corner in one hand, pick up your (freshly made) handle in the other hand and carefully feed it into the gap you left at the top of the bag, and up into the corner. Feel with your pinching fingers to make sure that the handle extends past your intended seam by at least 1/2”.

Stick that baby under the needle before everything falls apart, and sew off that corner.

Repeat the process with the fourth corner, again matching it up to the corner below it to make sure that it is the same size.

 

Now the fun part. Turn it right side out. At some point, it will look like this:

Don’t worry! Keep tugging, prodding, sweating and begging. Eventually, it will right itself. And behold! A cube! With a handle!

Now to fill it! You’ll need a small zip-top bag, filler (I used wheat, but rice or beans would also work) and a chopstick. (My zip-top bag was freezer-weight, quart size. I wanted to make sure 1) that I didn’t puncture it while filling it and 2) that it would be thick enough that it hopefully wouldn’t attract pests to the wheat inside. These were designed to be used at my parents’ cabin…and they have critters out there in the woods!)

Use the chopstick to poke out the corners of your cloth cube, and then stuff your bag into your gap at the top of the door stop. Carefully pour in your filler, pausing often to shake and shift and poke and prod. You want the filler to firmly fill out the bottom four corners. Keep adding your filler until your door stop is about 3/4 of the way full. Carefully squeeze out all the air that you can from your  plastic bag, and zip up the top. Tuck the bag completely inside the gap. (My door stops took about 3 cups of wheat, FYI.)

Fill out the rest of the door stop with fiberfill, and use a blind stitch or a whip stitch to sew your gap shut.

Congratulations! You have a door stop. Now, go forth and stop your doors. (I was surprised, when I took stock, of how many doors in my house needed door stops just to stay put…never mind how many doors would need stops if I were to open the windows!)

If you make one of these, please come back and let me know in the comments! I’d love to see pictures.

Thing 34: Little Boy’s Messenger Bag (a tutorial!)

  (This is my brain turning into licorice….)

 

Any questions?

 

Heh. Just kidding. The idea was to make a bag where the sides went straight up to become the strap…but I totally underestimated how long I needed that strap to be. So…it’s more of a man purse. *sigh*

 

Cut two matching rectangles as wide as you want your bag to be and twice as long (plus 8 inches) as you want your bag to be tall. (That gives it a 4” overlap for the front flap, plus 2” to go over the top of the bag, and 2” to go under the bottom.) Then cut a piece that is 8” wide by the distance from your boy’s knees, across his chest, around and back to his knee. (Obviously, I took the measurement hip to hip…and that gave me a purse. D’oh!)

 

Sew your two big rectangles, right sides together, making sure to leave a gap for turning. Clip the corners, turn and press. Set aside.

 

Take your big strap piece and fold 2” in on either side so that they meet in the middle. Press. Fold in half lengthwise, so that your folded edges meet and right sides are out. Press. Sew along the length, right along the edge where the two folded edges meet.

 

Now, here comes the part that made my brain turn into licorice. At one end of your rectangle, measure in 4”. Mark that. It’s your “flap. Now, measure in another 2”. Mark that. Now you have the two corners for the “top” of your boxy messenger bag. Now, measure down as far as you wanted your bag to be tall…mark that. Go another 2” and mark that. There’s the bottom of your bag. You should be left with a length that is identical to the back of the bag. 

 

Time to attach your strap! Your strap should have ended up 2” wide, and so should just fit into the “bottom” that you measured out for yourself. Carefully pin your strap into place and sew the short ends to the bottom of the bag, right sides together. Then, sew up the sides to close up the sides of your bag.

 

You’re done!

 

(If you want a stiffer bag, use something heavier than the flannel and cotton/poly bed sheet that I used or add interfacing between your layers.)

 

(PS – I obviously sewed the long sides of the strap before the short side. Do whatever doesn’t make your brain turn into licorice!)

Princess Dress, Final Revision

After Ming Wai went to bed, I stole her dress back from her bedroom and “finished” the edges. I did..something…with yellow flannel. I have no idea what I did, and I certainly didn’t do it right, but…it’s a costume, so I’m not too worried about it!

I cut 1.5” wide strips of yellow flannel and then sewed it to the wrong side of the unfinished hems around the cuffs, neck and bottom hem. Then I folded the flannel up over to the right side of the garment, folded the edge under, and topstitched it. I wasn’t careful with the cutting, I didn’t iron the wrinkled flannel, and there are spots that I fudged. But, you know what? Ming Wai has worn it three days straight. She loves it. And that’s what’s important! (I’m afraid that if I wash it, it will shrink or be damaged…so I’ll let her wear it one more day before I put it in peril! haha)

 

And Siu Jeun? He just likes to sneak into the craft room, because he figured out that that’s where Daddy hid the Rock Band set.

 

Rock on, dude. Rock on.

Thing 29: The Pants from the Shirt that Made the Dress

Do you remember, a few weeks ago, when I made this dress for Ming Wai?

Just humor me here, ok? Tell me you remember it.

Got it? Good.  (I mean, how could you forget those fancy hands???)

So that dress was made from the body of a large men’s polo. The sleeves were saved.

 

For these.

They’re not perfect, by any means (the legs are different lengths!) but I am getting better at making these. The waist fits much better than some of the first shorts I made him.  And I’m kind of diggin’ this cropped length.

Also? Mardi Gras beads – not just for New Orleans anymore! (Gold is rather fetching with navy, though, isn’t it?!)

Thing 28: A Little Red Dress

It’s been a little quiet around here this summer, yeah? Just a smidge? I hope y’all have been having loads of fun in the sun…or whatever you like to do in the summer.

My family just returned home from a fantabulous little reunion in north-central Washington, on Lake Chelan. We meet there every summer, rent houses, play on jet skis, go tubing, play tennis after the kids go to bed, and generally enjoy ourselves. (I think the Moms of Young Kids might enjoy themselves the most…there are so many extra adults around, it’s really easy to slip out with our husbands while the kids nap in the afternoons, or after they go to bed. Hooray!)

This year, there were four grandkids in attendance – my two, plus my twin sister’s two. Three of those four are girls. And so….three of those four were in matching dresses.

This was for Ernie, the biggest girl. I had a size 5, a size 4 and a size 3. Quick and easy, and the girls looked pretty sweet in their matching frocks!  They were really quick – I made up three of them in one evening. Just a sliced-off white top, with a red skirt attached. I cut the skirt fabric as long as I wanted the skirt to be, and two and a half times as wide as the shirt. I sewed that into a tube, used the selvedge edge as the hem, and gathered it up to match the top shirt. Easy peasy!)

(I also made two more of these, so the other girls would have dresses to match my daughter’s, for church. So much fun! But it was a busy day there, making five dresses. *grin*)

(The tops were all pulled from the Outgrown Pile, and the red fabric was a Freecycle find last year. I think it’s vintage – there was an old-fashioned tag stapled to it, with an address from Canal Street, NYC.)

The Polo Dress, Part II

 

Do you remember this dress? I first posted about it here.

Here are the front shots, and Ming Wai’s…er….Fancy Hands.

The dress is cute….but even cuter on my niece, who is two. The buttons don’t pop open when she wears it. Heh. Oh well. Live and learn…and next time, decide what kind of seams I’m doing BEFORE cutting out the dress! At least it’s sturdy…with all those nice (seam allowance eating) french seams!

Craft Fail…or Win? (Thing 27)

Do you see that blue dress? The one in the middle? I made it, during the afternoon. I got The Feeling, and I just had to go and MAKE something, or else I would explode. You do know that feeling, don’t you??

I dug through my To Re-Purpose Pile, and came across a long-sleeved navy polo shirt. Size Large, Men’s. Perfect! I grabbed a dress from my daughter’s drawer that always looks nice on her, traced it out, and started sewing! I was going to copy the sleeves as well….and then decided I just couldn’t be bothered. I also decided, after I had already cut it out, to attempt French seams. For the first time. From memory. (Heh. Yeeeaaaah…..)

I ended up with a rather cute dress, if i do say so myself, that is just a smidge tight across the chest. I haven’t decided yet if I’m going to re-gift it to my (smaller) niece, or unpick the seams and re-do them sans “French.” (Since French seams are essentially one seam sewn around another seam, undoing the French-ness would give me nearly an extra inch around the chest!).

I’m sorry I don’t have any pictures of the FRONT of the dress. My camera ran out of batteries as soon as we reached our destination, and when we got home again, it was time for bed. *sigh* The life of a blogger is tough!

Thing 26: A Pouf!

Ladies, and gentleman, I present to you…a pouf!

(No, sweet husband, it’s not a powf. If’s pronounced poof. Got it? Ok. moving on.)

 

I used this tutorial, from Living With Punks.  Her poufs were a little different – they had some rather smart looking piping around the edges. However, I had neither piping nor the patience to go out and buy some. So…no piping for me!

I learned a new trick with these – a way to make super strong handles! The fabric for the handles is folded twice, so it’s actually four layers of canvas. Also, see that nifty little x’d box there? That makes it really stick to the rest of the pillow. Neat, right?

 

My finished pouf is sitting in my daughter’s room, and I just ADORE it! The hardest part was stuffing it. I used some ripped foam filling that I scored off of Freecycle. Now, I love me some free, but that stuff makes a HUGE mess. And my three year old was helping me stuff. And my one year old was sneaking handfuls of the filling and launching it down the stairs. And I very nearly took the (unfinished) pouf, the “helpful” three year old, and the maniacal one year old and locked them all in the cellar to sort themselves out.

I didn’t.

But it was close.

(The fabric is a home-dec weight cotton from IKEA.)