The Saga of the Experimental School Dress - Part 2

Well, I've done it!  The dress is finished!  Perfect, it is not, but I am pleased with it and it fits little miss.

In my last post I finished with a dress that had sleeves and pretty trim around the button stand down the front.  I still had to:

Add trim to the neckline...

DONE!

Add trim to sleeves...

DONE!

Add buttonholes, buttons and pockets...

DONE!

And I wanted to liven it up a bit and made a pretty fabric flower.

Tadaaaaah! A finished A-line button down school dress with pockets, sleeves and everything!

Next time: Emma's Pokemon skirt.

Love 

B

The Saga of the Experimental School Dress - part 1

My second daughter is on the large side and has a little bit of an awkward shape, with a sticky out tummy and a curved back.  This means that finding clothes that fit her properly is a bit of a struggle.  Summer school dresses, you know, the gingham ones, are especially hard.  They are often drop waist or cut on the waist, while my daughter needs A-line or empire line.  So I decided to make her one.
Of course I found it pretty much impossible to find a suitable pattern, because all the A-line dresses are for small children, and my daughter is young, but big and tall and needs older girl dresses. Soooooo, I decided to copy a dress that she has that does fit and make it in the green gingham of her school uniform.

Right...

Easy peasy, right?

Well, I started off OK by collecting a selection of "Dresses That Fit".

The Dresses That Fit.

I traced, cut the traced bit in half and put it on the fold to get a symmetrical dress.  I actually cut two exactly the same pieces and then pinned them and put them on my daughter to find out how much lower the neck line has to be at the front.

Like so.

Then I realised that this is not stretchy material and she wont get the dress over her head.  I contemplated a zip, but have no zipper foot.  I considered a few buttons at the top, but that requires a bodice and skirt and I wanted A-line.  So I then had a sudden flash of inspiration and cut the front piece in half and decided to make it button down; all the way down.  I fashioned button stands (or whatever you call the bit where I will put the buttons) from 2 strips of fabric that I put some fusable interfacing on. And attached them bias binding style.  The result was shoddy.  So shoddy in fact that I couldn't bear to take a picture.  I needed to hide the mismatched squares.  Then I had another flash of inspiration: trim!  Lacy trim!  That will hide any wonky seams and mismatching squares.  So I went to buy several meters of the stuff and the end result is this.  I managed to have a fat and thin side, but once the buttons are done up, no one will notice.  I hope anyway...

The lacy trim pinned on.  Looking good!

Hmmmm, uneven edges...

So next were the sleeves.  I have never, EVER, put in sleeves.  I copied the pattern of a random other sleeve on a child dress pattern I have.  Got my Great British Sewing Bee book out and had a little read on how to ease the shoulders of a sleeve.  Then I pinned it all together and went for it.  The gathers may not be in the same place in each sleeve, but I'm pretty proud of these sleeves!  They fit!  They look like actual sleeves!

An actual sleeve!

Now the dress looks like this.  I need to make some bias binding to trim the neckline and sleeves, hem the dress and put in the button holes and buttons.  My daughter has also requested pockets, so I will also make a couple of those.  I may even make a little applique of some sorts to liven the dress up a little, you never know...

The dress as it is now.

So watch this space for the bit announcement of the finished Experimental School Dress!

Love

B

I'm rippling, rippling away.

Last year I spent over half a year making my mother-in-law's Christmas present: a flower and granny square blanket.  This one:

Because the pattern asked for real wool and it would cost me near enough £200 in just the yarn, I had substituted the wool for acrylic.  I made a rooky mistake by ordering the exact same amount, totally not taking into account that acrylic is much lighter than wool and so I ended up with a huge pile of left over yarn. 

This much!

I have decided to tackle it and have started on the Attic24 ripple blanket.  I'm making the stripes wider than hers and may even do irregular stripes considering I have more of some colours than others.  I am aiming for a single bed sized blanket to keep on the sofa to snuggle under in the evenings.  At the moment we have scruffy fleecy Ikea things that really don't look all that nice.  It will take me many weeks to finish, because I'm also trying to make a summer uniform dress for my middle daughter (more in another post some time), but keep your eyes peeled for my tadaaah post!

It's definitely growing!

Rainbow legs!

The main craft I have been plodding away at over the last few years, has been crochet.  I love it's portability, it's put-down-ability and the fact that you can create fun and colourful projects with something as simple as a hook and some yarn.  Over the years I have made cushions, blankets, toys, hats, scarves and even a little dress for the tiny one.

Because this week I have had a bit of a lull in my sewing, due to a severe longing to curl up on the sofa at night, I got my hook out again.  In January a rollerskating craze attacked the mums in my village and with that comes a need for bright 80's garb and leg warmers! One of the rollerskating mad mums posted a picture of some rainbowy crocheted leg warmers on my Facebook page and ever since they have been playing on my mind.  So last weekend I had a little rummage through my yarn stash and found a rainbow of yarn.

It took me 3 evenings, because I had to frog (undo) my first attempt, that turned out to be more of an ankle warmer. The purply stripe on the bottom is smaller on one than the other, because I ran out of yarn.  I made up  by making the light blue stripe longer and the legwarmers are the same length, though one seems shorter on the pic.  Despite the uneven stripes I'm pretty happy with them and they are sooooo comfy and warm!

The doomed little dress

I've called my latest project the doomed dress, because from the start it just all went wrong!  I have now learnt that I can crochet with a slightly foggy, sleep deprived brain, but not sew!

So for starters, I had decided to make the chicken dress again, but in a size bigger, because it was just right on Kathryn and I thought that a size bigger would be good so the dress would last longer.  I trace out the pattern on tissue paper and then take the old traced out pattern and pin that one to the dress an cut the fabric the smaller size!  DOH!

No real harm done, so I carry on, only to discover that I have somehow ended up with narrower straps that aren't as tidy as in my first attempt, I also found that the seams don't align as well.  I tried to unpick my stitches and redo the straps, but of course due to the notches I can't actually sew it again with a smaller seam allowance.  So it now has narrower, wonkier straps.  Hurumph.  I doubt others will notice when the tiny one is wearing it, but I know and it will annoy me for ever.  The hem has similar issues and the side seams had to be redone 3 times to get them almost right and are still not perfect, but I cannot get it any better, sigh.

See?  Way thinner!

Then finally I now have a button issue.  I couldn't find the right colour amongst my button stash and only had 3 suitable buttons, so it's not actually completely finished, but it'll take me forever to get to a shop to  buy buttons and I don't want to wait with until buttons arrive from an online order, so I shall post a picture of the almost finished product anyway!

Tadaaaaah!

Until next time.  

Love B.

It's spring, or was on Monday anyway.

Or rather, it was on Monday, but the computer said no to this post on Monday and Tuesday and Wednesday AND Thursday, so I only just managed to get it posted.

This wont be a crafty post, but yesterday was such a spring like day, that I just HAD to write about it and share some pictures I took.  I am the administrator of a small private Facebook group dedicated to photography.  There's a weekly topic and I had chosen yellow.  The gorgeous sunshine brought all the yellow out brilliantly.  I went on a big walk through the surrounding countryside and snapped away. 

The yellow daffodils and crocuses in my garden.

It was still a bit wet from the recent flooding in some places.

A poor victim of the storms.

I also had a little helper in the garden.