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I love coming home and finding a package at my door. Especially one full of new fabric. I recently ordered a bunch of fabric from fabric.com to start making some new fall clothes for my daughter. Last year I made a bunch of jumpers. This year I think it’ll be skirts and she can wear leggings under them. Now I just have to find some time inbetween plush projects and Halloween stuff to start working on them. Luckily a skirt doesn’t take much longer than an hour and I don’t have to worry about zippers and buttons. I’ll post pics when I’m done.

I took a little detour this past week to finish up some baby items for a friends baby shower. I have finished the heads of my Magicians Assistants and hope to start the bodies this weekend.

Everything is so cute and small. The shoes are from Simplicity pattern 2471 and the horse is from Simplicity pattern 2763. The large bib I think came from Martha Stewarts website a few years ago. I made about a dozen of these about 2 1/2 years ago before my daughter was born. The small bib I made by tracing a store bought bib I had had for my daughter. It was great having small ones like that when my daughter was a new born.

I really love how the horse turned out. But it was a pain to sew. The horse isn’t very big so  just sewing it together and turning it inside out was a pain. I recommend enlarging this pattern about 10-20%. It would make it a whole lot easier. I did add a rattle and squeaker inside.

I reprints of retro patterns.

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Here’s what I’ve been so diligently working on for the past month. Toddler clothes. It really is fun sewing for a girl. The above tunics are made from Simplicity pattern 4203. It really is as easy as it says it is. Though the pattern didn’t call for it, I added the band at the bottom of the tunics and made them a little longer. I also crisscrossed the straps in the back. I  made the dress that was included in this pattern too. No pic to show though.

Here’s my little model! This tunic is my favorite. I LOVE the ice cream print. They don’t look to bad over a long sleeved shirt either.

I cleaned out my closets about a month ago and was bagging up some old clothes to donate when I decided to save some stuff and repurpose it. This was originally an old dress of mine that I turned into a skirt. I made the lining a little longer so it would hang lower than the printed material. Added some white ric-rac and a bow.

This was a last minute dress. I found this material and had to have it. I used McCalls pattern 5836.

I also made three dresses for myself for the summer. I’ll post those later.

I think I’ve got all the flower making out of my system now. Here’s the last two necklaces I made. Again I followed the tutorials in the book The Artful Ribbon.

I’ve noticed lots of embellished t-shirts lately too. Lots of flowers, lace and ruffles. These four are from Anthropology. I love Anthropology but can’t justify spending money their. They are a bit out of my price range. But they have some pretty stuff to look at and be inspired by.

This my attempt at creating my own flower embellished t-shirt. I bought two t-shirts of the same color, one in my size and the other in a large. I then created a template of circles. I cut the circles out of cardboard and used these to trace circles onto my large sized tshirt. After cutting out many circles in the three sizes I started to stack them together. I stacked one large, one medium and one small circle together. I then sewed these together in the middle. After having a bunch of these sewn together I started pinning them to the t-shirt. The key to getting them to look full is to clump your circles close together. The closer you sew these together the fuller it will be. Hopefully that makes sense. I really need to get better with taking pics of my work in process. I get so busy working I just forget.

Below are the circle sizes I used. Just click on the image to make larger and print these to use. It should print out at actual size.

I’m still on my month long kick of sewing. I’ve almost finished the four tunics and dress for my daughter and I finished putting the hooks in the two dresses I made for my self. At some point I need to take pics of those. I’d love to get outside to take some pics but it’s always raining : (.  I also finished another flower necklace. When I get in this mood I start looking through my history of fashion books. I just discovered the Victoria and Albert Museum, V&A for short, Fashion in Detail books. The books only show close up photos of garments. You really get to see the construction of the clothing. There are also diagram like drawings of the garment as well as detailed written descriptions about the history of the piece. Very interesting.

17th and 18th Century- Fashion in Detail

19th Century-Fashion in Detail It looks like this book is no longer in print. However Borders website has it but it is back ordered. Luckily I was able to order this book through my works library and they were able to find it for me. We have an awesome creative library here at work, one of the great perks.

Images from 19th Century Fashion in Detail

20th Century- Fashion in Detail

I decided to make something for myself this weekend and got carried away with making a bunch of these flower bibs. I love how floral necklace bibs are in right now. I LOVE Victorian fashion and these remind me of that. It’s the attention to detail that draws me in. I also love fashions of the eighteenth century.

I made the flowers on all these necklaces from wired ribbon. They are really quite easy. I followed the tutorials in the book The Artful Ribbon by Candace Kling. I was fortunate to have gotten to take a class taught by her called Fabric Manipulation at the Surface Design Conference held a couple of years ago at the Kansas City Art Institute. I was super inspired after taking her class and had wished I had gone into Fiber as a major instead of Illustration. Oh well, I can’t change the past.

I wish I had taken a pic of an individual flower but got caught up in working and forgot.

Here’s what the back looks like. The book recommends using crinoline as backing to sew the flowers to. Use a heavy quilting thread when sewing down the flowers otherwise your thread could break. Once I had the flowers and leaves all sewn together I covered the crinoline with felt. You could sew this down or use a fabric glue. I chose glue.

Here’s the finish. I decided to change the shear material where the jump rings are held to velvet ribbon that I had lying around. I happened to find the chain with pearls at Michael’s and thought it would compliment the flowers.

There is no rule to making these. It comes down to laying things out on the table, moving it around, seeing how it all looks together and then sewing it all together.

I highly recommend this book. Even if you’re not going to make ribbon flowers, the pictures are beauticul to look at.

Here’s the second one I made. Love the single corsage look to this with the delicate chain. I also added yellow crystal beads.

This last one is my favorite. I wish the picture had tuned out better. I just could not get the lighting right. Though you can’t see them in the pic, I added small black and grey crystal beads around the centers of the flowers. I added crystal buttons to the silver flowers.  I also used some freyed sating material on this one. That’s what you see peeking out the bottom.

Check out the book below if you like Victorian fashion illustrations. This is fun to look at.

So here is what distracted me from finishing my movie concession guys. I used my new Serger which I LOVE! This is the time of the year I start getting antsy for spring and start making spring and summer clothes. This usually lasts for about two months.

This dress is for my daughters birthday. We are continuing the Alice in Wonderland theme from Halloween. It’d quite the coincidence that it wasn’t until after I finished my daughters Halloween costume last summer that I found out about the new Alice movie by Tim Burton. I was kinda bummed because now Alice stuff is everywhere and it doesn’t seem very original. I am very much looking forward to Tim Burton’s version of Alice coming out in the next month. I do hope the story holds together as well as his art direction.

I love that I was able to find material with John Tenniel’s illustrations and not the Disney version. I do love Disney’s Alice, but Tenniels drawing style really suites the oddness of this book. I found this material by Quilting Treasures at fabric.com.

This is Simplicity pattern 2574 used to make the dress.

And what little girl doesn’t need a matching dress for her doll. It was quite a pain to sew doll clothes. But it turned out SUPER cute.

I used Simplicity pattern  4707 for the doll dress and bonnett.

Last week we finished decorating our bedroom. All new paint, furniture and bedding. When we moved into the house we painted it the same color as the bedroom at the old house because it matched our bedding. We were tired of the color green and the light oak furniture so we decided to redo it. Furniture is from Home Decorators. We got a new bed, dresser, bookshelves and nightstands. I know a lot of people don’t like HD but we’ve always been pleased. To save money we picked it up and put it all together. Cream bedspread, brown shams, and brown blanket, along with brown drapes, came from JC Penny. I used Michael Millers Pod Posey Fabric to make two pillow shams and decorative pillows. Can’t remember the paint color but it’s Valspar American Traditions from Lowes. We’ve tried many paints and in my opinion it’s the best. Pretty much a one coat application paint. So two weekends of work and it’s done and super pretty. The only thing missing is a nice flat screen tv.

I finally got around to finishing up these tanks for my daughter from the fabric I bought a while ago. I think they turned out pretty cute. I also made 2 pairs of shorts and 2 pairs of capris to match. I used Simplicity pattern 5982, a very easy pattern. I also finished two other sun dresses for myself that I’ll try and get a pic of as well. I’m just about done with all my clothes sewing projects…of course now the garden is calling.

This dress is made from Butterick pattern 4386. It is super fast. You can easily get one made in an evening. I had to do a little altering. I made the darts bigger in the back because it wasn’t hanging right. I can’t remember who makes the print but it’s super cute and springy. I thought my squirrel head would looke really good with this dress.