KCW: The rest of the costume

So, I finished E.'s pants and vest. They are done, they work, and now I just need to dig an old ring out and put it on a piece of string for the rest of the costume.

Finding mushrooms on her quest.

 The Charles pants were fairly easy to put together since it's now my second time through the pattern. I haven't printed out the final version of it, so I was working with the test pattern again. I believe the final version corrects some of the fitting issues in the waist that were present in the test version. I used the more fitted waistband this time and did the elastic band in the back as well. I didn't quite get the length of the pants right, but as she'll grow taller, her pants being a bit long isn't exactly a disaster.

I used a pair of old brown pants for the main fabric, the same green flannel I used in the cape for the contrast, and did yellow topstitching. The buttons are some yellow-ish leather ones I bought at Button Button a while ago.

New pants, new vest, now if only the rock she's standing on were better.

 The vest was engineered out of an old cardigan of mine. I loved that cashmere cardigan, a $7 thrift store find, originally from Banana Republic. I finally gave up on darning the holes underneath the arms, where it was wearing thin. It's now a cozy buttoned vest with slightly wonky armhole bands for E., a side effect of not cutting the bands wide enough. I traced a t-shirt and made use of the button band already in place. It'll be a nice layering piece over the winter, as well as a Halloween costume.

I started a Louisa dress yesterday and it was coming together really well. Then I sewed through the zipper teeth for several inches without realizing it and now have to painstakingly take the zipper off and sew it back on more carefully and shorter (it's at least a 20 inch zipper, I have room to shorten it). Blasted invisible zipper foot not wanting to be compatible with invisible zipper I found at the thrift store that may be older than me. But the dress is lovely so far--blue corduroy with a flowered corduroy front pocket and fully-lined. I love how simple the pattern is, how elegant in many ways. I'm considering one with a matching front pocket and another without the front pocket.

I may not get the dress done tonight, but the hobbit child is ready for Halloween.

KCW: Hobbit Cloak

Instead of numbering the days for Kid's Clothes Week this time around, I'm just labeling my posts about it with the item I made. I made this cloak on Day 1, and today is Day 4, because it usually takes me a bit to get the pictures off the camera.

E. is going to be a hobbit for Halloween this year, which ties in nicely with KCW's storybook theme this time around. I took a look through Tolkien's intro to The Fellowship of the Ring, and it includes a note that hobbits like bright colours and are extremely fond of yellow and green. The hobbits in the fellowship wear green cloaks, so I took my cue from that.

I happened to have a child's dress-up cape pattern in a book a friend gave me last year when E. was born. The book is Sweet and Simple Handmade. It's a very nice book and my current biggest complaint is that either I am missing one of the pattern sheets altogether, or I have lost one. I don't remember there being four sheets, just three, and that's all I have, and at least one pattern in the book does not have a counterpart on the pattern sheets (and I was going to use that one for a vest for the hobbit costume--now I have to practice my pattern drafting skills instead). Also, I really hate pattern tissue paper. It never folds up again properly. Good book, would be better if it came with a CD of pdf patterns instead.

For the outer fabric of the cape, I went to Fabricana and found some green flannel. I would have loved to use wool fabric, but I don't really want to spend $25+/metre for a toddler's dress-up cape. (And yes, when I made myself a cloak, with the assistance of my grandmother, after my first year of university, I went straight to the woollen section and selected a lovely blue and green wool plaid. It's a lovely item and I've had it for years. Grown-up clothing is different, even if it is for dress-up). I am starting to really love flannel. It's soft, warm, easy to work with, and softens even more with age (true, not as sturdy as linen, but that's okay). I used an old cream-coloured sheet for the lining.

I added a hood, which I traced from one of E.'s sweatshirts, to make it a proper cloak. I used yellow ribbons for the tie at the neck. The cloak was a very fast piece to put together--several long seams each for lining and outer fabric, a couple curved seams for the hood, some careful pinning when sewing the two pieces together, and a little bit of handstitching where I flipped it right-side out (side-note: my blind stitch is improving).

The hobbit-child in motion.

I had to shorten the cloak by about a foot. It's listed in the preschool age section in the book, so it's designed with the average height of three and four-year-olds in mind. This is an easy alteration, though, and one I knew I'd need to make from the get-go. Same with adding the hood--I knew I'd want that so I got to try out drafting a hood for the first time.

Our little hobbit is off on an adventure!

The biggest problem I had with the pattern is it was very obviously designed for dress-up only, not for warmth. The width at the top of the cloak is too small to wrap around my very tiny child's shoulders--it fits because of the ribbon tie. I prefer capes that wrap around the shoulders more, both for practicality (warmth, basic fit, and oh, ribbon tie digging into my child's neck because the cloak has to dangle from the tie, not the shoulders) and aesthetics. This problem is easily solved by adding more panels when cutting out fabric. I kind of want to make another one in red.

I'm now working on E.'s pants for the costume. Charles pants in brown with green flannel contrasting fabric. I really love this pattern and these pants are going to be great for the rest of the winter, not just for Halloween.

kid's clothes week: after it's over

Geranium Dress-owls and foxes and hedgehogs, oh my!

I managed to muddle my way through KCW again. The picture above is another Geranium Dress, one size up from the usual. E. is growing, though when I popped it on her when it was finished, it was a bit big. And a little longer than expected. Not terribly so, but enough that it'll probably be a better choice of outfit next month. Maybe she'll wear it at her first birthday party (and no, we're not having a one-year-old extravaganza; we're having family, probably my parents and my SIL, since my in-laws aren't sure they can come and E.'s godparents are having a time of it getting new passports, and I'm using my cake pan that makes little rose-shaped cakes).

So, dress. I used a quilting cotton that I found at Mill End down in Portland at Christmas time. Some leftovers went into a set of coasters for a friend, and the other leftovers are waiting for me to make them into something. I love the fabric. It's adorable, and yes, rather more pink than I'd usually go with, but I don't actually hate pink. I just object to the "nothing but pink for little girls" attitude. I went with the pleated skirt this time, the faux-cap sleeve bodice, and the cut-out neckline. I did snaps on the back, without cursing. I wanted to do buttons, but all my buttons are in a box, and I didn't feel like digging them out.

We move on Thursday morning, and at this point, we're mostly packed up. I had one of my moving dreams last night, where I didn't have everything packed, people were loading up the truck for us, and I was out of boxes and then my grandmother called in the middle of the chaos about something. I've also had the dream where the previous tenants left behind a bunch of stuff, so the closets were all full of clothes and there was a full and very noisy campground next door.

I knocked out a couple of skirts in the last day or so of KCW. I based them off a paperbag skirt tutorial. The first one doesn't look quite how I envisioned, and is a little big in the waist. The second turned out just about right.

Skirt number 1: Not bad.

The basic pattern involves cutting a strip from selvage to selvage, seaming that into a tube, then hemming the bottom and top. The top gets an elastic waistband. I went with 12 inches, but didn't make my waistband as wide as I really should have, so the skirt is a little long. I went with E's waist measurement plus 1" for a seam allowance for the elastic, but that's a little bit loose. The material is some kind of cotton I found at the thrift store.

Skirt number 2: Much better.

 The second skirt was the same length, but I folded the waistband over more to get that lovely ruffle at the top, so it's just about the perfect length for E. right now. I also went with E.'s waist measurement without an additional seam allowance for the elastic. It stretches and doesn't slide down too much this way. This fabric is a corduroy from JoAnn's that I found at the thrift store. I have enough for one or two more skirts or possibly something else. I have ideas but haven't purchased the patterns yet.


I also finished a shawl I've been working on.

Batik Shawl

The pattern, Batik, is by Kitman Figeroa, and is available on Ravelry. I've had the pattern and the yarn for a while, and I finally got around to knitting it up. The yarn is one of the Kauni fingering weights. I love the long stripes in the Kauni colourways. I knit one ball up in shades of red a few years ago, and then bought this ball at Yarn Harvest that year. I knit the medium size of the shawl, since I didn't have quite enough for the large, and it's turned out beautifully. I get to show it off at knit-night tonight, then pack it away in a box for a couple days until we've moved.

And that's it for now. We'll be without internet for a day or so, since we move Thursday and the guy from Telus is supposed to show up on Friday. Let's hope that goes well. Last time it was a fiasco.

KCW: Day 2

On track so far with KCW! I made a bonnet for E. yesterday for Day 2. I made her a sun hat a while back, and while it is fantastic, we've discovered that it's much harder for her to pull bonnets off and toss them on the ground while we're in transit. I have run over that poor sun hat so many times with the stroller.

I used the same pattern for this bonnet that I used a while back for E.'s pretty floral bonnet for her costume when we went to Fan Expo. The pattern is from MAKE, and it's a bonnet that was originally designed for upcycling vintage linens. The only vintage linens we have on hand were ones my great-grandmother and great-great grandmother made, so obviously, that won't do.

Pink fabric, purple and yellow rick-rack. No, it's not stereotypically girly at all.

 However, my fabric stash has a number of odds and ends in suitable amounts, so I ended up pulling out a very pink piece of floral-printed fabric. I don't usually often sew pink items for E. because we already have so much pink in her wardrobe, but this fabric suited the pattern well, and I had coordinating ric-rac on hand (is it rick-rack or ric-rac or either/or?).

This pattern let me practice some hand-sewing--after sewing the lining and outside together, you flip the bonnet right-side out and blind-stitch the gap together. I used to be terrible at doing blind-stitch--I kept mixing it up with whip-stitch and doing that instead, but I seem to have finally figured it out.

If I make another one (and I kind of want to), I want to line the bill with interfacing to make it a bit stiffer. The first time I made the pattern, I did the ruffled brim. This time I did the flat bill option, which I think I like better than the ruffle, but lack of interfacing on the bill means that it doesn't have as much structure as I think it should.

Baby in her new hat!

 E. seems to like the hat well enough. I showed it to her and she grabbed it and wandered off across the living room, waving it over her head. Shortly after that, she got distracted by a pair of sunglasses and abandoned the bonnet next to one of the many boxes decorating our home.

On the list for today: A new Geranium. We are moving up a size! 6-12 months, here we come!

Kid's Clothes Week - Take 2

Well, I signed up for Kid's Clothes Week again. The latest round of it started yesterday and I'm making plans. And I got a headstart on it by sewing a baby dress Friday (I just couldn't stop myself). This is the Easy Summer Baby Dress from See Kate Sew.

I tweaked the pattern a little--I enlarged the bodice, which turned out to be an unneccessary change. E. can wear it as a jumper dress in the fall and winter, and as a slightly-too-big summer dress right now. It's also a bit long--blame it on how I cut out the dress so as to avoid weird skinny strips of fabric from the edge of the material. I whipstitched the lining over the seam at the bodice. The tutorial makes it sound like you just sew bodice, lining and outside, together to the skirt and then maybe zigzag or serge the edges of the seam and I preferred a neater finish. I could just be misreading the instructions, though. I accidentally set the straps a touch too far in. They're supposed to be at the very edge of the bodice and that didn't quite happen. Oh well. It works anyway.

What I love about this dress in particular, other than the simple construction (it took me an hour or so to make this, with the hand-sewing), is the straps. They are gathered with elastic and they make the whole thing look adorable. It's a simple thing to do, but it adds so much to the dress without being over the top.

It occurred to me when I signed up for KCW that it might not have been the smartest idea, what with us moving two weeks from now and all. Now that we're closer to time, I think committing to sewing for an hour or so a day will be a welcome distraction from the stress of moving. We've checked off some of the important things, like moving our hydro and internet and booking the truck. Now we're mostly at the "get more boxes and put stuff in them" stage. The really breakable things are nearly all packed, so I can put stuff in boxes around E. without worrying about her trying to help me unload them.

Sewing is a lovely break, and it uses up some of the fabric I have lurking around, so there's less to pack in the sewing supplies boxes. I've tidied up the sewing corner of the bedroom, so that's helped a bit. I've almost finished a tailor's ham that I've been stuffing with fabric scraps. It's not quite full enough, so I'll have to do a couple more projects and use up the leftover bits and pieces.

My first contribution for Kid's Clothes Week was another Easy Baby Summer Dress, this time in a purple rayon. Rayon and me don't usually get along very well, but I did much better with it this time. I suppose it's mostly a matter of practice, fabric weights, finished seams, and lots of pressing.

Not the greatest picture, but at least she's holding still.

After that, I think I may be more willing to sew with rayon. I may need to get a non-blurry picture of the dress later. E. is walking and getting faster every day. When she sees a camera, she just moves closer.

Next on the list for KCW: a summer bonnet, aka hat that babies have a harder time throwing on the ground. It's cut out and partially pieced at the moment. In a burst of "use up random fabric," I've ended up with a very, very pink creation. At least no one will assume she's a boy in that hat.