A simple skirt and a couple of sneak peeks

I've been rather neglectful of this blog in the past few weeks; first we were away in Devon for a very welcome summer holiday and then Andrew and I had the luxury of a weekend trip sans kids to the beautiful city of Edinburgh. In spite of the stacks of suitcases that have been living in my sewing nook for the past few weeks, I have managed to do a bit of sewing, so here's a little update.

I made this skirt for El using the fabulous simple skirt tutorial by Dana over at MADE. You can probably tell her love of yellow has made a lasting impression on me! I love this beautiful print, too, Song Birds in Bright, by Alexander Henry, sadly now out of stock at my usual online fabric store.

Next up I thought I'd show you a couple of sneak peaks into projects I'm working on and that I hope to share tutorials for in the near future.

Child's jester costume:

 - made from upcycled t-shirts, featuring a (kind of) authentic medieval hood!

DSLR pouch: 

- I'm not a fan of the black neoprene cases that seem to be the only choice for protecting your camera when it's in another bag, but my poor Canon EOS was desperate for a bit of padding. So I thought I'd have a go at making my own padded pouch. This is a photo of my first prototype made from oilcloth and bias tape. Hopefully with mark II I'll have a free pattern to share!

From an English country garden

Today was an event I really look forward to each year - the day the owner of this beautiful house opens its gardens to the public.

For a few hours we got the opportunity to explore the formal gardens and beautiful woodland walk, enjoying the flowers and trees in their full glory.

  

I decided last year that I wanted to sew dresses for the girls for this year's open day, and although I left it to the last minute, I just got a couple of simple little frocks done in time.

For El I made this sundress from Carefree Clothes for Girls, my first attempt at clothes from this book. I really enjoyed making it. I was worried, based on the photo in the book, that it might be cut a little low and loose at the front, so I changed the front to a round neckline rather than square.

I used a tie at the back instead of a button, to allow for a little adjustment and avoid hair getting caught up.

For Kiki, I used this ruffle shirt pattern by Heidi and Finn and added a couple of inches to make it into a dress.

This is the only photo I have of her wearing it - a rare moment of stillness between bouts of running around as fast as her little legs could carry her.

Contrary to the impression the photos above might give, the weather was very changeable today, with showers, lots of cloud and a very strong wind that shimmered through the meadow grass quite beautifully. Not the easiest thing to photograph!

A skirt for dancing

When I saw this ladies' (UK) size 8 cotton skirt in a charity shop last week, I knew it had to come home with me.

This might have been my most satisfying sewing project ever! I just chopped out the side zip, cut a couple of inches off the width to neaten it up, sewed a new side seam and then turned the top outward to form a channel for some elastic. Voila! A dancing skirt for El.

I added a drawstring at the waist just for extra security when those dance moves get too erratic.

Didn't get a photo of her dancing in it, of course, just this face when I asked her:

But it proved good enough for exploring, and sulking in too.

Incidentally the first photo above was taken on a hilltop near us, at a beacon tower (the type where fires were lit in Elizabethan times to signal the invasion of the Spanish Armada). It has the coolest old graffiti.

Just look at those fonts! I suppose if you go to the trouble of taking a hammer and chisel up a hill, you're more likely to take a bit of time and care with your lettering.

May the fourth be with you!

Goodness me, with all the celebrations for Easter and the Royal Wedding and various family get-togethers, I very nearly forgot all about one of the most important days of the year. ;)

Luckily, thanks to Facebook I was reminded in time, and we had chance to celebrate with a snack of what else but Aunt Beru's blue milk and cookies? (Hurrah!)

(Aunt Beru didn't have time to bake today so she had to fall back on the old emergency favourite of sliced bread spread with Nutella and dipped in coloured sprinkles)

And a quick lightsaber battle in the garden to finish it all off.

Happy Star Wars Day!

The final shirt (and another!)

In the end I wasn't too happy with just the stencilled Union flag for El's shirt, so I made another print with a further stencil of three hearts and a crown (which I drew by hand) on top. I appliqued the final design to a white t-shirt , added some off-cuts of knit fabric as bunting around the shoulders, and she was ready to go.

I loved the look of the bunting so much, I decided to make a shirt for Kiki too, using an old white hand-me-down t-shirt that was getting a little short on her. I added a couple of ruffles at the bottom and a string of bunting made from more offcuts and some ribbon.

 

I didn't have interfacing to iron on to the back of the triangles to stop them curling up so I had to sew them in place. I think I might make more in other colour combinations as I have a lot of fabric scraps and old t-shirts to use up!

As for the wedding itself, I loved Kate's dress, and those trees in the Abbey. The girls were not terribly impressed (neither of them are really the princess type, except for princesses who fight baddies and fly on spaceships). But they did approve of the mini Victoria sponge cakes and strawberries we had at tea time. And Daddy's home made bread.

Union Jack freezer paper stencil

Hope everyone had a relaxing Easter break! This is just a fly-by post to share a freezer paper stencil for a Union Jack flag (yes I know, pedants, strictly it's just called the Union flag). I'm in the process of making El a shirt for her Royal Wedding celebration day at pre-school tomorrow and I thought I'd share this now when it might actually be of use!

Here's the finished image.

This is the first time I've attempted freezer paper stenciling and I love it! Freezer paper isn't too widely available here in the UK, but you can get it from Hobbycraft. I got mine from Ebay. There are very many tutorials out there on the technique of freezer paper stenciling - for example here and here.

For this flag you need two colours and hence two stencils - one for the red and one for the blue (for use on white fabric). I've made the two part stencil into a pdf which you can grab here:

Click here to download from mediafire
Or here on Scribd

Just print out on to freezer paper (non waxy side), cut into two halves, then cut out the black parts using a craft knife and ruler.

(The pdf should print out OK on both US and UK paper sizes; just make sure you are not scaling to fit the paper).

Iron the "blue" part onto your fabric first, then sponge on your blue fabric paint. When it's completely dry (ours dried after a couple of hours in the sunshine), remove the paper and iron on the "red" part of the stencil, using the little grey markers to line up the cross correctly with the blue parts you've already printed. Then paint on your red fabric paint.

So easy! Miss El did this part herself.

Wait again, then peel and reveal!

As you can see I was rushing and got the positioning just off slightly so that some of the thinnest stripe at the bottom right is a little messed up. But imperfections are the beauty of handmade right? :)

I used scrap fabric so I can temporarily applique it to a shirt for tomorrow, but you can apply straight to a tshirt, of course.

Off to finish the shirt now!

ETA: click to see how it turned out.

The You and Me mat: a tutorial

One of the things I love about being able to operate a sewing machine is that often, when I think 'you know, right now something like x,y,z would be useful...' I don't have to go and scour the shops/internet to find it -  I can just go home and have a bash at making it myself, and even save a bit of money in the process.

I'm trying to be outdoors with the girls as much as possible at the moment, and snack stops on wet spring grass mean they need something to sit on. Our big picnic blanket is far too big to stuff into my bag (already overloaded with changing things, snacks, drinks, sunblock, etc etc). We have a few play mats that are about the right size but they would just end up soggy.

What we really, really needed something exactly like this:

It's lightweight. It's comfortable. It's a mini picnic quilt that's perfect for two. It's backed by waterproof polyester, and if it does get dirty, it's machine washable. It's the You and Me mat, and here's how I made it.

Materials

• Sewing machine with walking foot installed.
• Disappearing fabric pen.
• Hair grips (the metal sort with one wavy edge and one straight edge; we call them bobby pins).
• A piece of lightweight cotton for the top, sized 1/2" bigger all round than the desired mat size. I used a 37" x 27" piece of this "Gullan" cotton from Ikea featuring an appropiate food-splodged print, and I pre-washed and dried it.
• A piece of lightweight cotton for the ties (40" x 4" for the size of mat I made, I used a leftover bit from cutting the top piece).
• A piece of quilt batting cut approx 1/2" - 1" larger all round than the cotton top piece. ( I used Sew Simple 80/20 cotton blend)
• A piece of lightweight ripstop polyester, sized 4" bigger all round than the desired mat size. (The fabric I used was 130grams/square metre).

Instructions

1. Sew the quilted top
Place the cotton top piece on top of the batting and pin all round. With the walking foot installed, stitch around the edges with a 1/2" allowance (from the edge of the cotton top piece). Then, using a disappearing fabric pen, mark lines at equal intervals along the length. I used a 3" interval. Pin in the spaces between your lines to stop the layers from shifting, then machine stitch along the lines.

 

(Here's the top quilted at a 6" spacing. I then went back and added another set of lines to make the spacing 3").

Trim neatly around the quilted top, cutting through both layers to an allowance of 1/4" (from the stitched border), thereby making the top the size of the finished mat.

2. Attach the backing.
Place the piece of ripstop polyester on a flat surface, wrong size up (on my piece one side was slightly shinier than the other). Place the quilted top centrally on top, so 2" of the backing is visible all around.

You can't iron the polyester because it will melt, and you can't pin it either because any holes made will be permanent. So you have to fold and press the backing over the quilted top by hand, and secure with something that doesn't puncture the fabric. I used hair grips.

Fold over each edge by 1" to meet the edge of the quilted top, and then 1" again to overlap the top. At the corners, fold each corner of the polyester in underneath the corner of the quilted top to make a neat corner in the binding. Hold in place with the hair grips.

(You can also fold the corners like this). Continue all the way around.

3. Machine stitch the backing to the quilt top.
Large machine needles can rip big holes in the polyester fabric, so you now need to switch to a thin needle. I used a size 9, which didn't seem to be a problem with this thin cotton fabric and fairly lightweight wadding.

Still with the walking foot installed, sew around the top of the quilt, 1/4" from the inside edge of the binding.

 

I found this wasn't enough to secure the folded corners, so I pulled them to overlap a little and stitched close to the join.

To finish off and hold in place, edgestitch a second row of stitches on the binding close to the join with the quilt top.

4. Make and attach the ties

To make the ties, Take a 40"x4" strip of fabric and fold in half to make a 40" by 2" strip. Press, then open up and fold each long edge toward the crease. Press again, tucking in 1/2" at each short end, then fold in half so the folded edges are together, making a 40" by 1" strip. Press and pin in place, then machine stitch 1/8" from the edges to hold it all together.

Place the tie on the reverse of the mat, on one of the long sides, 1/8 of the long edge length (about 4 1/2 ") from the corner, with the middle of the tie positioned over the mat's stitch lines. Sew in place by following the two existing stitch lines. (With the mat unfolded, obviously.)

Roll the finished mat up by folding along the long edge, then folding again, then rolling towards the ties.

All ready to take out on expedition!

 

Just to the back garden... 

 

 

Or further afield. (A field).

 Washing tip: a 40 degree wash on a gentle spin cycle seemed fine, but probably best not to tumble dry.

Happy sewing!

(Personal use only - please do not sell items made from this tutorial, thanks)