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Piratetude

Published on March 10, 2011 in Handmade and Sew beautiful. 2 Comments Tags: , , , .


Pants: Harem Pant Pattern
Hat: Felt with Skull and X-bone application

L. rocking her Pirate Costume at the Faschingsparty at the German Saturday School. I saw a pirate hat like this at a friends house who inherited the hat from a relative for her son. It’s such a simple construction that I pushed it out till the very last minute to make one. It’s basically two half circles and three seams. To be worn, the hat folds inside out.

Well, actually, I pushed making the whole costume out till the very end. The pants are another version of the harem pant pattern, which you can download here. It’s still the 2T version, just lengthen the legs about 2″ or 5cm longer to make a long pant version as shown in the picture. The belt is just a single 2″ wide strip of black felt.

Pardon the wonky scan – but I was excited to share this guy:
1. Cut two identical half circles of felt (the inner radius is the head)
2. cut the scull and x-bone and apply to one of the circles. I used my sewing machine and the blanket stitch but you can easily glue it on too!
3. with the applique on the inside, sew the two sides of the half circles and the top of the half circles as indicated below. Backstitch at beginning and end to secure the seam.
4. turn inside out and voila – you have your pirate hat!

 

And another one…

Published on February 17, 2011 in Handmade and Sew beautiful. 2 Comments Tags: .

Harem Pants
Fabric: Refashioned Levi’s Sweatshirt

I did it again – this time I used an old sweatshirt of my husband that literally became unwearable with a humongous neckline and worn out cuffs and hem. Even though I did a wide swept cleaning spree a couple of months ago – I just couldn’t part with the beast. The fabric was a really lovely french terry with a heathered base. And I knew that it had a better destination in it’s future. Good thing we have kids, as it’s so quick and satisfying to create something sweet out of something formerly loved. I used the hem rib as waistband and the sleeve cuffs as hem cuffs.

With the use of my serger, the whole project took less then 1 hour.
Which makes it even more satisfying.

New Harem Pants

Published on February 3, 2011 in Handmade, little things and Sew beautiful. 3 Comments Tags: , .


Pattern: self drafted
Fabric: Cotton Elastan Jersey I had in my stash for maybe 10 years? It must have been when I was still working for adidas in Germany!

I just made a couple more of the harem pants – just because I felt inspired again… Maybe it has something to do with the Lady who runs the mag on the left? (hint: Kleinformat)
I drafted the pattern and made these pants last summer and even uploaded the pattern. I accidentally uploaded the wrong .pdf version but the link should be fixed by now.

Some more pics of the ones I made last summer:

And here another one I made yesterday.L is such a show-off! These ones are for sure the coolest! Cut up Andy’s t-shirt that got too small (he claims it on surfing) for the front and back pocket and the back is a left over of black Soy Cotton Jersey.

Home dec

Published on January 24, 2011 in design, Handmade, little things and Sew beautiful. 0 Comments

Cushions from Echino Fabric and Pendleton Woolen Mills scraps.

The last couple of weeks I took some ‘time off’ my sewing machine. Reading, reading, planning and plotting – not even knitting!

It took quite a while to get back to it. Before the turn of the year I had gotten a bit dis-enchanted with sewing for some reason. Was it that my love affair had ended?
Beginning of December ended the pattern drafting class with Amy at Modern Domestic. Super informative – that girl just has her stuff down – and a lot of nice girls that took the class. I knew that I had a bit of an advantage – having a pretty good idea about pattern construction – yet I had never ever created a basic sloper for my own body. So far I created two garments from that sloper and they both are fitting pretty well – more about that later this week. I had all those ideas in my head but didn’t get to make it all and got super frustrated with myself. Especially as two projects turned out not so perfect. And I felt that even after spending so much time behind the machine the last two years, it would take me many, many more years to really become an experienced sewist. Besides, we received the note that within the next three months, I will be able to get to work again! So things are very exciting and I am hoping that I’ll be able to pick up the pieces where I had left off about 2.5 years ago – and come back even stronger then before.

So I switched the sewing machine off.

To start planning and plotting and ideating…

Until last Satuday.

And it felt sooo good.

Just like catching up with an old friend again.

And today, i finished this skirt.

More about the skirt with me stuck in it later this week :)

The famous Infinity Dress

Published on October 21, 2010 in Handmade and Sew beautiful. 8 Comments Tags: .

Browsing on Burdastyle, I found a dress which looked so complicated, yet so beautiful. When I continued reading, I found out that this dress was actually very simple to make. Researching into it a bit more, I found this blog with a simple tutorial on how to make it. So I did. And it really is a quick project. The only tricky thing is to lay out and cut your fabric. This project surely is a yard burner. In the end, there is just 1 seam to serge. And i you want to do a longer version, then there will be 3 seams total.

Here a couple of hints that will make the dress a success:

Fabric:
Choose a Wool, Soy or Cotton blend with Elastan or Lycra component. The fabric should have enough body to give you good coverage and support. Try to avoid Polyester Microfiber blends and Bamboo based fabrics. As those won’t give you the support you need. Also, if you go with a printed fabric, be aware that the wrong side of the fabric will show once you are draping the ties around your body.

Tie Length:
I have found that the calculation of 1.5 x body height turned out too long and hard to handle. 2 yards usually do the trick. Unless you are a tall woman, then I’d go with 2.25 yards.

The Waist Circle:
In most cases, the dress sits directly under the bust, therefore I’d suggest to use the under-bust measurement to determine the radius for the inner cutting circle. Rostitchery recommends to divide this measurement by 3 and again by 2. In my case: 32:3= 10.5″:2= 5.25″ However, if your fabric is really stretchy, go even with half of that measurement or you’ll have to pull your waist while stretching out your waistband piece.

Will head over to Bolt this weekend to stock up on more knits for further dresses. They are having a great sale starting Friday. Maybe see you there.

Tiny Polka Dot Top E

Published on September 29, 2010 in Handmade, Sew beautiful, Sewing Japanese and Uncategorized. 0 Comments Tags: , , , , , .

Pattern: Top E from this Japanese Pattern Book.
Fabric: purple polka dot gauze from Fabric Depot’s Outdoor sale for $2/yard

A very special moment for me when L was taking time to do a little face and toe painting before we went to school. I wonder where she gets it from because I hardly use any make-up. The pattern is quite simple to assemble. The only thing I found tricky was that the bottom of the bodice and the top of the skirt both had to be gathered before they were sewn together. Which isn’t very stable. And in the end the gathering is not quite even all around but as I am probably the only one even noticing anything. Next time I would stabilize one of the gathered ends by sewing it against a tape down first to the wrong side of the garment.

I love the back overlaid openings but that’s something I will hardly be able to pull of anymore. But who cares if you have a little one who can pull it off no problem. Still a tiny bit too big but as summer is dwindling down now, I am glad it will fit just right next summer!

August catch-all

Published on September 8, 2010 in Handmade and Sew beautiful. 0 Comments

The month of august flew by and hardly left me any chance to devote time to my blog. My cousin spent her summer holiday here in Portland and we had lots of time to get to know each other. We traveled to Seattle, sewed 16 capes for L’s school, baked

surfed,

and visited the birds at the Audobon society, the Multnomah Falls, Timberline Lodge on Mt. Hood and went city hiking at Forrest Park. Besides we did trips out to Alberta so she could learn screenprinting at Modern Domestic. She discovered her love for the craft and printed a design on yardage so she could make the bag from ‘Carry Me’ – It’s the same bag I made from Echino Fabric.

Her luggage arrived late so I got her some striped jersey fabric at Bolt and we whipped up the little tunic dress she’s wearing on the photos above. Pattern is based on the Wendy Mullen book Homestretch. I used my new fancy turning tool to make the long belt. I have to go into that in a separate post because I totally love this tool!

L loved having Franzi in town and I had a companion. Especially for mundane things like cleaning up and sorting out the garage and make it ready for shelving. I also finally did some more natural dye experiements with carrot weed, black eyed susan and blackberry. More on that once I take pictures… And finished and ordered some prints for Shelly and Karen’s book they are working on. Anyways – next week we’ll have another set of visitors that will be equally fun but won’t stay quite as long as Franzi did.

Purple striped dress

Published on August 8, 2010 in Handmade and Sew beautiful. 5 Comments

Pattern: Self drafted using Built by Wendy Home Stretch
Fabric: Hemp Cotton, self dyed, self discharged

This is probably one of my most favourite knit dresses so far. I made this almost exactly one year ago. The pattern is self drafted using Wendy Mullen‘s Home Stretch pattern book. I had to take the bodice in quite a bit (I could have easily used the smaller size as base pattern). The skirt part is just two rectangles sewn together at the sides and gathered at the top. This was important to me as I wanted to use as much fabric without unnecessary seams as possible. The fabric was so dear to me because I thought it is very interesting and unique. And above all, self made:  I took a class on discharge printing last year and had no experience on self dying or printing at that point. I prepared some Hemp Cotton blend by dying it with an iDye packet I got at Bolt. I was almost shocked when I pulled the bright purple fabric from the washing machine. At least that helped overcome the fear of digging in and experimenting with large scale designs. Below you can see how I first masked off the areas that were supposed to stay dark purple. Everywhere else, I applied discharge paste with a foam roller and waited until the paste was dry. I don’t remember if I rinsed it right away or waited until I was able to chuck it in the washing machine.  Maybe I should re-read the post I  wrote about it last year.

Purple linen jacket

Published on August 7, 2010 in dyed naturally, Handmade, Sew beautiful and Sewing Japanese. 2 Comments Tags: , , .

Happy Homemade vol.1
ISBN978-4-579-11242-5
Style J

I used some fabric from the natural dye class that I took end of last year. And even though the jacket doesn’t look too bad on the photos – nicely styled with the sassy hat – but in reality it looks more like a scrub then a proper jacket. Part of it is surely the color. The dye I used is a Logwood exhaust of a prior dye batch with which I made this dress. I think I’ll try to do some tie dying to ‘save’ the jacket. I am very inspired by Karen’s post here but will need to think a bit more on how and with what I should actually overdye. Maybe tie it and overdye in a stronger Logwood dyebath and modify with Iron afterwards? Or simply use some synthetic black dye? We’ll see what happens – I guess the whole natural dye cycle just started.

All in all though, if I had chosen a better, more interesting fabric, the jacket wouldn’t be bad at all! I have pretty broad shoulders, which is also why it doesn’t quite hang relaxed enough on me. The other thing that bugs me in hindsight: I didn’t have enough fabric to make my own bias tape. So I ran and got some pre-made stuff. Obviously, it was impossible to find the right shade so I ended up with some light grey tape. The tape goes all the way around inside the front lapels and the neck. And is visible when the jacket is worn open and even tied with the belt. I should have used a contrasting or accent fabric to play it up as a design feature rather then an afterthought. The tape is probably synthetic, the body fabric a cellulose fabric, and the thread is poly. So overdying will most certainly bring a complete mishmash out of the style. The sewing is nearly perfect – that’s why I am just hesitating to open it back up again for the fear of butchering.

Oh hey, it’ll just be filed under another lesson learned.

New Figgy’s Patterns

Published on August 6, 2010 in Handmade and Sew beautiful. 0 Comments Tags: , , , .

The new Figgy’s patterns are out. I was so happy to get the opportunity to test drive the Tee for Two tee shirt pattern and made these two pieces out of it.

Highly recommend this pattern. To anybody really, but if you like to start tackling knit fabrics and don’t have a serger – this pattern is for you. Even though i am lucky enough to have a serger, I learned a lot about sewing with knit fabrics with the instruction booklet. More info on all the patterns here.

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