Wedding Guest Dress

I had the honour of attending the lovely wedding of Liz a few weeks ago, and as I am a fan neither of pink concoctions nor their prices, decided to create B's frock myself. (I am a fan of party frocks!)



This is based on the Itty Bitty Baby Dress (free pattern!) from Made By Rae, somewhat enlarged and with different straps. All of the dress materials came from our lovely local shop Darn It & Stitch, including these fantastic vintage glass buttons.



The shoes were one pattern combined with another pattern's idea. I used the Pleated Ballerina Shoe [pdf] pattern from Homespun Threads but added lacing loops like the ones at Me Sew Crazy, resulting in something that looks a bit like a highland dancing shoe!



Little minx unlaced them. :D

I think I must like these colours. Before B was born I knit a 1-year size baby cardigan. Here it is, it still needs a zip though!



It's a basic round yoke cardigan, knit in Lana Grossa Meilenweit Mega Boots Stretch and some other random red sock yarn. No real pattern, just made it up to suit the measurements. :)

Baby Trousers

These are fun to make, and pretty darn quick once you know what you're doing. Excellent for covering those cloth-nappied bubble bums.


Big Butt Baby Pants, pattern from Made by Rae

Pair 1, in some insane striped jersey. (The pattern is written for wovens, but seemed to worked fine with this cotton jersey.)



Pair 2, made from a pair of old shirt-sleeves plus a bum panel of fun fabric. :)



The pattern goes way into the toddler sizes, so I'm certain to be making more of these!

And that was Christmas...

...Which I'm only now managing to post about.

I made a few things this year, in snatched bits of time, as B still refuses to nap anywhere but on a person.

I decorated a couple of hoodies for my husband:





And made potholders for my two SILs and MIL: (Lacked in thematic material for FIL. Next year?)







Also, I recieved some faboo Urban Zoology fabric from Ann Kelle, for winning a giveaway at Fabric Rehab. Wahey! I feel lucky. :)



Mostly, however, I just took care of this one:

A finished quilt!

I am ridiculously proud of this quilt, especially as it's only the third one I've ever made.



I had a bit of trouble photographing it, between the auto-timer, the sun, the wind, and my well overdue bump. Plus trying to avoid all the enormous spiders and spiderwebs which are everywhere in the garden at the moment!



You can see the back of the quilt there, in all its chartreuse-ness.

Here are some close-ups of the quilting, which I did in a swirly zig-zag, with accents of stippling and swirling.

I used 7 colours to quilt with, because I couldn't stand the look of light thread on dark fabric, at least for this project! I also could use a machine with a stitch regulator, I've got horribly uneven stitch lengths. For my first go with a free-motion quilting foot, however, I think it's pretty good. :)









If I were to do this over again, I would make a narrower road, with no white dashes - these were boring to sew and a real pain to get lined up around the middle bit!

Finished dimensions: 44" x 59"

While I'm waiting...

My version of nesting seems to consist solely of a) cooking and b) crafting. The freezer is chock full of yummy eats (the fridge is particularly empty however. Oops.) and I am sewing to fill the time when I'm not too tired.

I knitted this hat-and-bootie set while at my antenatal classes. (Seemed appropriate!)



That's a modified-for-DK Sweet Norwegian Baby Cap and some Oh Baby Booties. (Picture taken before I realised that the tops of the booties fold down. :) )

And some sewing:



In the background: A simple swaddle blanket from My Longest Year. Behold the power of variegated thread!

Then a little crinkle square (that's the one with bees on), crinkle provided by Oreo packaging; a tiny taggie blanket, idea shamelessly gacked from OxfordKitchenYarns; and two soft fabric balls (in medium and small), pattern by Grand Revival Designs.

I should really be making more useful things, like reuseable baby wipes, but that's much boring-er! :)

Also, the quilt is finished, so a seperate post about that if it stays sunny and I get a nice photo of it....

The quilt top is FINISHED!

It took what seemed like forever (although in reality I had a week off while waiting for interfacing... more on this later), but the quilt top is finished. Today I bought wadding and curved safety pins and three (!) different colours for quilting with. I just need to sew together the back and away we'll go...

Here's the whole quilt top (click thru to get a bigger picture on Flickr), measuring 47" x 62", pretty good considering I was aiming for 45" x 60". Yes, it's going to be a floor quilt at first, although it's going to need a lot of floor space!



The light blue sky fabric was problematic: I picked it up from my local stacked floor-to-ceiling fabric shop, and it was in with the solid quilting cottons, so I didn't think twice about buying it. Almost straight away when I got it home, I realised that it was a MUCH lighter weight cotton than quilting cotton is. I had visions of it tearing to bits under baby's bum scootching. Oh dear.

I ended up getting the lightest weight fusible interfacing, which seems to have worked really well. Its somewhat heavier than the rest of the fabric, but the seams press down nicely and it looks good, which is really all that matters.

Oh, and a bit about design: I thought very carefully about which colours I was going to use, and I settled on a palette of true red, green, and blue. I was not allowed to use purple at all, so periwinkle blues were out, and I also kept out teal. There's a limited amount of yellow and pink, just enough to add a bit of splash and verve. :)

Every house is in a different fabric, stretching the resources of my very small stash! There's only so much fabric I can justify buying for any one project, though. Most of the fabrics are fairly new but two came from my mother's stash and are at least 25 years old!

Here are some detail pics of some of the trees and houses I sewed since the last post.

Terraced Housing:



Shotover Park (a big foresty park near to our house):



A barn on a hill:



A castle and the sun:



The school, post office, and shop, which will all eventually have embroidered signs on them!:

Maternity Wrap Top

I made this top ages ago. It's a knockoff of an Isabella Oliver top by Megan Neilsen. Here's her post about it.) The pattern was free when I downloaded it, but it looks like it's $5 now.



Anyways! I was determined to make this top, even though I'd never had success sewing with stretch fabrics in the past. I did my research, bought the right needles for my machine, and had a go. Good thing it worked, because the only place I could find 4-way stretch was John Lewis, and it was a bit spendy. (I have enough left over to make a pair or two of baby trousers though, so win!)

And here's a side shot of the bump. 35 weeks! And I totally need a haircut.

Bank Holiday Weekend

What I've been up to this bank holiday weekend: I started a massive mission to create a quilt for the child-to-be, something I dreamed up a while back. Since it will definitely be a floor quilt to start, it made sense to make a quilt that would be interesting to lie on and use. I thought about those car mats, whiere there are lots of roads and buildings and things to interact with, and went from there.

Here is my current rough plan:



Not too many roads, no. My first plan was much more literal, an attempt to reflect our neighbourhood. This one's a bit looser, but still includes our house, one of the semi-detacheds in the middle bit. Each square represents 6 inches of quilt.

I finished the middle bit today, which is very pleasing, as it involved a lot of brain-rending piecing. I had to be extra careful, because I only had a fat quarter of the green-with-daises-and-snails. I made it with a small bit leftover spare. Phew!



Here are some other houses, plus a church, which I've completed for the project:







I feel like I've completed the most difficult bit. Next up I'm going to create lots of road!

We Are Two Mariners

When I saw this fabric, I knew immediately that it should become a bag for Jaci, who is ever interested in all things seafaring. I bought the aqua green fabric at last year's NEC quilt show, picked out a pattern... and then did nothing to it. And then I got pregnant and tired and busy blah blah blah, you know how it goes? And finally, this summer, when I was ready to sew the bag (Lickety Split Bag), I found that I needed a full metre of fabric for both interior and exterior, not the meagre half-metre I'd bought.

Cue frantic searching on internet for more fabric. Cue finding out that Tula Pink is one of those crazy sought-after design lines that gets snapped up and hoarded. I was lucky enough, though, to find the same undersea-themed fabric in dark blue, and the coordinating chains-and-anchors fabric and two different UK vendors. *phew!*

OK, not the best photos ever, but here's the bag!



I fussy-cut the pockets because I wanted to show off the coolness of the fabric. You can see the lining in the first shot, too.





Happy birthday half a year late, Jaci!

Snow Day Bag

That project I told you about yesterday? Conceived, researched, and completed within a week, a mini bag for my brand-new iPhone. I'm pretty precious about the phone, since it's expensive, and I needed a way to carry it around the house while I do housework, so I can still listen to the iPod-ness of it.

I followed this mini-wallet tutorial, but made mine about twice as big. I'm so proud of it, it's just about the first thing I've made that looks like it might have come from a shop. (It doesn't look at all bodged - and it wasn't!)



It fits my phone, wallet, and keys, should I need to pop out to the shops. I'm quite pleased with the box corners which make it extra roomy.



And here are the linings. The front flap and pocket with have a popper (snap) at some point, but it stays well enough closed itself for the moment.



Finally, I must say I got the knotted strap idea from here.

I've already used it today, and for extra measure, it means I can really feel the phone vibrations! The school was polling everyone to see if we could make it in tomorrow, so perhaps this is my last snow day. :)

a quilt for baby rachel

A quilt for a baby who happened to be born before I got the quilt finished, but ah well, she's only three weeks old, she won't notice the difference.

I based it on the Amy Butler pattern Thea's Puzzle quilt (pic) (free pdf), but when I looked at the instructions, I realised that it was more of a string quilt, and I wanted more control over where the colours went.

So I turned to the idea of a string quilt crazy nine patch mashup.

I had my fabrics,



and to make certain it would work they way I wanted it to, I made a paper mock-up.



That's making a cut then taking the left side fabric from the bottom to the top, after each cut. Following the cut I'll stitch each layer then cut again.

So here's cut number one. The blue fabric was on top, but after I made the cut, I moved the left side fabric (currently purple) from the bottom to the top.



Here it is after the fourth cut. I kinda forgot to take pictures of those other cuts, but if you look at the paper diagram you should get the idea.



After I sewed all those, time passed. I'd originally planned to sash with the purple, but I decided to include it in the blocks instead, so I got the spotty olives-with-pimentos type one and did the border in purple instead.

More time passed, until earlier this week, when I quilted the whole darn thing, having finally got a walking foot. I'd wanted to stitch in the ditch, but also pressed my seams open instead of to the side, so they got outlined instead.

Then I bound it. I followed these tutorials with pretty much 100% success.

I just love that lime green and purple combination.



And here's the back. That's all folks!

Crumpets and Clotted Cream

I saw Crumpets not long after it was published in 2004, and I always knew I wanted to knit it. Oh, but that skirt, and the miles of stockinette I'd have to endure... not for me.



No beads or ribbons, either, nothing that could bother my one year-old niece. The skirt is eyelet cotton with a cotton organza layer so that she doesn't have to show her nappies to the world. :)



If we're lucky, perhaps Grandma will get a picture of her in it sometime!