work in progress: butterfly dress

Burda 9677 - dress, vest, and coat. At Mood last weekend, I bought a great green embroidered velvet fabric to make holiday dresses for the nieces. Then this weekend I bought this pattern for the vest. The dress has some really nice pleats, though, so I cut it out of a cute butterfly fabric. I've only done the front and back panels so far, the rest will have to wait for a while.

A soft teddy bear

At Joanns this weekend I found a great- super soft, insanely beautiful- piece of brown fake fur. It was $4 for a 20 inch wide piece, so I brought it home and made a HUGE mess turning it into a teddy bear. I had Simplicity 3779, so the kitty cat pattern got turned into this fine fellow. I tried following the advice to cut only the backing and not the pile, but that didn't so much work. This particular fake fur shed everywhere. Piles and piles and piles of brown fuzz static clinging to everything. I also couldn't mark the backing very well, so this was kind a "make up the darts as you go" project. Thankfully the fur hides all the goofs.



I'd like to adapt a doll jacket to fit him, and then I need to track down some doll sized pilot wings. My sailor got his commercial pilot license recently, and so I'd like this to be a pilot bear for him. I might end up having to make some embroidered wings on the jacket. This is where having an embroidery machine might actually be useful!

Halloween!

This is the second year I'm doing a little Halloween "advent calendar" for the nieces. Last year I made a large panel with pockets on it, so I'm reusing it again this year. There's no candy in it, so each day has a little treat like halloween stickers, or socks from the Target dollar bin, or a little something that I made. Here's a peek at a few of the things in it.



A green teddy bear from a free download pattern on Burda



A black 18" doll jacket from Simplicity 3551 for one of the dolls. (This was hard to fit in. I made the pockets way too small!)




A barrette I made from a dollar store barrette, some ribbon, and a bit of jewelry wire.



A small headband for Ana



Wooden magnets- I bought some halloween shapes at michaels, painted them, and used wood glue to attach magnets to the back. These were very popular last year, so I made sure to include a bunch.

And so here it is, stuffed to the brim. I'm sure they're going to rummage ahead- the odds that the little green teddybear stays in his pocket until the 26th are pretty slim.




I made this a year ago, so I have no pictures of the construction, but it was pretty straightforward.

I started with 2 pieces of flannel about 1.5 feet across and maybe 2.5 feet long. I stitched them together, right side out, and zig zagged the edges. You could be fancy and sew it right sides together, then flip it out, to make clean edges.

The hanging strap is a ribbon, zigzagged to the upper corners. I just eyeballed the length... my sister hangs this over a wooden plaque that's on her kitchen wall, so I just made it long enough to slide over that and hang down.

To make the pockets, I cut several strips of a halloween fabric as wide as the backing panel and maybe 3 or 4 inches high. I folded in the out edges, then decided where the pocket divisions would be. I stitched on numbers using fancy stitches on my machine, or painted them on. On a few pockets, I put on appliques or stitched even smaller pockets on top. Then I attached it to the panel by sewing along the sides and the bottom. The pocket divisions were then stitched in. This is where I kind of goofed and made most of the pockets about 1 or 2 inches wide. Fine for stickers, but I would really like bigger pockets for things like holiday socks or doll clothes! Not enough to make a new panel, though.

And that's really it... I made a handful of tiny pouches to hand sew on to be a few of the day pockets, just to vary things. And of course I did manage to make the 31st pocket big enough for a good treat!



Finally, there's a little Halloween contest over on the Dabbled blog! You can head over there to see all the cute halloween items other bloggers have made.

fairy dress

fairy dress
Originally uploaded by wck

An older photo of Kate at her 4th birthday party, wearing a dress I made for her. I accidently put in the fairies on the bodice upside down. Ooops! She never stands still, though, so I don't think many people noticed. This is one of the first "patternless" dresses that I made, and you can see that the shoulders are bit too long for her. I had to insert a purple midriff band to extend the bodice long enough to fit her, as she's kind of long and skinny.

Quilt

This is Declan, settling in to take a nap on some quilt squares that I'm working on. They were the floor so that I could see how much of a queen size quilt I had so far. The answer is.. maybe 1/4th. I've been working on it in bits and pieces, but the pile of squares looks so big when they're stacked! Well, there's no timeline on this project, so I'll just keep working on it.

It's made from a jelly roll of Mendocino by Heather Ross, worked into my own scraps. I'm using my favorite quilt square construction method, Mile a Minute blocks.