Monthly Archives: September 2013

Reminiscing

When I was looking through all my clothes on Sunday to find something to wear, I stumbled upon a floral pencil skirt that had been shoved to the back.

I pulled it out, excited to see it. It is the first article of clothing I ever sewed! (Ok. Technically, I sewed a pair of pajama pants for Ezra very first, but the pajama pants were a tutorial I found online where you just slap down a pair of pants and trace around them to make a pattern and then sew the pieces up. I knew absolutely nothing about sewing at the time-I couldn’t even wind my own bobbin. Jon had to show me! I cut the pants out wrong and all kinds of stuff. So those don’t really count. The skirt was the first real deal.)

I put the skirt on and thought about how happy I was when I made it. It involved sewing my first darts and putting in my first invisible zipper.

Darts!

Zipper!

We got on our bikes to head to church, except the skirt was too tight for me to sit on my bike. So Jon helped me put my skirt around the bike seat. Then all the boys laughed at me and said I looked like some half-human-half-bike creature.

Oh, yes. I am such a lady.

Jon’s Shirt

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I made Jon’s first oxford shirt. I’ve been meaning to for awhile, but I’ve been putting it off because it sounded so hard to make a men’s dress shirt.

It was finally time to try, though. All of his shirts for work are getting really ratty. And, it wasn’t as hard as I thought it would be. It was definitely a lot of technical sewing, but not too incredibly complicated.

I’m sad that it turned out a little bit too big. The arms are kinda floppy on him. But next time, I will get the sizing right.

DownEast Dress

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I was walking past DownEast awhile ago and I saw a mannequin wearing a dress I thought was cute. So I took a picture of the dress through the window because I wanted to try and copy the dress sometime.

I finally decided to try this week. I just combined my scoop tee pattern with my maxi skirt pattern, and then added a tie around the waist and some belt loops.

It’s a super comfortable dress. I rode my bike to church in it and it worked out great!

And here’s a picture of Owen in his new Sunday shirt. He’s turning into such a little man.

Owen’s Sunday Shirt

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I made Owen a new Sunday shirt. I used a pattern from Fishsticks Patterns (or a name very similar to that…I can’t remember for sure and I don’t want to take the time to look it up) called the Everyday Camp Shirt.

It was a really good pattern. I was so stoked when I finished this shirt. It was so much easier than when I made his first Sunday shirt in February. Part of that is because I used an indie pattern this time with much better instructions instead of a commercial pattern. But I like to think that a lot of it is because I’ve improved my sewing skills.

This time, I understood how to make the collar right and tuck all the seams into the collar. With Owen’s first one, I had to just serge the seams off because I could not figure out what the instructions were telling me to do.

I don’t even have any pictures of Owen in it yet, but I did have fun dressing the shirt up with a tie. I will take some of the real Owen in it on Sunday when he wears it to church.

The collar, the way a collar is supposed to be!

Corduroy Brothers

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I love corduroy for my boys. I think it makes the best pants and shorts. I made Seth and Ezra a pair of shorts out of this nice brown corduroy from fabric.com. Ezra wasn’t so sure about wearing them until I told him they were the same color as his golden Lego ninja. Then he put them right on and called them his “Golden Ninja Shorts.”

I also made another polo for Seth. I’m trying to get that school clothes wardrobe built up!

I made this one out of some striped fabric that I knew he’d love and when I ordered it, it said it was a jersey spandex blend. But when it got here, I could tell it had rayon in it. I wasn’t so sure about making a boy’s shirt out of it because it was so thin and drapey. But I think it worked okay for a polo and Seth loves the shirt because the fabric’s so soft.