Japanese

Hiya folks!  I’ve been hiding away for a bit, but couldn’t stay away from the Kids Clothes Week Challenge. I really thought I wouldn’t have the time to participate, but then it occurred to me that a challenge is supposed to be “challenging”! The point is that it IS challenging to find the time to make stuff, so here is a week set aside to make the time. And so I shall. :)

Here’s today’s completed dress:

Actually, I made it on Saturday, so I’m counting that as my “Day 1”. Today I worked on a similar dress for my youngest, and should have it done by tomorrow. My goal is to have a new dress, new skirt, and new pajamas for each girl by the end of the week. It feels so good to be sewing again.  The last time I was behind my machine was when I was finishing up a quilt. I never had a chance to update on it, but I will say that I’ll be remaking it in the coming weeks. More on that another time.

For the dress pictured, I followed a pattern from this Japanese sewing book. There was a hefty learning curve with this first one, which probably could have been alleviated if I could read Japanese, but the second dress is going much more smoothly.

If you’d like to follow along with everyone’s creations, just check out the Elsie Marley flickr pool.

This past week or so has had me so busy sewing! I’m not usually nearly this productive, but something special has me cranking out handmade goods like crazy: babies! Two of my friends are having babies in March and I’m on a mission to complete some little goodies for each of them. One baby will definitely be a girl, the other is yet to be known. Love surprises!

But, since I know that there will be at least one girl, I happily made a couple Itty Bitty dresses from Rae’s pattern. What a wonderful pattern she has created. Even with a couple of hiccups, I was able to make two dresses in almost as many nights (it would have been two days if I hadn’t had to make a trip to the store to buy matching thread for the blue ribbon…but I digress). The key to getting these dresses to look great is getting a nice gather around the side seams to help the skirt poof out more. And, I made the mistake of connecting the piping on the side. Not a good idea. The bend there makes the piping want to flip open and it’s rather annoying. Next time I’ll remember to join the piping in the back. But…they’re still so dang cute! Now on to a nice warm blanket for said baby and a doll quilt for her 2-year-old sister.

As for the doll quilt, I’m going to use it as an opportunity to try a few things. The first is the flower hexagons that I worked on a week or so ago. In addition, I’m diving into stamping with the help of Lena Corwin’s book (which I absolutely love and cannot recommend enough) . I did a test run yesterday:

I’m using acrylic blocks with hand-cut adhesive foamies. They’re sooo easy to make and use and I was positively giddy by the end of my first stamping session. For real. It’s awesome and so totally empowering to feel like I’m making my own fabric.

In between all this baby stuff I’m also hoping to make a couple outfits for my own little girlies. I recently purchased several Japanese craft books, one of which was a girls clothing book. I want to make everything in it…it’s that good. Snapped a pic of the fabrics I plan to use to make coordinating, not matching, outfits for my kids.  I’m so pumped. I’ve looked over the diagrams and I actually think I can do this. I’ll be sure to post some photos of the book and some of my favorite garments.

Well, I think that about brings us up to speed! Happy crafting everyone and I’ll be back soon!