Life moves pretty fast...

"Sweater, n.: garment worn by child when its mother is feeling chilly."
~Ambrose Bierce

My parents came to visit this weekend. As mentioned in an earlier post, I am making Simplicity 4193 (the skirt and jacket) for my mother as a Christmas present.


I was able to get the "muslin" skirt basted together before she arrived and we fitted it to her. She's a short lady, so I had to cut off something like 3" from the bottom to get the right length. It seems to fit pretty good now, and it's ready to be deconstructed and cut out of the fashion fabric. She actually really liked the pink butterfly fabric on the skirt, so once I cut the new pieces out of the fashion fabric I'm also going to reconstruct the "muslin" so she'll have 2 skirts!

I wasn't able to get the jacket put together before she left but I worked on it today. Here's the "finished" skirt (still the muslin) and as far as I've gotten on the jacket.


The jacket is HUGE! There's no way it's going to fit her. I think I'm going to have to make it a few sizes smaller. They're coming back for a very brief visit on Friday because my dad has gotten us great seats to see the shuttle launch. I had intended to have the "muslin" jacket done by then, but now since I have to basically redo the whole thing, I'm not so sure that's going to happen. Now I'm torn between starting to redo it and just leaving it as is so that she can at least get an idea of what it'll be like to make sure she's happy with her choice.

We did have time this weekend, though, to make a trip to Joann's and she picked out the fashion fabric for the skirt and the jacket. Here's what she chose:

a pink silk for the skirt and a gorgeous brown silk brocade with a turquoise, pink, and white paisley/flower pattern for the jacket. There's more turquoise than pink on the brocade, so the skirt will highlight the pink in the jacket quite nicely, I think.

It's interesting, when I was working on the muslin, I had almost no motivation to work on it. It was a chore and I just couldn't get excited about it. Now that we have the fashion fabric, though, I'm really excited about working on it, even the muslin! I'm quite amazed at how just having fun fabric for a project makes such a huge difference in my excitement and motivation for that project.

Past project Wednesday becomes Back to the Future Wednesday

Well I've now gotten my blog up to date on all my past projects, so past project Wednesday is now converted to Back to the Future Wednesday where I will report on the projects I have lined up and/or need to get to.

Next on my list is an outfit I'm making for my mother, she picked out Simplicity 4193 for me to make her the skirt and the jacket as a Christmas present.

She's coming to visit the second week of November, so while she's here we will go shopping for the fashion fabric and hopefully I will have a muslin version ready for a fitting. I think she's a brave woman agreeing to this considering these will be my first adult pieces of clothing to sew. :-O

Though she may not have actually realized this yet.

Tiger bag complete

"Lettin' the cat outta the bag is a whole lot easier 'n puttin' it back in." ~Will Rogers

I finished the bag I was making for my mom for her birthday.

My mom teaches at a high school where the mascot is the tiger and their colors are orange and brown. I think it will make a cute school bag for her.

The inside has a big pocket and a divided pocket.

The details:
This bag was quite a project and I only got it done in a weekend because I pretty much did nothing else the entire weekend. Next time I think I'll give myself a little more time for gift making.

The bag is formed by the patchwork layer (cotton fabric), a layer of buckram, 2 layers of fusible fleece, and another cotton fabric for the lining. Sewing all of that together was a bit difficult for my machine. I broke the needle 3 times. One time because the lining had bunched up so it was extra thick. Once I realized what had happened I had to take the stitches out and redo it which was a HUGE pain considering I was using a small stitch length. Also, getting all of those layers under the foot was a feat in itself. I think my machine is a bit grumpy after all that.

I hand stitched the binding on the top, and that was quite a chore, though I eventually got the hang of making the slip stitch and it got much easier. Overall I'm pretty satisfied with it despite the fact that more swear words were used in the making of this project than all of the others combined. :) I don't think I'd make it again necessarily, but I'm glad I tried it once.

Well my quote works two-fold. There's a slight chance (very slight) that my mom might read this and the cat will be out of the bag, and also one of the kittens decided to take a nap in it and I managed to snap a picture before she hopped out.

Birthday present project

"All women become like their mothers. That is their tragedy. No man does. That's his."
~Oscar Wilde, The Importance of Being Earnest, 1895

My mother's birthday is coming this Friday. Eep! I had no idea what to give her. So I decided to make her this bag


McCall's 5598





















Finding a bag pattern I liked was easy. Choosing 4+ fabrics is turning out to be not so easy. I spent over an hour last night dragging poor B around making him help me make decisions only to say to him "well I dunno that I really like that, actually." :) He was quite a trooper though.

My first thought, since my mom is a French teacher, was to find some cute fabric with scenes of Paris or the Eiffel tower on it like these Michael Miller fabrics














But they didn't have anything even close at my local Joann's. We scoured the shelves and came up empty handed. As an after thought we checked the red tag clearance and found a nice cotton fabric with tiger heads on it. The reason for the tiger print is that the high school where she teaches' mascot is the tiger, and their colors are brown and orange. She has a lot of school spirit - she wears orange and brown clothes, she has tiger stickers that she puts on the students papers sometimes and she has various other tiger school supplies - so I think she might really like it if the patchwork was some combination of tigers and brown and orange fabrics. Though I only found 3 fabrics that I liked for the patchwork so I was thinking of repeating the tiger fabric for one of the 4 squares.

The cool thing is that my mom used to sew. She still does a little, but I think mostly to mend. She never got a chance to teach me, but now when I have questions I can call her up and ask her and she does the best she can over the phone. So I think she'll really appreciate the handmade bag.