Snow Day

Ick! The weather is lousy, so of course the basement toilet decided today was the prime day to break! 😡 Thankfully, we have an awesome hardware store here in town that came to the rescue. They have several plumbers on staff, so we got one here pretty quickly, which was good because we had to shut off the water to the entire house in order to keep things contained. 🙄 It sounds like today was the day for plumbing malfunctions though, since they were booked and not sure they could send anyone terribly soon when I placed the order to get mine fixed. But all is well now, thank goodness, and the mess was minimal (most of it from the plumber tracking snow in–but I wasn’t about to ask him to take his boots off/on when he was there to help us out!)

And since the weather outside is so lousy, so we’re hunkered down in the sewing basement to keep warm and not have to listen to the howling winds outside. It also helps that my sewing stuff is all down there to keep me busy. I’m working on Simplicity 2475, I’ve got my pieces traced off and have about half of the muslin cut out. We’ll see how it goes! Anyone else doing any snow day sewing?

Just keepin’ busy!

Hope everyone has been having a wonderful past couple of weeks! I have been keeping busy on my end, though it’s hard to tell sometimes. I’ve done some cooking, some sewing, and a lot of missing my hubby! He was gone all last week to some sort of work thing, which left me and the kiddo here all by ourselves–it was rough! 😦 But, he’s home now, and we’ve spent a lot of time catching up. 🙂 Unfortunately for ya’ll, it’s sort of like I haven’t been able to talk for about 2 weeks, so it’s all pent up desperately trying to get out. Fasten your seatbelts, this will be a long post! 😛

Last weekend was a wedding for a family member, and I need new clothes like crazy…(I rely heavily on jeans and t-shirts stolen from my hubby which wouldn’t fly at such a nice event) so I originally thought I’d sew up Simplicity 2403, but I ran into an issue with my muslin…for some reason the waist part was so tight there was no way I was going to be able to wear it. Because I made it in the largest size I had on hand, I decided to try a different project.

Enter Jalie 2561. If you’ve read any of my previous posts, you’ll know that I’ve made these once before….however….not only have I put on about 5 pounds since then, they were also extremely tight to start with (especially once I put the waistband on). Because of this issue, I decided to try and remake them in the size suggested by my waist measurement…..yeah…right… Turns out, making them based on my waist measurement turned these cute (and snug-fitting) pants into clown pants! 😮 I could have fit almost TWO of me in there somehow! 😮 I think I’m going to have to retrace this pattern about 100 more times to figure out exactly what size/range of sizes I need to get it to work, once I do though, they are definitely going to be TNT’s, because they are just so darn cute and easy to sew up.

After all of that, I decided to just make a dress. To go with my Jalie 2561, I had planned to make up a drape-neck top in a silky print that I had. Even though I had ran into a snag with the pants idea, I couldn’t get the drape-neck idea out of my head, so I decided to make a dress out of the drape-neck top I was working on. Enter McCall’s 6069. I merged it with my custom drafted drape-neck top and made a very cute dress for the wedding in just a few short hours. 🙂 It has a chain going across the back drape to keep it on my shoulders (instead of the fabric tube suggested by McCall’s) that is held on with hooks so that I can take it off to either change it out according to my ever-changing mood or just to wash it. 😉 I found an adorable belt at Vanity, broke out my cute strappy heels, and was fairly pleased with the result. 🙂

Sorry for the bad pictures. This was me throwing it on a couple of days later (and it had been crumpled up in the wash pile since I’d worn it), no undergarments (I wore it with a strapless bra and a waist cincher to the wedding), and it smelled awful from being worn during the 100* heat in a church with minimal cooling abilities. (Everyone was a sweaty mess–but it was still fun! 🙂 )

I LOVE, LOVE, LOVE the fabric I made it in! This knit was such a dream to sew on, the print is pretty cool (even though I hate houndstooth), it has excellent wearability (no wrinkles even after being wadded up in the basket for several days!) and it feels pretty luxurious against the skin. It also had the perfect amount of drape for the style of dress that I made, which is something I have trouble with on occasion.

The past few days I have been spending time with the hubby, cleaning up my Singer 301-A so that it’s ready to go as my topstitching/buttonhole machine, and cooking.

Speaking of the 301-A, here it is in it’s (slightly ugly) glory! 🙂

I’m not going to try and sugar coat it…it’s ugly. I mean, it’s brown, for Pete’s sake! They could have least made it metallic blue or heck–black! But, she purrs like a good little kitty, and I think I’ll call her Tabby. 😉 There’s definitely going to be some getting used to the setup, especially the reverse feature, because it’s totally different than what I’m used to. I’m also going to replace the foot pedal getup, because it’s kind of a safety hazard, but I’ll keep the old one just in case.

Tabby got a good washing and waxing today before her internet debut too. I used a product called TSP (which is usually for cleaning the grime off of painted walls) which I was assured that it wouldn’t take any paint off. Near as I can tell, the only thing removed was the grime…lots and lots of grime. After that I even put on a rubbing compound to take off the dead paint (which there was surprisingly little of) and then I waxed it with plain ‘ol turtle wax. I’m sure there is someone out there right now gasping in horror, but I assure them that the machine looks better now, and I can use it without fear of getting gunk on my fabric (because it looked/felt like someone had parked it next to their Fry Daddy and made about 30 batches of chicken nuggets *yuck*).

Anyway, I should probably stop gabbing and get to work on something productive…like supper! I have two hungry males to feed, ya know! 😛

So boring!

Making muslins is like watching paint dry…or grass grow…

But, hopefully, this effort will pay off and my version of Simplicity 2403 will look nice when I’m done…so far I’ve only sewn up the bodice in the muslin, I need to try it on after the kiddo goes to bed and I can go back to the basement to work.

BTW, if you make this pattern up, be aware that it has A LOT of pattern pieces, and notches, and little dots to match up–holy crap!

Sewing my butt off!

Or at least wishing that it was actually coming off due to my sewing… 😛

So yeah, I’ve been doing a lot of sewing lately, unfortunately, no pictures. Sorry. I finished *almost* all of my charity sewing projects (to which I nearly dedicated an entire rant-post to, but decided against posting it). I just have to put some binding on one of my charity projects and I’ll be done. However, I’m going to have someone help me put that binding on since I’ve no idea how to do it myself.

I started on Simplicity 4076, but my version is going to be a wadder. I really liked the knot detail on the front, and thought that it was going to be cute, but the neckline is way too low and the knot detail is kind of gape-y. I’m not going to throw it away, just in case I decide to see if I can figure out how to fix it, but I’m considering it a wadder for now. I think it needs a more substantial fabric than what I tried to use honestly. 😳

I hope to have my pieces traced off and cut out for Jalie 2908 by tonight, because I’d like to have them finished before we “leave” for vacation next week, since my only pair of nice jeans has finally started to come apart. 😥 It seems that on most things it takes longer to cut the pieces out than it does to sew them up, so I’m hoping that will be the case on these.

Jalie 2561

After my skirt, I’ve decided to work on some dress pants for myself. I double-checked my measurements, and based on that, I’m making the recommended size X in Jalie 2561. I’ve got the pieces traced off, and only have a couple of pieces left to cut out. I’m using the same cotton/poly/lycra fabric that I used for the simplicity skirt I just finished, and I think I’ll have enough left to make the Simplicity vest 2556 that I bought a while back. I didn’t have anything suitable to make a muslin of the Jalie with, so *fingers crossed* that it turns out perfect on the first try.

I couldn’t hardly believe how tricky it was to trace the lines off on the pattern! I guess though, to fit everyone from kid’s to just short of plus-size on there, there’s bound to be a lot of lines. Too bad they didn’t color-coordinate, that would make things SO much easier.

Thwarted!

Grrrr! I’ve been working on Simplicity 2451 since yesterday. Things had been going very smoothly, perhaps too smoothly, so I was wary of there being a problem. I finally discovered it. 😦 It’s the booty….I’ve always had plenty of “junk in the trunk” (do they still say that?), but since I’m over my ideal weight, I’ve got more than normal. So now, I get to fiddle with my adorable skirt to get it to sit nicely over the excess derriere. *sigh* At least I have time to work on it, since I don’t have a zipper for it yet. 🙄

Simplicity 2451 skirt

After finishing hubby’s slacks, I decided to see about starting a quick project for myself. I looked through my stash for a pattern that looked like fun, and I saw the Simplicity 2451 that I had purchased during my $1 pattern-buying-spree. Since I’ve been kind of desperately in need of a skirt, this was a no-brainer. I had purchased some fabric specifically for this skirt, but had no idea that it was supposed to need 1 and 5/8’s of a yard of fabric, and I had only gotten 1 yard. I wasn’t sure it would work out, but with the exception of the pocket lining, I somehow managed to squeeze a size 14 skirt out of 1 yard of fabric with small stripes on it. After those tedious slacks, this skirt has been kind of fun to put together. So far I’ve only got the front half (minus the yokes) finished. Here’s some pictures. 🙂

This middle picture is the closest representation of the color–it’s kind of a charcoal grey with lines of small lighter grey dots….hard to explain, but it looks really nice. I’m also loving my cute little decorative stitches by the pockets. Here’s a picture that shows the stitches just a little more closely.

I just selected one of the decorative stitches on my sewing machine, put in a topstitch needle, and used some silver metallic decorative serger thread. I know you aren’t supposed to use serger thread on a sewing machine, but I figured for such a small decorative detail, a little serger thread wouldn’t hurt anything. I’m trying to decide what to do for the rest of the topstitching, because I think continuing the little flowers would just be too much. Maybe just a triple-stitch? I do plan to keep using the silver metallic thread though, because it looks awesome against the fabric. 🙂

Hope you have a good evening, I am off to spend some time with the hubby. 🙂

$1 Sales! Or, why I shouldn’t be allowed to shop alone…

I could elaborate, but really, I think the title and the picture pretty much say it all. LOL!

Simplicity 5 for $5:

3775
2925
2556
2508
2451

Butterick $1 (limit 10):

5451
5454
5450
5463
5284
4659
5542

All that and, a big cardboard cutting mat for less than $30.