Quick Upcycle

      Althea had her last day of preschool back at the beginning of the month. So it has been the two of us again as we wait for her big sister to finish up being a kindergartner.

Althea on her last day of preschool for the year

       Before school ended, she was supposed to bring in a white t-shirt to decorate. I kept forgetting about it, and all of a sudden one morning I realized that it was due that day. I thought I had one somewhere, but couldn't find it immediately and so decided it would be faster to make one than to keep searching.
      I took an adult long sleeve white shirt that had a logo near the top, and used the bottom of the shirt to make one for her. I traced a t-shirt that fit her and cut out a front and back (utilizing the existing hem of course) dolman style shirt so that I wouldn't have to sew sleeves. I stitched those two pieces together.  Then I cut the neck band off the original shirt, sewed it slightly smaller than the neckhole of her shirt and serged it on. Finally, I cut the wide cuffs from the bottom of the sleeves of the adult shirt and serged them on to the sleeves of this shirt and voila! The cuffs were the perfect width for her upper arm. The whole thing took about 20 minutes and I think the result is super cute! Comfy and slightly original t-shirt for her to cover with froggies!

Thanks for stopping by!

Sister Alley Cats

This is the final week of Project Run and Play, and it has been so much fun to have the typical format back and to see what everyone has done for each week, both contestants and sew alongs. 

I actually took my inspiration for sewing this week directly from a link up from week one. When I saw Turtle Birdies' Mouse Alley Cat I knew that I had to have that pattern (the Alley Cat Romper from the Lil Luxe Collection). I had seen the pattern before and liked it, but once I saw this version, I just had to sew it up. 

Perhaps taking direct inspiration from someone else doesn't sound like I am finding my own signature style (which is the theme for this week). It works in my mind though, because this is how I sew. Inspiration comes  at me from various places, and once it does I don't feel completely satisfied until I have made it a reality. 

Two alleycats, sewn entirely this week. It's a reality!

This also fits my signature style in my mind because of the eclectic sources of materials used. The brown top with the gold was an old tshirt of mine. The purple fabric was gifted to me by a de-stashing friend. The red was leftover from making the girls leotards a couple years ago. (I love buying a little bit too much every time I shop for a project and building a cache of leftovers). The blue / black / white tribal and the brown with blue flowers are both from a knit fix I bought from Girl Charlee in August which I have been ever so gradually working my way through. I have to admit that I love having a large collection of fabric. (Don't tell my husband! I keep saying that I am going to try and rein it in). Most of it is potential upcycles, but splurging on some yardage here and there is my favorite way ever to pamper myself. 

These rompers are a great way to use up a variety of materials. It is fun to mix and match colors and prints and to add other accents if you are running low on something. And they look way cuter on children than on the floor:

         Althea has been wanting to wear nothing but jammies lately. This satisified that itch for her quite well! Daytime jammies, I told her. She bought it. Once she tried them on, she didn't take them off until bedtime. Even caught a little snooze on the dog bed by the fire with it on!

       I love when they love it! And when they look so stinking cute in something that Mama made them.

    I stayed true to the pattern aside from adding on seam side pockets and changing the sleeve length. I am definitely going to make a couple more and try out the sleeveless version.

Thanks for stopping by!

Upcycle First Day Dress

   We are super lucky to have in our family a set of twin girls who are two and a half years older than my oldest. They also have an older sister, and multiple female cousins on another side of their family. So we get ridiculous amounts of clothes handed down the line to us. Which is awesome. We have a lot of the basics covered and just have to supplement their wardrobes with occasional items (that I sew for the most part). On occasion, there is also an adult item included in the bag of goodies that gets passed along to us. It is very kind of my aunt to think that I can fit into her clothes, but generally that's not the case. She has great taste though, and there was one really fun tank top that Fern loved. So I turned it into a dress for her! Refashions of that nature are so quick and satisfying. She adores the dress and wore it on the first day of school (among hundreds of other occasions).

 As close as she dared to get to the swan

First day of school! With Daddy and Althea (and some grapes from the yard!)

Halloween 2014!

      Hurray! Halloween is here! My favorite holiday to sew for. I actually finished the costumes a few days before Halloween, and I spent less then $4 on fabric. I'm feeling quite proud!
      Do you remember Disney's Robin Hood? My brother and I adored that movie. We watched it over and over and over and laughed and laughed and loved it. My husband and his brothers all felt the same way. So last fall one day when Fern was sick we picked up that movie on itunes and have begun the indoctrination of our kids on all those old Roger Miller tunes. They love watching the adventures of that crafty fox, Robin Hood, his sweetheart, Maid Marion and that good-for-nothing scurvy Prince John.

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                   I mentioned when we were watching the movie that maybe their dad and I could dress up as Maid Marion and Robin Hood for Halloween sometime, and Fern latched onto that idea right away. Except that she knew she wanted to be Maid Marion, and therefore her sister would have to be Robin Hood. This was all well and good when her sister had just turned two and didn't have too many opinions on things. As the year went on however, she began realizing the power of choice and has since refused to do just about anything unless it is her idea. So she went through her routine of thoroughly rejecting this idea, then coming up with it on her own soon after. And by the beginning of September they were both gung ho about these characters and I could begin trying to fit sewing into the free time that existed among 3 weddings and a week long family vacation out of the country that took place between labor day and Halloween.
             

Wow, they are cute. 

I will do another post with more complete info about the construction process, but I will give an overview here. Fern's costume consists of two dresses, a hat with a veil, a necklace and a removable fox tail. Althea has a dress, hat, pants, mittens and a belt with a fox tail attached. 

I decided to do two dresses for Fern instead of a dress with a blouse underneath because a) Maid Marian has many layers of skirts visible underneath that dress when she dances in the forest

b) I didn't have a pink knit that would have been good for making a turtleneck and 

c) I did have a pink tablecloth that I came across in a free box while walking to pick up our farm share one day that has this awesome eyelet trim around the edge that was just too good to not use as the bottom edge of a dress. And it was the perfect light pink color. 

So she has this pink wrap dress:

underneath the purple one for extra layers of skirt!

The purple dress is made from a bed sheet that she actually was currently using on her bed. She has two back ups though, and I couldn't help it. It was the perfect color and so soft. It is pretty thin though, so it is lined with an old bed skirt which has a ruffly edge to it. 

The hat was made with interfacing that I had on hand from their Easter Bonnets, covered in the purple sheet. The veil was (I love this) a layer taken from a carefully disassembled bridesmaid dress that I wore in my brother's wedding last year. It has some really lovely drape to it.

Did you notice? She has a fox tail. She LOVES that thing. 

She also has a necklace made from a lovely pendant that is a broken pin that belonged to my great grandmother. I didn't want to sew it onto the dress, or to make a choker for her, so we made a necklace with a matching purple ribbon and brought that blue from the Disney character's dress into our ensemble. 

(she is wearing a turtleneck sweater under the dress in this picture as well to keep her warm for the parade)

Althea's dress is made from an old shirt of mine. My only fabric purchases were the yellow felt for her hat (which followed this tutorial), and the orange fleece for her pants and mittens. I got away with purchasing about a 1/3 yard of the felt, and 1/2 yard of the fleece. Both of which were already on sale and so totaled about $4. I had the red feather on hand already and we re-used an old belt. She had a perfect pair of faux fur / suede boots on hand already as well. And ta-da! There you have it. 

Here's a peak of her tail:

And finally, on the big day, I painted their faces to look more like the fox characters:

I hope everyone had a Happy Halloween!

You can see some other awesome Halloween costumes linked up along with these guys 

over at Project Run and Play. 

In honor of repurpose week, I am going to share a couple repurpose projects 

that I made over the past year. 

       First up is our original pair of "skirt pants". I love to wear elastic waist, loose, wide-legged, swingy knit pants. I have a few pairs and Fern always things they are very fancy (I love when she thinks I am glamorous going about town in my pajamas; Ha!). "Ooooh, I like your skirt pants Mama!"
      So she started asking for some skirt pants. This basically means to her any wide legged pants. I think elastic waist is probably a criteria as well, but I haven't confirmed that with her. So I made this pair from an old maternity shirt. One that I loved, the fabric is super soft, and has some subtle little stripes that are hard to appreciate in the pictures. My husband used to laugh at it though, and said it looked like I was "hanging a curtain on my belly" when I wore it. So it went into the repurpose pile with no qualms at all. Plus, it was so easy to reuse. The whole waist band on these pants (which is elasticized and almost ruffled) was already present on the shirt, sewn on the outside of the shirt just below the bust. The fancy ruffle cuffs were also part of the original shirt, along with the tassels hanging down the side (which sometimes end up tied in a bow).  She loves these pants, so it's a win. They are very lightweight, so this time of year we try to keep them as jammies or inside pants.

    And here is a maxi skirt that I made for her out of the remnants of a tshirt blanket. I love that they are not only repurposed fabrics, but scraps of repurposed fabrics that made this skirt. Another super easy project. Each section is just a large rectangle, each slightly larger than the one above it, so that there is a little bit of gathering.

The top is a piece of purple elastic a la her pink fleece pants.

I guess we have a theme going here with color blocked pink and purple. It does seem to match everything in her wardrobe when I do this! 

She also has on a headband made from the scraps of the scraps. It felt great to not waste anything here. I cut the lavender scraps into strips, tied a strip of the darker purple around them to make a sort of a bow, and attached all of that to a wide band of the pink. The pink is sewed together to fit her head. She is funny with headbands and tends to wear them like Rambo or Jane Fonda instead of on the top of her head. She's got it about halfway between both styles here. 

I have more pics, but my computer isn't cooperating with me very well. I need to let it know, a little more firmly I suppose, that I have started a blog and it needs to behave so that I can share all my photos with some hypothetical new friends. Perhaps it is censoring me after I accidentally posted an obscene photo for about 36 hours. My husband tells me that there is something off with my magnetic field that makes all technology within a certain radius of me fail. It does ring true sometimes. I like that theory better than the one in which I am just a mechanical dunce or somehow cursed by some new fangled god of tech.

So many reasons to sew.... along with Project Run and Play, the Kids Clothes Week sewing challenge began today. I missed last weeks entry day for PR&P, but I did sew something for it. The theme was "Let's go to the Movies." My immediate reaction (Heidi!) was not feasible due to time constraints; but we had recently watched a Care Bears movie and Fern and I both wanted to make Care Bear shirts.

Did you used to love the Care Bears too? It is fun to watch movies from my childhood with them. I had forgotten a few of the details of the Care Bears and it was fun to recall. They all "care" so much they wear their emotions on their tummies, and when they get together they can puff their tummies out and light shines out of them and they can make magic happen. She had decided we could make up our own emotion themes to put on the shirt instead of mimicking the characters already created.
So I asked each girl what she wanted on her shirt. Althea answered immediately "A horse!" Perfect. She is a crazy child, so she is the wild horsey care bear. Fern wanted a castle on hers. Hmm. Very princessy, not surprising, but what emotion is a castle? I asked her how castles make her feel and she answered, "beautiful, safe and brave". Done. I will definitely make her a shirt that makes her feel that way. She has named herself "Princess Magita Care Bear". This is her favorite princess name at the moment. She named her sister Princess Soweeta, and I get to be Queen Aleen. No creative names for Dad, though, he is King David.

I thought a raglan shirt with the front panel done in white and the rest of the shirt done in a solid color would be a simple casual way to present the care bear theme. Their designs on the tummies and a little heart on the lower right corner of the back of the shirt (remember those little hearts on the care bears' bums?) finish it off.

I used this tutorial for making them some raglan shirts. The fabric was all upcycled. Althea's horse shirt was made from an old maternity tshirt; I was actually wearing it when I gave birth to Fern-there we are!

Fern's pink fabric was from a hand-me-down size 6 girls shirt that she would have eventually grown into. I think this makes it much more personal and fun though. It has sparkly pink trim on the hems:

The lighter fabric on the tummies were both scraps from a tshirt blanket I made last summer (to be posted at a later date). I ended up using grey instead of white for the tummy on Fern's. I wanted to use the grey for Thea's as well, but didn't have enough so I ended up having to use a piece of white that has black lettering on the opposite side that shows through. A little nod to the fact that it is upcycled I suppose.

On Fern's I actually just straight up cut the sleeves off of the original shirt; I didn't cut them open at all because I didn't want to be too tight if I lost fabric by sewing them up again. I had to cut the top of the sleeve at a much steeper angle after I cut it off to fit with my raglan pattern. Her shirt therefore ended up basically shoulderless because of this, but while it looks a little funny lying down on the ground, it fits her fine.

I wanted to avoid hemming, so I used all the old hems on the bottom of Thea's sleeves and at the bottom of the shirts. The collar of Fern's shirt is reused from the original pink shirt. Althea's collar is the hem of one of the sleeves of the maternity shirt.

 At first I thought about trying the freezer paper stencil technique everyone is doing for the designs on the tummies, but I didn't want to go buy freezer paper. I did have some wonder under on hand though, so I used that to applique some knit fabric onto each shirt and top stitched it down for good measure. The horse is the same fabric as the rest of the shirt; Fern's castle was from an old shirt of mine that had a hole in it. This weeks theme for PR and P is upcycle, so that works out quite well!

 The castle was something I drew myself, but the horse I printed from this page and then traced it onto my wonder under. It's amazing what you can find when you google an image idea with the words clip art at the end.

 We are a bit under the weather here, so the shirts made great loungewear for today.