Christmas Gift: Pin-up Girl Embroidery

As a pressie for one of my housemates I thought I'd try my hand at some embroidery.

A small pin-up style girlie.

Of course, wearing a sparkly red swimsuit with matching hat and heels; it's summer here at the moment after all!

However, as I suck at drawing, it's based on this picture that I found on the internet. Sadly I can't give the artist true credit as I cannot for the life of me find where I got it from (if you know where it's from please tell me and I'll credit accordingly):

Christmas Gift: Fold-up Fabric Bag

I made a fabric bag for mum for Christmas. I followed this tutorial to make a fold-up bag. The fabric is from the quilting section at Spotlight.

The front and back of the bag:

And once it's folded up:

I found some steps of the tutorial a little confusing; like where the 'top' is mentioned but there is no indication as to which way around to put the fabric to get the 'top'. However I muddled through and the bag is great. I have some different fabric that will be made up into another one of these for myself.

Thanks Gran & Jo!!!

Before I continue posting the gifts I made for other people I wanted to show you what my Gran and Jo gave me for Christmas.

Two jelly roles, some charm squares and two fat quarters of various Moda fabrics.

Now I need to decide what to make with them. I'm already having fun running ideas through my brain, especially since I've never made anything with jelly rolls or charm squares before.

So Thanks again Gran and Jo, it's a great gift and I'm looking forward to using it.

Colour Indecision...

Launching straight into sewing for me now Christmas is over I'm working on a pair of PJ bottoms. However, indecision has struck; I want to add some coloured trim to the edge of the pockets and near the hem at the bottom of the legs but I'm being indecisive on the colour. Help?

Pink, Green or Blue?

The blue and green are poplin and the pink is drill (so might be a bit heavy...?). I don't know which one to choose and I can't really proceed with the PJ bottoms until I have. Opinions?

Christmas Gift: Smiley PJs

For my brother for Christmas I made a pair of Smiley PJs out of some fantastically fun jersey fabric I found at Spotlight.

For the top I used the basic T-shirt pattern from "sew u home stretch" in Large but with 3" added to the bottom to make it long enough for Marcus' 6'4" height. If I were to make it again I would also have added some length to the sleeves, as they're really very short. Actually, if I had been making anything I would expect him to wear out of the house I would have added at least 2-3 inches to the sleeves.

As you can see I used the red from the bottoms for the neck band. I thought the Smileys might stretch out if I used it and didn't want to risk it.

The bottoms were from Simplicity pattern 3947, which is my standard 'PJs for Marcus' pattern now. I made a Medium but using the long length. I love this pattern as it has pockets; In my opinion all PJs should have pockets. I altered the waistband slightly so that it had a separate part made with the contrasting smiley fabric containing some nice chunky elastic (1" wide I think).

For the various hems I used a double needle which made it turn out really well (although I think I need to buy a new double needle as it missed a few stitches).

Marcus was also the lucky recipient of a superbly and lovingly cooked Christmas dinner (even if I do say so myself). We had a full roast with all sorts of different veges, lamb for me and a vegetarian thing for him, complete with perfectly cooked Yorkshire Puddings of course! Too stuffed to manage desert we've decided to save that for tomorrow.

I hope everyone else had an enjoyable and hopefully relaxing Christmas!

Merry Christmas!!

I hope everyone has a lovely and enjoyable day tomorrow (and all the days after that of course). May you stuff yourselves silly with food, have great company, and get all you wish for.



Thankfully, despite a halt in productivity today due to me coming off my bike while cycling to the supermarket and thus taking a nap this afternoon to rest my injured knee rather than sewing, all my planned gift sewing was done on time. I have photos and details of everything and shall post about them after tomorrow once they have been gifted. Next week shall be a week of sewing things for me. I'm going to be ambitious and try for 10 things next week, as that's how many items I still need to do to get to 52 crafts. Not sure if it'll happen but I can always try.

Now it's off to bed for me so I'm alert and ready to cook my first ever Christmas Dinner tomorrow. It's just me and my brother and I may have horrifically over catered by buying enough food in Coles today to feed a small army, but hopefully it'll be enjoyable :)

Super-Star!

You saw the beginnings of Mindy's Star costume for our Christmas party the other day, here is the rest.

After cutting out the star shape it was sewn together:

Then tried on:

And a face hole promptly added to allow for breathing (sadly essential):

After adding a cardboard cone to keep the top point of the star up, and some fantastic silver make-up the costume was complete:

Mindy even took the tram down to the party with us:

*three cheers for Mindy's star*

She didn't win the costume contest, but was in the top 5. In my mind she should have won!!

Sailor Scout Costume Details

As promised, some more details of the sailor scout costumes.

(images are clickable to see bigger versions)

The base pattern that I used was simplicity 7808 (which appears to have been removed from the simplicity site, and replaced with this one). I used the bodice and skirt from pattern C - the Glenda the Good Witch costume, but shortened the skirt quite substantially. Thankfully the princess seams allowed us to cut the same size for all of us and alter the pattern on each person rather than work out exact sizes for each of us. I then drafted/draped my own sailor collar and sleeves with a little fold in.

White ribbon was added to the edges of the sailor collars and bows were added to the front and back - the back being bigger than the front and being attached on one side of the zip with a little snap. Finally I added a covered button to the centre front:

Of course, all superheroes have their various accessories. We had gloves that coordinated with our outfits (we bought the gloves but I added the colour to the top, along with a strip of elastic to keep them up):

Chokers:

And tiara type thingys for our foreheads:

And Sally even had a little red bow for her hair:

Lastly, we each had different shoes, with me and Becky needing coordinated knee high boots:

The boots were made by wrapping the fabric around our legs and attaching velcro up the centre back seams. We then wrapped the fabric around our chosen shoes (excluding the heel) and hand stitched it to shape. Lastly the top of the boot was hemmed into the pointed shape and white ribbon added along the top edge.

All of these items together yielded some very fun costumes:

The Sailor Scouts

Last night was our big work Christmas party, which is always fancy dress. This year the theme was "Out of this world and into the future: a space adventure".

Me and four other girls from work went as Sailor Moon and the sailor scouts:

As none of the other girls in the group sew I made all 5 costumes (with help cutting and pinning from them). It took quite a long time, but I'm very happy with the result and think it was worth the effort.

I will post proper pictures of all the details in the near future.

Happy Birthday Dad!!

The main reason that my blogging was quiet through much of November isn't because I wasn't doing any sewing, but because I was working on a very special gift; a birthday present for my Dad.

I found these fabrics on the internets, and after brainstorming over a design I bought some. I was very impressed by the service provided by the site; they responded overnight (for me) to my email enquiry, and once I bought the fabric it arrived MUCH quicker than I was expecting, 7 days later I had the fabric in my grubby little hands (which I washed before handling the fabric).

The piecing of the quilt top was straight forward and pretty quick to piece. I chose a design that took advantage of showing off the prints on the fabrics and adding some plain black poplin as sashing. The finished quilt is a little bit larger than my couch quilt:

I wanted to choose a quilting design that would work well with the fabrics; emphasising them rather than detracting from them. Once I decided what I wanted to do the quilting was a little tricky as the only quilting I've done on a full size quilt was straight lines, so some of it leaves a little to be desired, but overall I'm pretty proud of my efforts.

(click on the below images for bigger versions)

On the "sea of holes" I wiggled between the holes in vaguely diagonal lines:

On the orange I wiggled my way around the different characters:

On the small animation cells down the sides I went around the squares and circles. On each of the four large panels I did a slightly different thing.

On this one I went around the submarine, the circles and the outline of the Beatles, and then stippled around the bubbles in the background:

Similar to the previous one, on this panel I went around the submarine and then stippled around the bubbles:

On this panel I free-motion quilted an echo pattern around the band:

And on this one I did a similar echo pattern around the Beatles and within the hill:

I decided to leave the sashing without any quilting on it, as I wanted the emphasis to be on the Beatles fabric.

For the backing I chose this fabric:

And the binding this pale blue (still from the Beatles range):

So, Dad, I hope you like it.