Drop Waist Knit Dresses

Recently, I have been playing around refashioning t-shirts.  I trimmed down a few old adult tee's into some little girl nightgowns, but then I wanted to make some dresses.  I first tried a dress from scratch.  I constructed this completely from a maternity shirt that I have no intention of EVER wearing again in my life.  While it went pretty well, it ended up being about a size 4, and really did not fit Abigail.  I also didn't realize until after I washed this dress that I needed to be using a ball point needle.  Not to shabby for a first attempt.  It could have been cute on her, next year, but I scrapped it to make an even better creation.

My next efforts were based off of three t-shirts that Abigail already had that fit her.  I simply added a tube of material, cut from another t-shirt, to the bottom to make them little dresses.  Each dress is slightly different though they are all built on the same construction principle.  

This skirt is the least gathered.  It was constructed from a shirt of my eldest daughters that was too short for her to wear any longer.   I was able to stretch the t-shirt to its max girth to match the skirt addition.

 The Purple skirt was formerly a plain shirt of mine.  It was a very cheap t-shirt that had absolutely no shape, so its second life is a drastic improvement.  I needed to sew a gathering stitch around the tube before attaching to the top.  I'm thinking about adding a purple gathered ruffle around the bottom of the sleeves to make it more co-hesive.   

 This dress ended up having the most gathering of the bunch.  The skirt was the above mentioned maternity shirt that masqueraded as a toddler dress for a single day.  The skirt was twice the width of the t-shirt making the skirt much fuller than the others.  

I love these simple dresses for so many reasons.  

1. I don't need to find a coordinating bottom when dressing her in the morning.
2. I don't need to find a coordinating bottom when dressing her again a few hours later.
3. Only one piece of laundry to wash.
4. Only one piece of laundry to fold.
5. Only one piece of laundry to put away!

With 15 minutes of time, a $4.00 t-shirt from Target, an old t-shirt and one seam to sew, anyone can fill their little ones closet with cute every day play dresses!

Quick Fix - Changing Pad cover

I am a procrastinator.  I over plan, and under achieve.  This should be the vinyl saying on my craft walls.

I bought a terry cloth fitted sheet when I was pregnant with Abigail.  I did get it died as an experiment that wasn't all that successful as the brown is streaky, but the cover looks better brown than the yucky cream it came to me in.  Unfortunately, it didn't fit my changing pad, since it was a standard fitted crib sheet.  I tried to keep the excess fabric tucked under the pad, but honestly, I'm not that detail oriented!  I just used it as it was, and didn't really put much more thought into it.

Nesting comes in different forms, and for me, this just needed to be fixed.  Tonight!  

So while Kolton read The Storm Testament II to the family for bedtime, I turned the cover inside out and put the sheet onto the changing mat.  That allowed me to easily pin 4 places to sew new box corners and also able to cut the excess sheet away leaving an extra 1/2 inch allowance hanging past the table.   I also pinned where to sew 2 button holes for the safety belt to be threaded through.  That only took a chapter.

Once the kids were brushing their teeth and heading to bed, I quickly sewed the new seams for the box corners and 2 button holes. Then I took underwear elastic and zig-zag stitched that around the entire bottom of the sheet pulling the elastic taught around each corner.  15 minutes :) tops for this... and it only took me about 2 years to actually get done :)

  

Thrift Store Find

I went to the Goodwill this morning, more as an escape for an hour with no children than anything else. I wanted to check for side snap infant shirts, a new maternity dress, and look for a whole pile of matching wooden buttons for some curtains that I am going to be sewing for the next few days. I new I was hoping for too much to find 20 matching buttons... but sometimes you just never know!

While I was back in the homegoods section, I spotted a package of fabric that caught my eye. It was the bottom pink fabric that I initially thought was so cute, however, once I picked up the package, I noticed that the other three prints where the same style in different colors. THREE PRINTS! I looked for a price tag and it was marked at $1.00! 4 yards of material for a buck!

I tried to get a picture of just fabric, but Abi thinks that anything I'm making must be for her, and automatically claims any fabric that is not put away to play with as a dress, skirt, pillow, or blanket.

Now I just have to figure out which girl gets which print, and what skirt pattern to use this time around! I had initially thought that a 3 tiered skirt would be adorable with each girl getting a layer of each print, but Khali has vetoed that already, so I'm still thinking.

Maternity Dress Refashion

While blog hopping, you will find a few zillion tutorials on how to up-cycle different articles of clothing. I have a few articles of clothing set out for such purposes, but this dress was higher in priority. This is a maternity dress by Motherhood Maternity, which I bought used for $5.00, that fit well when I had a baby bump, but now that I have a basketball bump, the dress is just a bit too short to comfortably wear to church.

I have 6 pairs of yoga style black maternity pants, and some of them are floods, so they were an easy choice to donate to the project. I cut off the pant leg hem and also the waist band, then I pressed the pants so that the outer leg seam was 1/4 of an inch to one side. I then cut 4 inches from that outer seam the entire length of the leg so that my material was really 8 inches wide, with a seam 4 and 1/4 inch from the front side. Repeat this from the other leg of the pants, so there were 2 long strips. The bottom of the dress was 35" wide so I trimmed the length of the strips to 35 1/2 inch and sewed them together to make one long tube using a 1/4 inch seam.

From that point, all I needed to do was to fold the strip back in half, making sure that the seam was going to be on the inside of the dress, and pin it to the dress hem. Because I was working with 2 very stretchy materials, I pinned very close together to increase my chances at an even finished look without puckering. I do not have a walking foot, so I stitched very slowly, making sure to not pull on the materials while sewing with a small zig zag stitch. Viola! I can now wear this dress for the next 12 weeks of pregnancy.

If I get adventurous, another day, I might shorten the sleeves and add a black binding to those too.... I haven't decided yet. What do you think?

Rectangular Sewing Again!

Every time I make something, I think its the coolest thing I've ever made! Even better than what I made last week. Of course, that only lasts until the next time, but its a fun feeling! I have discovered a LOVE for sewing anything that doesn't require a formal pattern, gathers, pleats, zippers or even button holes. When I stumbled upon "The Idea Room" I found a ton of fun crafts to make, but since I was looking for a quick gift idea, I settled on this.

The Fashionable Fabric Keychain. Have you ever noticed when looking at other peoples sewing projects that they have the cutest stinking fabric you've ever seen??? I often feel like this, and sometimes is discourages me from starting the project, but this time I ignored the thought, dug through my stash for a minute, and came up with a pairing that I thought was pretty cute. I also already had the fastener on hand from previous attempts to make a binky clip. Boo Ya!

A simple craft with everything on hand; so perfect for so many reasons, no runs to the store and no money spent are my favorite two! Her tutorial was very simple to follow with lots of pictures. I think the most time consuming part was changing the thread and bobbin on the machine twice to match the materials!

A Week of Crafting in Review

Fruit Storage
I started asking around and perusing the net for a large fruit basket about a month ago. Preferably one with tiers for easy access and superior storage abilities. You can go through a good amount of fruit in a family with 4 kids. The only good choice that I felt was an option is a tiered hanging basket, but seeing that we are renting, and I know it would be a penalty to screw anything into my lovely kitchen cabinets, that will not work. A friend sent me to a blog featuring someone making a tired dessert tray with different sized plates and small candle holders. Turns out that is a large craze at the moment and there are many, many different takes on this idea in blogs everywhere.I adopted the idea to use long ceramic trays, and a package of cake stand columns, sealing the deal with e6000 glue. The top tray is just low enough below the counters that you can still easily get to bananas. The night I made this and took the picture, we were running low on fruit, but you can see how much potential space is available for your produce.

Up-cycling Jeans to Apron

The biggest downfall about the way we shop for my dear husbands clothes, can be a

great boon to available craft denim to me. You see, he doesn't like to go shopping. Who can blame him when we always drag along the kids? When we go to the store, we buy 3-4 pairs of jeans, and a

few new shirts, generally a pair of shoes. Since they were all bought at the same time, they all wear out about the same time as well. So in the past week or two I've accumulated some materials just waiting to be up-cycled. I stumbled across "A Girl and a Glue Gun" in a search for recycling denim projects and loved what she did! Her tutorial says to use the

same size jean for your apron that you'd normally wear. I think that using a slightly larger jean would be preferable because I like a bit more side coverage to my apron. Of course, since this isn't a

Maternity apron, I couldn't model it, so I just layed it out for a picture.

Crinkle Toy

We had some company in town over the weekend. We BBQ'd for lunch one day, and they bought a bag of Sun Chips in the crinkliest bag ever. Despite Micheal Pollan's warning that the more something crinkles, the less you should buy it, Sun Chips didn't listen. This is definitely the loudest chip bag ever, and its compost-able you know. Since I have been collected the plastic cereal liners to make reusable sandwich wrap-ups with, it was natural I would want to keep this bag to create a baby toy. I had seen an adorable 'how-to' done by "Andrea's Originals" in a previous craft search and had a link in an email! Horray! I love when I think ahead enough to mail myself craft projects. Otherwise, it was just a passing thought. I did some research on the bag itself to make sure it was safe to use for such a purpose and feel that it is. The bag cannot currently be recycled by most municipal recycling plants, and will only decompose in a proper composting unit. Unless the bag is surrounded by the key ingredients in a composting pile, I think it will work well for this project. Like most crafted things, I would machine wash, but hang to dry. While I was sewing Abi played with the pin cushion. It happens to be a turtle. I had my camera with me and managed to snap a picture before she sensed the cameras presence. She's also modeling the apron. After the other girls had tried it on, it was of course her turn, and she never wanted it taken off for the night. I wish I was as handy with the camcorder, because she says 'turtle' so well, its just adorable!!

Fitted Table Cloth

After all helping little hands went to bed, I started to work on this last project, a tutorial given on "Smashed Peas and Carrots". I had cut the proper dimensions out earlier in the day yet any time I started to work on the corners the entire table cloth got the wiggles. The table the girl covered on her blog, has exact square corners, making it an ideal candidate for the simple box corner treatment she whips together in minutes. I didn't realize up front that my table has large rounded corners. So while I wanted the same outcome, I had to change what I did. Instead of the simple box corner seam, I ended up gathering toward the center of the corner from each side, and then tucking material from each side behind the middle of the corner material. I then folded the excess up and under to ensure that the entire perimeter of the table had 4 inches hanging over. Perhaps all this has technical names that would be much easier to understand, but I don't know what they are, Sorry. Overall it's been a fun week!

Onesie Refashion

Abi has decided it is time to start learning to go to potty, which renders her onsies pretty useless. She has quite a few long sleeve onsies from winter time that still fit her so I have decided to make them work for a little while longer.

Using my sewing scissors, I trimmed right above the leg binding all around the bottom of the onesie first, and then slightly eased the curve to be a bit less dramatic. I then just set my sewing machine to a wide zig-zag and pulled the cut edge taught while stitching to create a lettuce effect. Since it does not require turning under a hem the shirt is still plenty long enough for her. If summer ever arrives I think I will further refashion her onesies to be short sleeves. This refashion took about 5 minutes with Abi helping on each step. She knew they were her shirts and wanted to take part after all!

Reusable Snack Bags - 2.0

The first few bags where so much fun, and I had the supplies sitting and waiting, that I knew I'd make more. So after dinner had settled, and the wheels in my head had more time to turn, I called my mom to run my new idea past her. Of course I talked to my Mother-in-Law as well. They are both wonderful consultants and extremely patient when I am trying my hardest to turn my thoughts and images into communicable words.

Instead of a flat bag, I wanted to put a pleat at the bottom of the bag, like the old fashioned fold over sandwich bags. Does anyone remember those? My wonderful mom thought that it would both put less stress on the side seams of the bag, and also help with functionality. What neither of us realized is that it also makes it so the bag can 'sit' on the counter when you fill it, and also in a child's lap helping to prevent spills. This is definitely the way I'll make the bags from now on.

Reusable Snack Bags

This has been the funnest day project! To make it even better, it uses up a bunch of scrap fabric that I've kept for far to long and wondered what to do with. In fact, the shiny stuff on the inside I remember using to make some kind of fabric flower when I was a little girl. Pretty Please tell me I'm not the only person that has some of their mothers fabric stash? Its hard to throw these types of things away!

I'm not sure what search I was doing that I stumbled upon the Idea of Re-usable snack bags, but I'm so glad that I did! Once again there are many tutorials and options out there, but the one that I thought would be the easiest and fastest I found here. If you are going to make your own stash of baggies, I recommend when you sew the second end seam (the first step) that you pull your outer material just a tad bit longer. Then when you flip it right side out to sew on the velcro, the outer material is naturally a little bit longer than the inner material. I think it creates a cleaner look.

I tested out the snack size bags with cereal in them for the little girls when we went to the grocery store. I think they are the perfect size for individual treats. The larger sandwich sized bag I think will be more functional for sharing treats. After dinner, I have a few other fabrics to whip into cute little snack bags. I even have one or two fabrics that aren't quite so girly, so Porter can not look silly, though he really could care less.

Sewing Hair Curlers

I have been wanting to sew these hair curlers since before we moved! I saw this posted on another blog and put it on my 'to sew' list. Unfortunately Wonderwoman is no longer blogging, but her website is full of wonderfully creative projects that I'd love to make more of. Wonderwoman found the idea here, but her's were far more inspirational. I made them out of 3 old handkerchiefs my grandma sent me in a fabric stash, and a little bit of fluff that was also laying around. Total cost- negligible. My type of project!!!

Khali's hair had been washed and was still slightly damp when I put her hair up. I used a little bit of gel before hand as well. I made 14 curlers total, but I believe that I only used 10 in her hair. (I have had to use all 14 when wrapping my hair) Thankfully it only took about 10 minutes to wrap her hair, and she didn't really care because she was reading a book :) She also didn't mind leaving them in for a few hours to dry, because she just read her book.

I let the curl rest for a few minutes upon taking the curlers out before trying to separate them. Isn't she a pretty little girl?

Up-cycled Ribbon Edge Lovey

Bell and I had fun today up-cycling an old dress of mine into a Ribbon Edged Lovey for Abby! I also had a nice stock pile of ribbons that I bought when making hairbows for the older girls so this project was made completely from things we already had. Bell had a lot of fun helping cut each of the ribbons, and then handing them to me while I was sewing. I roughly followed the instructions found on this blog. I did not applique anything but I did add a thin batting. This does make the lovey less likely to be carried nicely in my purse, but with all hard wood floors, everything is nicer with a little cushion. Now only to wait a few months for her to be interested in it!
This lovey is a bit smaller than I had wanted, some darling little one was helping out a bit too much when I was cutting this material. I plan to next make a quilted top and back it with fleece with no batting. I am going to try 24" with ribbon tags only at the corners... I think it will be a little more useful that way.

Faux Boppy

Because we chose to not find out the sex of this baby until birth, I had very little in the way of clothing and equipment. After all, if it was a girl, I would want to buy pink frilly things. Where as a boy needs lots of driving equipment printed on his clothes, and sweaters. There are few things cuter than baby boys in sweaters.
While shopping the past week, I looked at the prices of Boppy Pillows. Wowzers! $35 dollars. Their were also no super cute pink patterns, so it was pretty easy to pass up. Who pays that much for a pillow? You can make a pillow right?
A Googling I go.... and end up with this Boppy Sewing Pattern. I used some material I already had on hand to make the pillow form with. I must admit, my boppy is not as pretty as the commercial counterparts.... but I'm rather attached to my Franken-style stitching. Tomorrow I'm going to delve into the fabric stash and see what I can come up with for a cute cover.