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!

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?

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!

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?