New to Me in 2013

2013 has been a year of huge changes for me, and my ever-expanding bump has been the biggest of these!

As I'm 5 foot 0, I'm finding it hard to get my hands on decent maternity clothes that fit around Bump and don't absolutely drown me (H&M, I'm looking at you and the 6 inches that I had to take off the bottom of my new trousers!) So I decided that I've give dress alterations a go.

So, in terms of firsts, this was the first time that I'd done any alterations apart from hemming, the first time shirring and the first time sewing with knit fabric. Armed with my new ballpoint needles and the handbook for my machine (yay to stretch stitches!), off I went.

I started off with a dress like this from Dorothy Perkins (except in the sale and two sizes too big...)

And cut the top off it - scary moment! 

After folding down about 2 1/2" at the top, I made a casing and threaded in some thick elastic, and somehow managed to keep the ties in the back. I topstitched, cut off about 5" and hemmed the bottom. Easily said but it took about 2 hours, but I guess that's not bad for a first attempt!  This tutorial was really useful for inspiration.

The final product:

Please excuse the dodgy photos, Hubs is impatient! I wore this to a friend's wedding last weekend with a dark t shirt underneath, and the photographer took lots of photos of me (an abnormal amount if you ask me - wonder who she thought I was!), so hopefully I'll have some better pics to show when the happy couple get their prints back.

I also altered another dress into a skirt, just by cutting off the top, adding thin elastic and then 4 rows of shirring. I couldn't get any decent photos of this dress though, so I'll hold off sharing until we get a sunny weekend!

Linking up to Fiona at Celtic Thistles:

Paper piecing and pluses

I've been catching up on my paper-pieced stars this month, having not touched them for the last 3 months!

I'm using my Simply Solids Stash Crew fabrics, and random charm squares or pieces from my stash to fill in the fourth segment of the star.

Here's my progress so far.....

 PS - check out the geeky colour co-ordinated pegs!

The pink and yellow are nearly finished, I've been trying to be methodical and do two blocks at once to cut down on the number of times that I have to pause/trim/press. Their other halves are still on the table needing the last trims and piecing of the quarters. It does seem to be speeding these blocks up, but they still take absolutely AGES!

Linking these up to the Paper Piecing Party at Quiet Play

I've also been working on a quilt with my Lotta Jansdotter fabric:

Unfortunately, I really don't love it, although I really want to - I can't put my finger on why either....

So, the current plan is to do some straight line quilting and hopefully get it finished in time to donate to the Siblings Togther project, although I'm now wondering if it's too babyish?

To end on a nice note - we went to see Eddie Izzard last night at the O2 - twas fab!!

Posy Geranium Dress

Thanks for all your kind wishes on my last post!  I am regaining some of my energy to sew again - unfortunately sewing is quite painful!


Anyway, if your memory is good enough, you might remember that I was working on a Geranium dress over Easter for my friend's little girl on her 4th birthday.

I did manage to finish the dress whilst we were in Cornwall (weather was horrendous!) but I didn't manage to summon the energy to blog about it, so here goes.

Had some slight mishaps in the making, despite having made one before - I sewed the bodice and skirt together inside out - twice!

The notched neckline wasn't quite as notched as I intended - perhaps because I forgot to take the interfacing to Cornwall so had to use an extra layer of fabric as emergency- interfacing!

 

Here's the little lady in her birthday dress, far too busy to stand still for photos

 

She liked the "flutterby" sleeves!

 And no, I didn't add an underlayer, she just decided that she wanted to wear two pink dresses :-)

And the last thing about this dress that made me go "squeee!":