A Holiday Dress

Decided to be my own guinea pig; who better to practice on? I had 2 yards of a wine-colored polyester pique knit material I had purchased on sale from fabric.com. Not exactly a remnant, but I did use a remnant from the fabric stash for the embellishment. The pattern was Butterick Fast & Easy B4597.  Good going! The pattern normally retails for $15.95 but of course I got it on sale at JoAnn’s for $1.99. The pattern called for 2.5 yards, but as I only had 2 yards, I needed to make the dress I wanted with shorter sleeves instead of long.

The polyester knit was WEIRD to work with. It had almost an oily feel to the fabric, and it snagged very easily. Plus, I found it very difficult to match up the seams; by the time I sewed to the end of a seam, one fabric piece was longer than the other. I tried to remedy this by using a roller presser foot on my machine, but I still ended up with some uneven seams.  Fixed that; cut them off.  I did use my new favorite stitch for knit material, the Double Overlock stitch.

The beginning

Progress

The pattern has a scoop neck, 3/4 length sleeves, and a hemmed slit in the front. For the neckline embellishment, I made some frayed rosettes, loosely using a FREE pattern by Jennifer Paganelli and Carla Hegeman Crim, that I downloaded from youcanmakethis.com last July.  I say loosely, because I sewed my rosettes onto the bodice, rather than mounting them on felt like the pattern specifies. The pattern is very specific and easy to follow!  The fabric for the rosettes is a 100% polyester double georgette  in burgundy. It’s the sort of material that would make a good fake-silk scarf. Not exactly a perfect match in color, but I’m ok with it.

Neckline embellished with rosettes

Hope everyone is having a happy holiday-preparation time while I’m playing [Who ya gonna call?] Fabric-stash Buster!

Baby boys

More baby boys! This design is becoming my signature baby gift. I know it isn’t new but I love this pattern and how terrific it turns out in flannel with piping edges!

And the patterns for blanket and burpies were FREE for the downloading on youcanmakethis.com.

The burpies are made of flannel blanket fabric, backed with prefolded, padded  gauze diapers cut to fit. I know these must be appreciated by moms of projectile-vomiting baby boys such as my boys were, and their boys.  Jonah, the newest grandson, would be smiling like an angel, cooing like a dove, then spewing the contents of his stomach like a sailor three sheets to the wind. 🙂 Oh well, even celebrity babies hurl prettily. I was channel surfing a few weeks ago and saw a Kardashian baby barf all over his mama and aunt, from a king-size bed in a Miami hotel room. Throw-up: the stuff of great reality TV.  Suffice it to say that Jonah’s mama REALLY likes cloth diapers for burp cloths, and a jaunty print on the other side makes a utilitarian cloth soaked in sour partially-digested formula seem a little nicer than a rag, before it embarks on its journey to the laundry hamper.

Another set, not a remnant redo…

I wish you could see and feel how soft this cotton flannel is, and imagine how it would be so comforting next to a neonate’s tender skin (neonate: that’s what my old Human Growth & Development professor called a newborn). I love fleece, and it does a great job of keeping one warm, but cotton flannel is so mmmm! And lightweight for the weather here in Florida.

Remnant Baby set

 

Finished receiving blanket

 

The .9 yard remnant was trimmed to a square, and backed with the same sized square of a pink/white dot flannel, with a jumbo rickrack edging. The pattern for this was FREE and downloaded from http://www.youcanmakethis.com

I bought some flannel last month when it was on sale at JoAnn’s. Rickrack and piping and other trims rarely go on sale, so I save up the %-off coupons for items like that. I was lucky enough to find an unused package of pink jumbo rickrack in my sewing desk, which either came with the desk when I inherited it from my gran, or I bought somewhere; check out the package—–> it was 59 cents! The back of the package said 1974!

 

cutting out the diaper backing

 

Next came the matching burp cloths: I used the pink fabric and backed it with a prefolded cloth diaper, using the FREE pattern for Oh, Baby! Burpies on http://www.youcanmakethis.com. The cloth diapers were on sale at KMart, Buy One, Get One 50% off, so I paid about 75 cents per diaper.

I embroidered the burpies with a strawberry motif to go with the flannel print, which came with my embroidery machine software (NOT FREE but convenient!)

This is a pic of the final remnant redo project (you can click on it to center it):