Something un-kid-related, and yet, it's all about making something kid-related.

Well, I don't know if you've heard, but I've taken to sewing. I started last spring with a hand quilting class. I figured that was a good place to start, since I didn't know how to sew on a button. From there I made a couple of small quilts and enjoyed the process very much. Then last August, Linda gave me her mother's sewing machine, a beautiful old Singer in pristine condition. It's a perfect machine for me because I find the modern ones overwhelmingly complex. It's electric, and it only goes backward and forward. You can change the length of a stitch, but that's about it for bells and whistles.

So since then I have determined that I don't really like quilting with the machine (though still make them by hand), but I am really enjoying using it to learn how to sew other things. Recently I started reading and researching clothes. I don't like patterns all that much - oh the tedium! - so I took a few old things apart to see how they were made. I even tried to make a few patterns myself, with limited success.


Front - Imps & Elves dress


Back - Imps & Elves dress


And then I found this great dress of Clare's from a Dutch company called Imps and Elves that she is starting to outgrow. She has two of them, hand me downs from our friend Dory, and they are made of t-shirt material. I couldn't bear to cut them up, though, so I spent a few evenings trying to measure one, but I couldn't get the math to add up because the t-shirt material was so stretchy. Finally I realized I could press it underneath my see-through grid ruler that goes with my rotary cutter, and I measured it out on a graph, inch by inch.







Then I traced it on muslin, and cut it out. Looks simple from here, right?






Turns out not so much.

I had an old skirt with a decorative bottom, so I cut it up and traced on my pattern. Then I painstakingly learned each step after doing it the wrong way, undoing it, and then doing it the right way. Piecing it together was easy - it was adding the neck, armholes and bottom hems that caused me the most trouble. And then I added the extra hem. All told, it took me a few weeks. When I washed it, it actually looked kind of good!

It's not ironed in this photo, by the way.














Lila wants one now, too. I guess I have to make another pattern...