Pink Toddler Dress with Overlay

This light, summery, dress was made for my granddaughter, Lily, for my eldest daughter's wedding in July.  The material is a plain dusty pink cotton, overlaid with a dusty pink gauze fabric. with a white flower print.  Two very small buttons were used for each of the straps.

 

 

You can see the colour of the underlay in the picture above.

Please do not reproduce these photographs in any way without my permission.

Machine-shirred Yellow Toddler Dress

Very simple yellow cotton print dress, made for, and modelled by, Lily  The machine-shirred bodice and straps will grow with her. 

Please doo not reproduce these pictures in any way without my permission.

Yellow Baby Play Dress

I made this dress from Prudent Baby's Snappy Toddler Dress online free pattern here, http://www.prettyprudent.com/2010/07/baby-kid/snappy-toddler-dress-2/

 

I changed the pattern slightly by inserting a pleat front and back, instead of gathers; and using buttons instead of snaps.

 

 Here are a couple of close-ups of the button and buttonhole, and the inside back neckline.

 

 

Bean Bags for Noah

With Noah's 2nd birthday coming up in August, I thought I'd make him a few 4.5 inch bean bags with a letter of his name on each one.  I didn't want to use the usual beans or rice filling, as this can start to grow if it gets wet - and these bags will probably need to be washed pretty regularly - so I went with some small beads found in our local Dollarstore.

Because I'd used beads which were slightly heavier than beans would have been, I didn't want the bags to split open and have him swallow any of them, so I made a simple interior bag, double-stitched all the edges and also zig-zagged it to keep it neat. 

I sewed four bags out of brightly coloured cotton, cut out Noah's initials from the same colour fabrics and ironed on some light stiffener to make sewing them on easier, appliqued an initial of his name onto each bag, put the interior bag inside, and sewed up the open seam - simple!

 

 

 

Unfortunately I ran out of yellow thread, so before I can finish the 'A' and the 'O' bags, I need to purchase some more, but here are the two bags I've finished so far

 

 

 

 

 

 

Millie's Christmas Bandana

Don't we all want to look our best at Christmas?  Millie does, so I made her a Christmassy bandana that she could wear and look especially festive.

A triangle of bright red cotton fabric, a quick hem all round, some iron-on glittery christmas trees, and voila.  Simple!

 Happy New Year!

Mug Rug

Yesterday I decided to join the 'mug rug club' and had a go at making myself a mug rug from one of 'Handmade by Alissa''s designs on her website.  I shamelessly stole her pattern and colour ideas, but as "imitation is the sincerest form of flattery' I thought that she probably wouldn't mind!  As this was such a small item, only 6" x 8", I drew the design onto a piece of copy paper and used the paper piecing method to make this.

I'll definitely make another one - and use my own design - as it took me less that 2 hours to cut, sew and quilt the 'rug'.  I bound it in the usual way, handstitching the back with a slip-hem stitch, but I think next time I will use the self-binding process and see if that works any better.

Honeycomb Quilt

This quilt is one of the most frustrating I have ever made.  The idea was to make a twin-sized quilt, but due to a major miscalculation on my part, I now have a lovely cot-sized quilt and absolutely no-one to use it! 

The template started out much larger and, in a moment of sheer stupidity, I decided it would be a great idea to cut out all my fabric into squares of a sufficient size to be able to just draw round my template and cut more than one at a time.  I measured my hexagon from top to bottom, added an inch 'just in case', and blithly set about chopping up my fabrics. Unfortunately, what I'd failed to account for was that a hexagon's longest 'side' is from side to side (if you see what I mean).  When I'd cut up all my fabrics into the required number of squares and tried to put my template onto it, it didn't fit!  So, I had to cut down my template to a size that fitted my squares.

Note to self - next time check that the template fits the square before cutting them all out!  (Or, better still, perhaps it would be better to cut them out one at a time)

My next challenge was the quilting.  I'd decided that I'd do simple straight line quilting, using a quilting stitch built into my machine.  A trip to my local sewing shop provided 3 reels of a variegated Sulky thread that I'd heard so much about and thought would be great to use.  The sewing shop owner said that I should use a top stitch needle, but I sort of ignored this advice.  I was machine quilting, and you use a machine quilting needle when you're machine quilting, don't you?  Another very bad decision.  After having to take out 2 lines of quilting due to the fact that the thread was constantly breaking, I thought that perhaps the advice I'd been given in the shop wasn't as odd as it sounded, and changed my needle to a top stitch needle.  It did lessen the breakage I'd been experiencing, but, even though I tried every tension setting I could, the thread broke quite regularly.  Now I am not sure if it was something I was doing or not, but I've never had this problem with any other thread I've used.  Would I use Sulky thread again?  At the moment, it is not likely. 

All in all, the quilt has turned out very well and I'm pleased with the result.  Now I just need a home for it to go to.

Crayon Holder

Now Thanksgiving is almost on us, my thoughts are turning to Christmas and so I thought I'd make this crayon roll for the little girl next door (me having no children of the right age for it!).  It's almost finished, but I just need to find a fastener for the two buttons.  I made this following a tutorial from You Go Girl which you can find here: http://yougogirl.typepad.com/you_go_girl/2009/02/guess-what-today-is-no-its-not-my-birthday-nope-not-my-anniversary-groundhog-day-has-passed-and-valentines-isnt-yet-here.html

In this photo, you can see that I 'flattened' the bottom of each pocket.

The back view (or would you class this as the front view?)

A closer view of the main fabric used.  All the fabric came from Connecting Threads.

You can see the inside fabric in the following two photos

I think I'll try making one with ties next time, for a change.  I'll keep you posted.

How time flies

Another month gone by since I last posted. I'm still working on echo quilting each of the 'logs' in my log cabin quilt - it's going to take quite a bit of time to do it. And I still haven't decided on a name for it yet.

I have also been working on a child-size hourglass quilt made from Sandi Henderson's Meadowsweet range of fabric, together with white Kona fabric. I can't seem to get a good full-size picture of it as all the photographs look 'washed out', but you should get an idea of what it looks like from this one.