80's Nursing Gown

I finally sewed up McCall's 9437! I got this pattern quite a while ago from the lovely ladies at pattern rescue. Initially I just liked it. I love classic-style nightgowns, and there seemed to be lots of nightgown patterns available in the 80's.

This one is great because it buttons all the way down to below the waist in front, so it should make a perfect nursing gown. In fact I was just on the Baby Center boards this morning and people were saying the only good nursing gowns they have found were Laura Ashley! Well this pattern happens to be a Laura Ashley pattern that was issued back in 1985. :) 

 Here is my pattern review.

Sewing Tiny Things

And my final weekend project is a couple of wrap onesies for my little guy. I found a really great tutorial for a wrap onesie at Nefertari Creations. I was looking for something that wouldn't irritate his healing belly button when we brought him home. I love that her design criss-crosses, but still snaps at the crotch. She is very fortunate to have a cover stitch machine that gives a professional finish on the edge binding. But I found another great onesie tutorial from Naomi at Omi Creates that uses a very simple zig-zag stitch to create beautiful binding. So I used her technique on all the binding.

This first one was really just a trial run, so I used the selvage of the fabric to make the binding, since I didn't have any other knit. And I learned that I made the binding too narrow for the snaps to fit. But, it's still pretty cute! I really wanted to make him something with the fold over mitten cuffs and attached booties. Because I've been getting lots of good advice from experienced Mamas and I'm hearing that infants constantly kick off their socks and scratch themselves with their new finger nails. (Thanks Mama Kelly!) So, I altered the wrap onesie pattern to have longs legs with booties, and I used the sleeves with mitten cuffs that I found from yet another great baby tutorial created by Jessica at Running With Scissors. Not only she offers a great tutorial for sleep sacks, but she also had the genius idea to use old T-shirts for the solid knit portion of the pajamas and the binding!

This is what I plan to bring Korben home from the hospital in. I just have no idea if it'll fit him! LOL! So, I'll bring a couple other cute outfits that people have given him just in case...

Stuffed Animal Hammock

We have a toy hammock!

It's nice to free up some space in our bedroom by going vertical with stuffed animal storage. I loosely followed the cute Stuffed Animal Net Tutorial from Christie at Lemon Squeezy. But I'm always looking for resourceful ways to save money on crafty projects, so I used some alternative materials. I bought a mesh bag from Dollar Tree and took it apart for the netting. And I used 2 1/2 packages of webbing from my rainbow luggage strap stash.

The bag was really easy to take apart. The stitching on the seam and the stitching on the drawstring casing just pulled right out. Then I cut it into a triangle and serged all the edges to add a little strength.

These luggage straps are one of my favorite 99 cent items. Whenever I see them at a dollar store I stock up. I've used them for sandbags, bag straps and now for the binding on a toy hammock. I just folded it in half and sandwiched the mesh inside- no pinning required! Good thing I still have a couple packages of this stuff left for future projects!

Up next on the list of nesting to-do's: a robot lamp!

Finally sewing for the baby!

I've been seriously nesting! I'm 34 weeks and starting to realize that we're going to have a baby soon! We've had the kitchen/dining room/entry area and living room repainted. And we bought a new kitchen table and new living room furniture. Michael even approved an area rug! The house looks SO much better! Since we're staying in our little condo, we'll have the baby in our room with us. The plan is to have him sleep in the bassinet attachment of a pack n play and store his clothes in bins on the two lower shelves of his changing table. So I bought two of the Fabler Groda frog prince wall pockets from Ikea and hacked one of them into a diaper stacker. I looked all over different blogs for diaper stacker tutorials and I found some cute ones. But this one from Shannon over at Sew Beautiful was my very favorite. (And it's not just because she has such an awesome name!) I love that she made it gender neutral and the pockets on the front are a really cool detail. It also has the biggest capacity for diaper storage of any of the other diaper stacker tutorials I came across.

I harvested as much of the green stripes and dots as I could from the original wall pockets. Even though the wall pockets are over 4 feet tall, they really aren't made of much fabric. So I supplemented with the white cotton center from one of our old bed skirts. Now that we have a platform bed, our bed skirts have no purpose. But, we definitely have a use for a diaper stacker. So, all the diaper changing accessories and baby utensils will go in wall pockets and diapers will go in the matching stacker. Next, I need to figure out a net hammock for all his stuffed toys! He already has tons and after the baby shower tomorrow, I'm sure he'll have even more.

I've already done two loads of baby laundry and all those bins in his changing table are full of clothes, bibs and blankies! What a lucky boy he is already!

PREY

A few months back I took out our trash and this huge roll of kaki green fabric was sitting by our dumpster! I was so excited, I always dreamed of getting to find fabric in the trash just like Peter! I wasn't sure what I would do with it, but there was no way I was going to turn down free fabric...
So I made sand bags. We had a flourescent light bank fall on the first day of shooting PREY. And we were SO lucky that no one was hurt. But we learned our lesson and Michael put in a request for sand bags. So I just wipped out my stash of sport zippers and rainbow webbing and put together 4 sand bags. For free! We went down to the beach and filled up gallon ziplocks with sand, and in just a few hours time we had plenty of weight to keep our lights upright on set.

Last night (and this morning) was our second day of shooting for PREY. This is just a little sneak peek of the props we used. It was great having Michelle on set working her magic with set dressing and props and lots of stickiness! And Eric at Morb Fx wowed us all with the awesome blood and makeup FX!

And, of course Mark brought the creep-factor as the twisted serial killer "John". I made his shirt from my vintage, 1956 McCall's 2118 western shirt pattern. It looked amazing drenched in blood!

The Vintage Vogue Search

In March of last year Pattern Junkie posted over at Sew Retro about the Vintage Vogue Pattern Search.

I always believed that Vogue had some magnificent archive of patterns, and just pulled gorgeous vintage patterns from it to be reissued. Well, apparently that is not the case at all. They DO NOT keep a pattern archive! Isn't that sad?!

When I heard about the pattern search I knew exactly which pattern needed to be reissued.

Vogue 4743, of course.

I submitted an email and I snail-mailed in a scan of the pattern also. A few weeks later I got the email that my pattern was chosen! How exciting!!

Well, just this morning I received another email that they will be available in the Summer catalog and online right now!

So here it is...

Vogue 8729 is now available to everyone!

Time for some holiday sewing!

This is Hyde the Thanksgiving Owl. I just stitched him together tonight. I have decided that there are not enough happy images to symbolize the Thanksgiving season. So I'm declaring that owls are now officially added as an icon of Thanksgiving. I used this Carnivore Owl Bag how-to and just made him out of felt. He stands up on his own because he has a Spiderman ziplock bag of fish gravel in his bottom. And we named him Hyde because he's a horned-owl.

Over the weekend I started using up some of my VIP craft panels. I really love using craft panels. They come with all the colorful designs already printed. All you have to do is sew them up and stuff them. I made a turkey for each my mom and Michael's mom. They also have Spiderman ziplocks with fish gravel so they'll stand on their own.

Rudy is also a VIP craft panel. I made him specially for Michael Bacon. He looks EXACTLY like the clamation, politically incorrect, Rudolph we all remember.

(Maybe he'll like Rudolph so much he'll let me have a white plastic Christmas Tree this year)

:)

It's mine, all mine!

This was my dream wedding dress. Even with help from Erin at Dress A Day

and the lovely ladies at Pattern Rescue, I didn't locate it in time to make my wedding gown.

I LOVED my wedding dress! I was able to come up with something just as wonderful. But Vogue 4743 was never forgotten.

And a couple weeks ago it turned up on eBay!

Now it's mine and I can't wait to make a party dress out of it.

I just need a fabulous party to go to...

Sewing, Sewing, Sewing

I've been really in a sewing mood. It must be because February is fashion month, and the fashion node in my brain is responding to environmental signals. Or I'm just a big dork that likes to sew a lot!

I've been wanting to make my own jackets to wear to work for a while now. I work in a very cold, poorly constructed cement building. It doesn't matter how warm it might appear outside, it's guaranteed to be freezing in my lab. I have to dress in layers at work because, when I leave my lab to go just about anywhere else on campus, not only I get hot, but the people I work with all think I'm wacko for being bundled up all the time.

I need cute jackets that are warm but still fairly thin so I can move around and do my job. If hooded sweatshirts, and warm cozy sweat pants weren't so completely unflattering and slovenly looking, I would wear them to work everyday. The hooded sweatshirt with the Kangaroo-pouch really is the ideal upper body warming garment. I love them, I could write a whole blog about them... maybe someday.

I bought two vintage jacket patterns from Michelle over at Patterns from the Past. Patterns from the Past is really great. I've been buying vintage patterns from them for close to 10 years. I highly recommend checking them out. Anyway, I bought one car coat pattern with raglan sleeves, and one kinda fitted jacket pattern that is fully lined. The car coat is Kwik Sew 419. It has raglan sleeves and can be made single or double-breasted. I'm not a big fan of double breasted things on women, so I made the single breasted version.

As long as I can remember my mom had this plaid stuff in her fabric stash. I would rummage through things looking for something cute to make Barbie a new dress or some sort of garment to torture my cat, Muffin, with. And I would always get down to the big piece of plaid and realize I was at the bottom of the stash. Eventually I realized that it's probably some good fabric and I should save it for... something. So when I kinda took over her stash for her, I always had it at the bottom just like mom. Well, I finally washed it and cut into it. I think it's wool. Its really thin, but really warm. Perfect for my chilly lab.

For some reason I always put crazy deadlines on my sewing projects. I told my self I was going to make this last Monday night and wear it to work on Tuesday. I did, but Tuesday was miserable. I stayed up until 3 am, because I didn't actually start sewing until about 8:45 pm. Needless to say I was really tired by the time I got to the buttons. I didn't have any real buttons that would work, but I happened to have just the right size forms to make my own. I didn't even try to make the plaid match on them.

The other jacket pattern is a Simplicity pattern from the 70's, I'll post pictures of it when I start sewing.

My cousin Alex's girlfriend, Kim, gave me the cutest birthday card with a pink and green paper flower on it last month. I liked the colors so much I wanted to wear them. Kim is so crafty and talented. I thought I should make a Kimflower shirt, since she took the time to make me such a cute card. I made the paper flower into a broach, and bought some $1/yard pink and white polka-dot fabric. I had the green quilting cotton in my stash, so I just made some bias strips. I downloaded the Tara top pattern from Burda Style. I changed it a little to have kimono sleeves. The bottom is too wide, so I need to take a few inches off each side before I wear it. Burda Style is a really great source for free patterns. Anyone who sews should check it out.

My mom is the sweetest lady in the whole world. If she thought you might need it, she would give you the shirt off her back. So I wanted to make her a special shirt for her fun little get-away to Arizona this weekend. I always use Simplicity 4077 for her shirts. They just look really great on her.

I used a corduroy print that has just a little bit of stretch. And I found these great blue shank buttons.

(I really need to learn to take better pictures!)

Where'd Ya Get That Pretty Little Stitch?

From my new Singer 115 of course.

Michael got me a beautiful Singer 115 in a very ornate treadle cabinet for my birthday. The treadle cabinet works beautifully as a desktop for my serger, and I wasn't really sure what I was going to do with the old machine that came in it. But I decided to look into the serial number anyway. It's amazing how as soon as you name something, you become attached to it.

I couldn't find any pictures of this machine anywhere online, and none of the old Singer collector's websites listed it. So, I called Singer's 1-800 number and gave them the serial number. This is what they told me:

She was born January 8, 1917 in St. Jean, Quebec, Canada. The gold decal design is called "Wings".

Now that I know a part of her story, I love her and have to keep her. I wonder how many different dresses she's made. I wish I knew more about her. I oiled her up really well, and she sewed the most beautiful stitch I've ever seen. I still plan to take her in to get serviced, but first I think I need to make one dress. :)