Pants!

So my mum cut out some pants at some time, we think it was fairly recently in history because of where they were located, though one can never really tell. They will fit my niece right now, so they were a lucky find!

They are pretty uneventful pants, they were already cut out. All I did was overlock and sew them up, blind hemmed them, shoved some elastic in, and Voila! pants. They took all of one episode of  a Seinfeld  rerun and an episode of Stargate Atlantis to finish off. I even managed to clean and oil the overlocker and sewing machine and rethread both during that time too.
So you say, why am I showing you the uneventful pants, well it's because of the fabric. I am totally in love with the fabric and because there was no more of it located at mums, not even scraps from cutting out, I thought I should show someone who may recognise it.

It's a chocolate brown with lilac dragonflies and red, yellow and white tulips within a lilac circle. If anyone knows/has this fabric, even if it is in a different colour I'd dearly love to get more of it. Please let me know!

A skirt made from another skirt

While my niece is here we've been making her lot's of clothes, and heres another one! At some point during the 90's my mum made herself a very large long skirt. Then after having made the skirt she cut a good 30 cm's off the bottom of the skirt before she wore it. The left over piece of skirt was hemmed and had 8 curved panels in it, because there was so much fabric, I cut along the hem and seams (instead of unpicking - I hate unpicking!) and overlocked and stitched 5 of the pieces back together again. Technically I could have saved myself time and just left the seams as they were, but I prefer the look of overlocked edges to zigzag, and this way all the parts will look the same. I used the remaining panels to cut out pieces of frill and sewed them together. I then began using a gathering stitch on my overlocker along the entire frill, which looked really long but gathered up almost perfectly to the size of the skirt (after fiddling around for hours with the settings to get it to do semi decently gathered stitch). It turns out the manual apparently has the wrong settings for the needle tensions for the gathering instructions. grrr!
Luckily it turned out great, it's one of those projects that could have gone either way but would have probably ended up in the "Later pile"if I hadn't persisted.

Again I made a fabric flower using a tutorial from Wise Craft because my niece really loved the last one. I again added a vintage button from my mums button jar and this time, some new organza ribbons. I love these fabric flowers. After they've been washed a few times and start to fray and curl they get a whole lot more character that I love!

If it weren't for Police Academy being the late night movie last night I may not have spent so much time trying to work out how to gather with my overlocker. Police Academy is an oldie that's for sure, but it still has the ability to make me laugh out loud and throughout all the fiddling and test stitching with the overlocker I needed some laughing! For those with this overlocker, Janome Harmony 9102D The settings I finally used were : Left Needle Thread Tension Dial set to 9. The Right Needle Thread Tension Dial set to 9. Upper and Lower Looper Thread Tension Dials set to 3. The stitch length dial set to 4. The Differential feed dial set to the next mark past the 2 (the book calls it 2.2) and the Needle plate setting knob set to S. But please if anyone knows if there is a more correct way to gather using this overlocker please let me know!

Blue polka dot frilly dress

We made my little 4 year old niece the yellow t-shirt and skirt for last week and today we made a new dress.  We made it from some vintage 80's polka dot my mum still had in her cupboard and at the last minute decided it should be a raa raa skirt (extremely 80's!) I didn't have a pattern so I used the T-shirt pattern from the yellow T-shirt and made it longer, cut two strips off the bottom of the long t-shirt and then cut 3 frills. I gathered them on the overlocker, but it just wouldn't gather properly! grr! I eventually gathered them using a long stitch on the sewing machine and pulling it - old style. Better than hand gathering, but i cannot for the life of me work  out why the overlocker wont gather. I know I've done it before, and I used the settings from the manual.(double grrr!)

Anyway at the last minute I decided it needed something and I made a fabric flower using a tutorial from Wise Craft Fabric Flowers The button is vintage from my mums button jar.

I think it looks pretty cute!