Halloween dresses? In February?

Does that make me too early or too late?

Something else from the unblogged fall sewing projects are these adorable candy corn dresses that I made.


(apologies for the wrinkles)

I saw an image of a dress like this on Pinterest, looked at the sellers etsy store and decided I could make it myself. I googled for a basic tutorial and used this one. I adjusted it to have three sections and cut each section out individually and sewed them together. I used bias tape around the armholes and made a simple casing for the ribbon at the top.



For Ellie's dress I made a rough pattern from a dress we already owned. However it came out too tight in the armholes because I failed to add extra fabric for the ribbon casing. It was super easy to trace a simple shape like a dress and make my own pattern so I will surely be doing it again!

Perhaps they need some cute springy matching dresses?

Skirts for the girls

As one of my first Kids Clothing Week items of business, I whipped up some skirts for my girls.


I made these very simply. I measured each girl's waist and doubled it for the width of the skirt. Measured them waist to knee and added 2 inches for the hem and waistband.



I whacked a bunch of them out from stash fabric and batch sewed them up. Ironed the hems and sewed them first then did the waistbands.



I found it to be super quick to do a bunch of these at once. I used one inch elastic in Samantha's skirts and 3/4 or half in Ellie's (whatever I had on hand).



I have lots more fabric set aside to make more things for them - dresses and skirts.



I couldn't resist this cowgirl fabric since we live in Cowtown! :)


See more of the skirts (including Ellie's which mostly match Samantha's and are not pictured here) in my flickr set:

Dressing my kids

So I posted a while back about planning to make some clothes for my kids during Kids Clothing Week back in October. While I still need to post all the things I made then, I wanted to show these off first. I bought these plain long sleeved onesies (that were not white! Miracle find!) with the intention of embroidering patches for them. My sister-in-law had done something similar for my nephew, and it was adorable. I began by choosing some patterns from my Sublime Stitching collection (confession: I have all the books and about 1/4 of the available iron-on transfers), and some from Doodle Stitching. (if you embroider, this book is a must-have!).
I combed through them looking for cute but not cutesie designs. I had four onesies for each babe, and I wanted to use as many as possible. I also tried to 'coordinate' the designs/colors I chose with the colors of the onesies. I also took into account our interests - hubby used to play the drums so I had to go with the drum design.


Both the drum and the rocket ship are Sublime Stitching designs.



I wanted something to coordinate withe Ellie's brown onesie, so I had to use the adorable hedgehog. (Hedgehog is Sublime Stitching and birds from Doodle Stitching)



These two are my favorites - both from Doodle Stitching. I just love that cow!

Instead of embroidering directly onto the onesies (which I worried about because of the potential of stretching), I embroidered onto plain Kona cotton. I was planning to back each with interfacing, but decided to try folding the extra material behind the design and ironing it flat. It worked! I've found that interfacing can wrinkle when washed repeatedly, so I thought this might be a better fix. It has held up just fine.

I'm already trying to find some cute, plain, non white onesies to stitch up for summer!