Monday, April 5

Darling little girl's skirt...

Hope you had a great Easter.  We woke up to around 6 inches of snow and it felt more like winter than spring.  We still had a great time and I love having an excuse to have so much chocolate in the house. 

I found this website that had a Easy Skirt Tutorial and I wanted to try one out for my little girl.  The size that it made was around a 2T to 3T.  I had this darling fabric that I wanted to use that I got out of the bargin bin and I knew that it would be great as a skirt.  The website's skirt used only 2 patterns of fabric and I wanted to use all of these fabrics because they work so well together so I modified the pattern just a little.

First - look at how cute this fabric is....

Okay now that you know how cute the fabric is you probably agree with me that I had to use it. 

In the tutorial it states that the bottom piece of the fabric is 34" by 5.25" so I cute that out of this fabric..


I then finished the edge by using a zigzag stitch since I am not rich enough for a serger. :) 

The top part of the skirt was listed on the tutorial as 28" by 9".  I wanted to use 4 types of fabrics so I just divided it by 4 and came up with 7" each.  I wanted to do 2 pieces of each fabric so that would be 8 total pieces (2 each) of 4" by 9" to account for a 1/2" seam allowance.  I sewed 4 pieces together (just one of each fabric) and it turned out like this.


So after sewing all the top pieces together - I then sewed the bottom piece.  On this piece you use your widest straight stitch and then pull through the top thread to slightly gather it.  When it is gathered enough that it is the same width as the top piece, pin, and sew it on.  Then the skirt will look like this.

Now you can sew in the elastic.  I had zigzag stitched the top of the skirt so I could just fold it once.  After folding it down (leaving enough room for the elastic) I stitched it and put the elastic through using a safety pin.  I then top stitched it to help hold the elastic in place since I hate it when your elastic folds and twists. 
Then I hemed the bottom of the skirt and sewed it together.  I had to modify it a little by trying it on my little girl to make sure that it fit.  I figured I would make sure that it stayed on her since I had her here to try it on for me. :)

Here is the end result - Darling isn't it!



Try it - it is easy and well worth the little amount of effort!

Tricia

Friday, April 2

Easter madness!

It has been a while since I posted because I have been going crazy trying the finish a dress for my little girl and trying out a bunch of other crafts from the blogs that I follow.  So here is what I have been up to.  In my family growing up we would always get church clothes for Easter and I am trying to follow that tradition in my family.  So I found some darling fabric that comes like this at JoAnns:

and a idea was born for a cute spring/summer dress for my little girl.  I figured I would just measure, cut, sew and maybe add some straps and voila!  I would have a darling dress.  Well, the material is pretty thin so I had to put a liner in the dress and then I wanted to add some ribbon and buttons for the straps.  I am not good at making button holes so after some thinking on my part, my husband told me to put snaps on it.  So that problem was solved.  Then I tried to make a dress for her baby doll but too much work for something that will be thrown into the bottom of her toy chest.  My daughter has a thing for taking the clothes off of the dolls and doesn't bother putting them back on.  Anyway - So I got the dress finally finished and it looks great at least that is what I think.  Here it is -

The second one is a close up on the cute little straps and buttons.  I am pretty proud of myself since this is my first dress sewing attempt. 

On to the next project - I decided then that I have all this cute flannel left over from my girl's blanket that I made for her crib and her birthday is coming up so I decided that I would make something for her baby dolls.  She likes to sing to them and put them to sleep or "night - night" as we call it around here.  I decided to make a sleeping bag for her doll.  I just made 2 small blankets and then sewed them together leaving an opening at the top and a small opening on the side so you would be able to fold it down like a real sleeping bag.  I love to applique so I did a flower on the front of the bag.  I then tried out my first ruffle and it was sooo cute that I added it to the front too.  Here is the finished product with a baby doll in it - sorry about the condition on the doll - just be glad that you can't see that she has no clothes on (See comments above).

Here is a close-up of the applique and the ruffle -

Lastly, I was following one of my favorite blogs and she did a flower week and so I just had to try out some of her flowers.  Some of them are links to other blogs so I will just give you a link to her blog and you can check them all out.  These are the ones that I made and you can find instructions on Lolly Chops

 
They are all easy to make and they are all shown on Lolly's blog. 

That was my week and that didn't even count the vacuuming everytime one of the kids would get into the tomato seeds that we planted or any other catastrophe that we had.  I hope you have a great time and enjoy reading this post.  Try out these flowers they are a blast to make. :)

Tricia