More bibsies

I made some more bibs for a friend of mine and Jon's cousin. The friend managed to have her baby the day before I got the bibs in the mail, but Jon's cousin isn't due until April, and hopefully I'll get to the post office today or tomorrow. For my friend, I made the alien bib and one out of a fabric I had in my stash that has a colorful tie print. (By the way, could anything be cuter than a baby boy wearing a bib with a tie print?)

For Jon's cousin, I made those two plus a bumblebee baby bib and an alligator. I made the bee one with an old pair of yellow-and-white checked boxer shorts instead of the yellow fleece I usually use because I couldn't find the yellow fleece when I started. I think it's super cute. (The photo is rotated in iPhoto but not here, apparently.)

I love making gifts for people, but I'm a bit burned out on it right now. I have two more gifts I really want to make soon, but I'm going to make a couple things for myself first. I worked on a new dress yesterday, and I'm going to finish it today and maybe even start another one.

Stained glass

Another non-sewing home post. I just want to show off! I bought a groupon for six stained glass classes last semester, and I started it this January. I ended up working fairly quickly, so I was able to make three projects in seven classes (I paid for the last one separately. The first one was geometric with a blue, yellow, and red design. Here is a close-up of the textured clear glass.

The second was smaller and has lots of different textured clear glass with a pop of blue.

Here's the size comparison.

I used a patina-making chemical for the first one to make the connecting solder darker, but I liked the brightness of the metal on the second one, so I left it un-patina-ed. Most of the interest in the second one is in the textures of the glass, so here are some close-ups that capture that.

For my last project, I used the same pattern as the first one but changed the color scheme. It looks like a sunset to me.

I can hardly wait until we live in a place where I can hang these up properly. I don't really have a place for it here, but I do enjoy seeing them just sitting on my windowsill.

I never knew that a regular person like me could make stained glass. Some of the steps are difficult for me, and my work is quite imperfect, but it's cool that in just seven weeks, I learned how to cut glass, use a grinder, and solder. (I had soldered before, but not since high school.) This was really fun, and I might even pay regular price to take some more. I wish the studio were closer, though. That would definitely make me a regular customer.

Nightshirt for Jon

Our second wedding anniversary was on Friday, and the second anniversary theme is cotton, so I made Jon a nightshirt/robe. It can be worn without pajama pants, but not for photos on a blog! I found this goofy but very cozy flannel with giraffes, bunnies, ducks, and teddy bears on it, and thought it was better than the only boy-type prints at the fabric store, which were of the superhero variety. I just don't see Jon as a superhero PJ guy (but apparently bright pink with bunnies is OK). As you can see if you look closely, I accidentally cut the back upside down. I honestly didn't notice the directionality of the print before Jon put it on. Oh well.

As you can see from his big smile, he likes it! (Or at least he likes me enough to pretend.) It's warm and soft and obviously made with love. I used Simplicity 3683, a costume pattern I already had from making a shirt-and-pants costume for a friend of our for Halloween one year. It's unisex and has a lot of variations on this kind of shirt and pants. I shortened a duster coat. I cut a straight XS for Jon; even though his measurements should have put him at a small, I thought the wearing ease was too much. Jon is a smallish guy, but I think it's kind of silly that he is the right size for an XS in a unisex pattern. What would small ladies do? For example, the shoulders on this are too broad for me, and there are a lot of women smaller than I am. (I would have posted pictures of me in this so Jon wouldn't be embarrassed, but the shoulders are too big and the hips too small.) We shouldn't expect a unisex costume to have a great fit for most ladies, but it's still a little ridiculous.

I was thinking about sewing the shirt together in the front up to the second button level, but then I did so much work to make the facings nice all the way down that I didn't want to just sew it together, and now that I've made buttonholes, it would look weird, so I'll leave it as is. Speaking of buttonholes, they went really well! I just used the buttonhole foot on my sewing machine, and it was pretty self-explanatory. I think I've only made one or two before, many years ago, so I was nervous.

Thanks, Jon, for letting me post these! You're the best husband ever.

Prom dress

I can't believe it took me so long to post about this. I made this for my senion prom in 2001. That is me and my date, who was my best friend and went to grad school in Chicago, so now we get to hang out again. If I get ambitious, maybe I'll go scan in some other pictures from prom too. As you'll see when you scroll down, there are three tiers and a hoop skirt.

This is a Butterick "making history" pattern, and I think it is supposed to be an antebellum-style southern belle dress. Of course, it is not at all what a dress from that time would actually look like because women no longer wear corsets, and I didn't use any boning or anything. I would probably not have chosen this now because of issues with romanticizing that time period, but at the time I was kind of into "Gone with the Wind," and of course I thought the big billows of fabric were beautiful and elegant. It was a big challenge, which appealed to me. I think I made it during winter break that year, and it was a lot of fun. It is a heavy red satin. I still have the pattern envelope, and I don't remember whether this was 45" or 60" fabric, but it took somewhere between 7 1/2 and 10 yards of fabric and 15 3/4 yards of ivory lace. The bodice is fully self-lined, which is nice because the low neckline doesn't allow much in the way of undergarments.

The dress is so heavy that it does have a problem with kind of slipping down a little. I think if I were to make it again, I might investigate a waist stay, and I might make it tighter around the waist so it wouldn't have any room to start inching its way down. There was never any danger of a wardrobe malfunction, but I did have to adjust the bodice occasionally, and I don't enjoy fussing with my clothes.

This is me modeling it in 2009, when I was going through a closet at my parents' house and decided to see if it still fit. I thought for sure it would be far too small, but I think it looks even better now. I know it's silly, but I am a bit proud that I am still able to fit in my prom dress and that it looks so good on me, if I do say so myself. Maybe I'm just more confident in my body than I was in high school. That's a good thing, for sure!

I was invited to a costume party for German Carnivale (Fasching?), and I decided to haul it out again. For some reason it had never occurred to me as a Halloween costume. I still had the gloves I wore at prom, so I added those and did my hair in a complicated braid, which might not be historically accurate but seemed old-fashioned and easier than doing a bunch of curls. If I ever get pictures from the hostess, I will add them to this post. The ones on my camera don't really capture the look. It was fun, but wearing a hoop skirt is a bit cumbersome, especially if you want to move around and talk to different people or go get yourself a beer or anything. I was definitely glad to get home and put on normal clothes again.

Reversible tote bag

OK, it's probably dumb to keep doing posts of various tote bags I make, but that's what I've been doing. This one is for my sister, and I hope it's already arrived or arriving soon. She is a grad student in harp performance at Texas Tech, so I made her this bag with treble clefs on one side and a Texas Tech theme on the other. It's a little hard to see the music pattern in the pictures of the bag, so here it is.

I don't think my sister is really into school spirit, so if she doesn't like it, I'm giving it to a friend who went to Tech for undergrad and is an elementary school music teacher. If my sister does like it, maybe I'll pick up these fabrics again when I'm in Texas and make one for my friend.

The other bags I've made using this pattern have a big old seam sticking into the inside, giving it a very clear outside and inside, but this time I constructed it to be fully reversible, and I'm pleased with how it turned out. To do that, I sewed the bottom seams of each fabric separately before sewing the sides and straps. I was going to turn through a strap, but after about two inches of trying that, I knew it would make me crazy, so I opened up part of the seam under one of the straps (kind of in the "armpit" of the bag) and turned through there, then tried to disguise it later. It worked pretty well. I was pleased with being able to make it reversible. It seems a lot cooler.

This was going to be a Christmas present for my sister, but then thesis defense stuff got in the way, so it was going to be a birthday present. Her birthday is in mid-March, but her second master's recital is tomorrow. Since I got it finished last weekend, I thought it would be a good recital present, so I just sent it on. I went to her first master's recital in November, but I couldn't make it out this time.

Non-fabric home decorating projects

I just made this weekly calendar, inspired by pinterest. I got an 8x8 photo frame set and cut out rectangles from a set of historical European maps given to us by my MIL. The image on the left is right after I put the maps in the frames and wrote on it with dry erase markers to test their erasibility on the glass. Then I used a silver Sharpie to label the days of the week. We haven't quite figured out what the eighth rectangle will be for. Possibilities are the weekly menu, upcoming events that aren't quite on the weekly calendar yet, or a to-do list. My things are in blue, Jon's things are in red, and things for both of us are in black. I was a little disappointed by how light the silver Sharpie was, but I can get a paint pen and go over it sometime.

Making this calendar reminded me of some other framed home decor projects I've done, so here they are.

This is a set of vintage postcards I bought on a trip to France. Some of them have been written on, and luckily I was able to frame them without cutting them.

This is a set of three postcards we got on the same trip to Europe, but in Germany. The two sides are early Kandinsky prints, and the middle is a cute Max Ernst statue. Jon and I are Max Ernst fans. I did have to cut these to frame them, but they aren't as irreplaceable as the vintage postcards.

This is a photo cluster we have near our kitchen. It's pictures of us and our families. The glare on my grandmother (left middle) is due to the position of our kitchen windows, and I couldn't maneuver out of it. I am pretty pleased with how cute this is. I like the different frames and not-too-fussy placement.

Finally, a framed picture of us on the French island of Porquerolles. I decorated the frame with sea glass we found there. I had never seen sea glass before that trip, and it has become a hobby for us.

Back with more flowers

After a long sewing hiatus due to finishing my thesis (yay!), I am back in the sewing room. My first project was a bunch of mending , which was boring but allowed me to cross a lot of things off my to-do list quickly. But today I finally finished my first real project of the new year.

Early last year, I reposted one of those chain "comment on my post and I'll make something for you" things on facebook. Back in February, I made a tote bag for a friend who had commented on that. She has two adorable daughters, and I wanted to include something for them. Now, 11 months later, I have finally done that. I made these two flower hair clips out of the same fabrics I used for the tote.

These were from the same McCall's pattern set I have used for other pins. I made the one with the purple on the outside first and learned why they have you hand-gather. I'm a lazy hand-sewist, so I always do things on the machine if possible. I machine-gathered instead, and I could not get it short enough to roll into a nice flower shape, so I had to double it. (It's like a cone point of angle 4π, but the identification doesn't quite work at the ends.) In these pictures, you can see how one of the pins has one layer and one has two. I do think the hand-gathered one is better, but the machine one looks OK too, at least in my opinion.

The glue is still drying on the hair clip attachment, but I hope I can get it in the mail tomorrow.

I'm really glad to be back in the sewing room. I hope that I get a nice rhythm going on my sewing projects. In the search for the fabric I was using last night, I saw so many pieces of fabric I had bought with such big ideas and haven't gotten around to yet. They aren't even UFOs yet, they're unstarted objects. It makes me feel a little sad when I see how much I've bought without using, but I am also happy with how much I've done with some other things, like scraps I've been making into baby bibs and the leftovers from my wedding dress and my sister's bridesmaids dresses, which have been used for many placemats. (More bibs and placemats in the works this year, too!)

In other news, I'm taking a stained glass class right now. I got a Groupon for a class at this store, and I went to my first session today. At the end of the three hours, I had chosen a project, traced it, chosen and labeled the colors and orientations of my glass pieces, cut out the paper pattern, and started cutting the glass. To cut glass, we're just scoring it with a rotary cutting device and then basically cracking it. It's pretty cool. I'm excited to do such a different art project. I hope I like it when I'm finished.