Signature Sewing Style

 

 Last week, I missed participating in week four of Project Run and Play because I was sick. I had a very bad ear infection. And, when your ear and jaw hurt and your eustachian tube is so congested you are a tad dizzy, sewing is not a good idea!  So, I put off sewing my signature style until this week.

And here it is!  My signature style is floral, ruffly, very feminine, basically a dress that looks like a walking flower garden.  Since I was a little girl, this has always been my favorite clothing to wear.  My mother, bless her heart, preferred for me to buy simple clothing that I would not tire of wearing. But, as soon as I was old enough to buy my own clothing, beautiful floral dresses started entering my wardrobe. And, I still have two suitcases of the ones I first bought, waiting for my girls to get big enough to enjoy. 

Currently, as a stay at home mom, I live in yoga pants or Levis and brightly colored t-shirts, but I do occasionally pop on a nice floral skirt if I want to be fancy.

I had originally planned to sew a very feminine Handmaiden's Cottage Petticoat dress out of the same swiss dot fabric Lynn used in her pattern listing. I found some lovely Shabby Chic white and lavender floral and my vision was something Elizabeth Bennett would have worn. However, I learned the hard way during design your own fabric week, white and lavender are very hard for an amateur to photograph correctly! 

So, I switched to a jewel tone garden dress and used up a bunch of my Jennifer Paganelli fabric stash. The main body of the dress is Natasha in green from Crazy Love.   The yellow floral ruffle is Victoria in mustard, also from Crazy Love. The navy floral at the bottom is Emma in navy from Lucky Girl. The turquoise ruffle is Rosetta in blue from Honey Child.  The other three ruffles are miscellaneous fabrics from my stash.  The lovely ribbon is from Les Bon Ribbons. You will not find lovelier ribbon anywhere else!   The pattern is the amazing Tea Party dress from Handmaiden's Cottage Patterns.

So that, my dear reader friends, is my signature style. My little one LOVES it and it makes me very happy to look at, which means it is a great success.  I may not win any awards for originality and I don't design my own patterns, but I love this dress and so does E and that is what makes a style your signature. That you love it and it brings you joy.

Project run and play week #3 - design your own fabric

 For this week's Project Run and Play, we were tasked with designing our own fabric. I decided to take this project quite literally and design some fabric at Spoonflower! I have always wanted to do this and I have been playing around on Inkscape, drawing delphiniums (my fave flower) so that became my theme! You can read a bit about the design process on my guest post at Sew McCool. I will add a bit more details here, however, just for fun.  I spent hours making these pictures. Literally hours and hours. Probably 12 hours in all, over the course of a week. This was not a simple process.  I hand drew those delphinium flowers that you see on the bodice and colored each petal individually in Inkscape. I painstakingly added each stamen.  I used the controlZ keystroke (undo) a lot!

As you can see, each petal is a slightly different shape.  

One of the reasons I love flowers is for how perfectly unperfect they can be.  They never have completely uniform parts.   After I made these individual flowers and created the fabric for the bodice, I then moved on to the skirt fabric.  

For the skirt fabric, I cut and pasted and resized the flowers to achieve the look of one delphinium stalk.  For the stalks, I also removed the dark blue outline I had put around the bodice fabrics flowers.  So, the skirt flowers have a softer look.  

The leaves were also hand drawn.

 When the fabric arrived, I was pretty sure I was going to make a Tie Dye Diva Perfect Party dress with it.   Because fabric from Spoonflower is pricey, I chose to get the least expensive option, the basic combed cotton.  The fabric resembles sheeting fabric in it's sheerness and wrinkle factor.  So, I knew I would need to line the bodice. However, I was unsure what to do with the skirt!

Until I saw this Barbie. 

I cannot show you a pic because I don't want to get in trouble with Mattel, but please be sure to click on the link to see Mad Men Betty Draper Barbie, my inspiration!

For, you see, this project is also going to be part of a Tie Dye Diva/ Handmade Dress Haven blog hop for how to use the Perfect Party Dress pattern in unique ways.  ( I will tell you more about that tomorrow).  So, voila, the Betty Draper-inspired Perfect Party Dress.

See! It's the same pose!  Isn't she cute, my little Eliza!

 Tomorrow, I will tell you more about the pin tucks, the tulle underskirt, and the double-gathered waistband I made for this dress.  In the meantime, here are some outtakes from our photo shoot.

 One tulle underskirt is so boring! How about adding a few more tutus and some bloomers!

This is her "what does a model look like" pose.

Big sister was the stylist for the shoot. 

Cute girls!

More posing like models.  

Project run and play week #2, season 9: Spring Break Vacation!

What do you know! It is spring break around these parts! So, what did I dream up for the PRAP Sewalong this week:  Glamping across the USA!  My dream vacation is to own or rent a trailer or RV and take several months, at least, to glamp our way around the country.  We live in an amazing country and I dream of driving down the Pacific Coast to the Redwoods, heading inland through the Sierra Nevada Mountains, crossing the desert to the Grand Canyon, and heading east to Taos, Austin, and New Orleans. From NO, we would head to the Carolina Coast to compare beaches. From there, we could spend a few days in DC seeing the Smithsonian and the sights. Then, on to Pennsylvania dutch country to see where my grandparents were born. Into upper New York state we would go to see Niagara Falls and the Adirondack mountains, and then to Montreal.  From Montreal, we would drive around the great lakes and explores some of that area before heading west again towards Washington state, where we live.  The drive from the Great Lakes to Washington will take us at least a week, if not more, so we can see all the fabulous natural and significant sights along the way. 

Glamping, to me, means camping that is a bit more glamorous than living in a tent and using a porta-potty. So, in my dream, we would have a vintage Airstream like the one my grandparents had when I was a kid!I always love that thing! It had a bed and a fold down table and it was so stylin' in it's looks. Even in the 70s, it was fab-U-lous to see. In my vision, we store cool chairs, rugs, flowers, the antenna so we can stream NPR, and everything else we need to camp in style. We would, of course, stop at lovely retro motels every few days so we could shower, swim, wash our clothes, and enjoy the amenities. 

You are thinking CRAZY!  This girl is CRAZY!! Her dream vacation is an RV trip across the USA? Yep! That is my dream trip. I looooove car trips. My parents have been taking me on long car camping trips since I was three months old. I am an excellent passenger and I love seeing the sights.  Plus, I've already been to Europe.

 

photo courtesy of lhttp://oldtrailer.com/vintage-airstream-trailer-pictures.html

So, with out further adieu, here is my week #2, season #9 Spring Break Vacation sew-a-long outfit.

It started with the fabric and the idea of using my friend Amy's Brownie Goose patterns. I knew they would be perfect for summer fun.  See sidebar for link =======>

Google camping fabric and you get Moda Glamping. 

*THUD*

 I fell off my chair. How CUTE IS THIS!! 

So, I added Robert Kaufman Carolina Chambray, the perfect summer fabric. (learned that from Amy of BG) and a few bits of this and that and Voila!

 

The coat is Brownie Goose Pepper with serious modifications.  Pepper is supposed to be a dress but it can be done reversible as a coat.  I not only did it reversible, following Amy's tute, but I shortened it for summer and added a pocket and appliques. I purposely lined up the coat so it would show a bit of the Blondie tunic and I made the sleeve trim match the Blondie body so they would look CA-UTE together.  I googled "camping tent applique" and "vintage trailer applique" to get ideas and winged it (wung it?) from there.  I think they turned out super duper cute!! Since this will be a layering item, I made the size 7 and it turned out great. My E has broad shoulders so 7 fit her great.

Then, I made BG Blondie top and Darby shorts.  Since E is a size 4 wide and 7 long, this took some tinkering. I made the size 7 Blondie but I had to do some serious tailoring to get those armpits not to stick out.  My seam ripper was my BFF for this top.  The yoke also gave me fits, but that is another story. The 7 fit her great, once I got the armpits to work. (remember, she is a 4 wide) The Darby shorts are a size 4 wide but I added length to them at waist and leg. So, they turned out great! 

 Here are some details.  I have done about 2 (??) applique projects before this but I found this awesome-sauce tute from Sew Like my Mom and followed it like no tomorrow and practiced first and I think things look pretty good!   Several years ago, I bought these gigantic red buttons and hey! They look good here!  

 Here are some more photos.

Check it out at

Project Run and Play Sewalong Season 9, week 1 - Put me in the zoo

It's Project Run and Play Season 9, week 1 and the theme is "Put me in the zoo!"  Elizabeth and Liz, over at PRAP, gave us this challenge - Week #1---"Put Me in the Zoo" Challenge.  Take inspiration from your favorite (or your child's favorite animal) and design and construct an outfit.  Remember to make it "inspired by" and not a literal costume.

My favorite animal at the zoo near us, the Woodland Park Zoo in Seattle, is the red panda. I like them for a variety of reasons. First of all, it is always quiet near their habitat so we can linger as long as we like. For some reason, they don't attract the big crowds. I also love that they are always up in the trees. My daughter, Eliza, is a climber and I was a climber as a child so I can relate to these little guys. It's pretty cool up in those trees! There is food, you are safe, there is a good view.  And they are so stinkin' cute!  Panda is Nepalese for "small, cat-like animal," which fits them perfectly. They are as cute, if not cuter, than any cat I have seen. And I love cats!

When I looked at that little face above, on the Animal Facts website, I immediately ( I mean like lightning bolt fast IMMEDIATELY) saw what I was going to make inspired by this animal - a Millie Rose Flutter dress.  And can you see why? The red panda's ears look just like flutter sleeves, the facial fur and muzzle looks like a bib, the cute eyes and nose are like buttons. The skirt tiers mimic the shades in the body and the sash ties are the tail.  PERFECT!  I just knew it. And, I had just seen two fabric lines at my local quilt shop that I knew were the perfect colors: Downton Abbey by Andover and Chateaux Rouge by French General. 

I used Microsoft Word and Preview to plan the project out.

And it turned out just as I had pictured!

 

 

You can check out the linky party over at Project Run and Play and see all the other Zoo outfits!

Project Run and Play - Planning

I am excited to let you all know that I have decided to participate in the sewalong to this season's Project Run and Play contest.  If you are not familiar with PRAP, it is very similar to Project Runway in that there are designers and they compete in challenges and one gets voted off each week.  The difference is this competition is online, on the PRAP blog,  and it is for children's clothing sewists.  There are six sewists/designers starting out in the competition and they will be competiting against each other to sew each weekly theme and not be voted off! Voting is done by "celebrity" sewing judges (past participants) and blog readers. There are prizes for the top three winners. There is also a sewalong part to the competition where anyone (me!) can share their weekly themed creations in the Flickr PRAP pool and on their own blogs. The sewalong participants are eligible for smaller prizes and they get to enjoy the fun. 

So, I have been really busy planning for this competition!  The weekly themes are "Put Me in the Zoo," Spring Break, Design Your Own Fabric and Signature Style week!

Can you picture an animal inspired by this fabric? Hint: it is not a cat.

 Didn't French General do an amazing job with selvages! So pretty!

For week 3, I may or may not be planning a glamping outfit!

For week 3, I have had a blast designing my own fabric at Spoonflower. I used Inkscape and drew it all by hand. Very fun.  I don't have it yet, but will share it with you soon!



  For week 4, I choose shabby chic florals and swiss dot. 

You will have to wait and see what I do with it!

 

I can't wait to see what everyone else makes? Are you playing along?