Birthday dress for a friend's daughter

The pattern for the summerdresses, Schnabelina's kapuzenkleidchen is really very versatile, it can be made with knits only, top knits and skirt woven material or woven material only (with buttons / zip somewhere). This time I used it for a winter version: knit for the top, corduroy for the skirt.

The dress is really easy and normally fast to make, but this time I almost wrecked my two sewing machines. First the embroidery (from emblibrary) went wrong and everything was blocked, then the corduroy broke one of the needles of my overlock, then the overlock went completely crazy. I managed to finish the dress and I found the reason for the behaviour of my overlock: A screw is missing! No idea where it could be and how it could get lost without me noticing it, but I guess it should be easy to fix.

So here is the dress. The colours should be orange or red - so it's both, which should be perfect, the theme princesses or elves. I took a princess.

And now another entry to creadienstag!

Birthday dress and X-mas skirt for my big girl

Yeah, I know, my attempts to catch up are really slow... Still in December...

A quite spontaneous and quick skirt for Christmas (made from the top of a skirt of mine, the bottom was attached to my Christmas outfit)

The colour is a bit hard to catch, it's actually aubergine, not brown.

Just after Christmas for my daughter's 4th birthday a dress in fuchsia corduroy.

Since my daughter is sucking in stories, enacting and retelling them to herself (or whoever is listening) and she loves fairies, I decided to make it a 'Lesefee' (Reading Fairy) Dress. Actually I think she came up with this herself!

The script is made with the embroidery machine, the fairy I embroidered free-hand with the sewing machine.

Polkadots

...on sweet daughter's coat. The corduroy material is actually a dark aubergine with pink polkadots. The pattern is Ottobre 4/2010 St Germain.

This project was a bit of a challenge for my nerves, not that it was per se difficult, but sometimes everything goes wrong that can go wrong... It started with the pattern that was not where the instructions claimed (that would have become a jumper). Then I cut out the facing for the collar without seam allowance - no idea, why, I guess I confused it with the fusable interfacing... Next in the line of desasters the embroidery. After the first colour was done, the whole thing was sucked into the machine and I really feared I would have to cut a hole into the piece... In the end I managed to disentangle it but then I had to make the machine restart at exactly the same position...

Since it worked out well and the embroidery unit was up anyway, I decided I could also put our name and 'minikin pin' in the lining. Great idea, if only I had taken measures against some of the material doubling during embroidering. So I had to unstitch several letters, which was no fun at all!

Great ideas usually come too late, like the idea of embellishing the slit pockets. Better before you sew it together, let me tell you!

The last desaster is actually the one that shows most: The buttonholes. Even though I took a piece of the material to make several test button holes, in the end they did not work out so well on the original...
All the rest looks quite nice and my daughter loves it :)

finished: colourful, funky corduroy skirt

My youngest daughter has the chickenpox - not nice, her head is covered with small pimples, luckily her face is not too affected... Well, for sewing a sick child can be quite a drawback (so it was for the last 2-3 days), sometimes, however it can be the opposite. So today, while my husband took our older daughter to her gymnastics and to mass and the youngest was still sleeping (in fact she is still sleeping right now!), I finally managed to finish the corduroy skirt I had started earlier this week.

I'm quite happy with the result and it's so easy and fast to sew, I guess if it also fits, I will make some more!

Pattern: Ottobre 4/2006 Poppiger Rock

corduroy memories

I'm currently working on a skirt for my older daughter made from a beautiful colourful corduroy. Whenever I start working on it, it reminds me of the recycle trousers that I once made and enhanced with details from this material.

The red corduroy I took from some old, beloved trousers of my slimmer days, again nice memories are linked with this material. The colour is just stunning, a deep and nobel red, not the cheap, blatant red that you find so often.

The zipper I cut out completely from the original trousers, since I had never sewn trousers with a zipper before and I didn't want to start on this without any pattern. In the meanwhile I have come across this fantastic tutorial for zippers sewn into trousers, so I could now do it in a more elegant way, but actually it worked out very well the way I did it.

Instead of a button I used kam  snaps - they work well, even a year later now.

I added some embroideries, an owl, a freebie from ginihouse

The  house and the pigs are from emblibrary again

I made these trousers almost exactly one year ago and I'm happy that my daughter can still wear them before they will be passed on to our youngest!