Guess what I've been doing

Can you guys guess what I have spent the past two evenings doing?? I'll give you a hint...

No I have not spent the last two nights staring at a t-shirt hanging on my door handle (on a truly horrible and old fashioned crocheted clothes hanger too) I have actually spent the last two evenings making this lovely kimono top. This was actually the hardest sewing project I have undertaken to date, for several reasons, first of all it wasn't just squares of fabric of different sizes sewn together, and secondly that bright green strip you see running across the top of the shirt is actually bias tape, and something I have avoided at all costs before now, with good reasons too. I always knew the first time I sewed with bias would be horrible, and I wasn't disappointed. The biggest problem I came across with the bias is that I actually bought tape that was too small for what I needed, meaning that I had to do a lot of fiddly messing around with the tape to make sure it fit on the top properly and didn't look ridiculous either. That took me three hours to do. Three very long and frustrating hours. So the next time I do this top, I will be making sure I use thicker bias tape which hopefully will make everything go a lot smoother.

Yes you heard me correctly then, this is only the first of hopefully many kimono tops I will be making. This was really just a practise run to make sure I could actually follow the pattern and have it resemble a piece of clothing at the end. Because of this the fabric I used here was a very cheap and thin cotton (that I found for $5 at our local Spotlight store, can anyone else say bargain??) which as my little sister told me made this top look like it is meant to be hospital scrubs and not a gorgeous Japanese inspired piece of clothing. But I'm not too worried because the next time I attempt this it will be in a softer, possibly more stretchy fabric. And because I made plenty of mistakes this time around, I have learned what not to do next time so I should get it done a lot quicker too. And the first thing I will be doing next time is making sure I don't have the iron on too hot when I press the fabric because the very first thing I did was melt one of my cut out pieces of material while trying to iron out the creases made while the material was stored in its shopping bag. Luckily I hadn't even pinned the pieces together yet so I didn't have any unpicking to do as I had to scrap that piece and cut out a new one. Luckily I bought way too much material for this project, so I still had more than enough left over to cut another piece out. But it does mean I now don't have enough to make a matching pair of pants to go with this top. 

Hopefully I can return tomorrow with photos of it being worn by Miss K. Sadly by the time I had made the final finishing touches on it tonight, she had been in bed for 3 hours and I couldn't bring myself to wake her up just to make her model her new top. But I know she will be super excited to be allowed to wear it tomorrow, as I let her try it on a few times today while I checked hem lengths and made sure it fit her properly, and every time I made her take it off again she cracked the poops at me big time. Fingers crossed I can get her to sit still long enough to get some decent pictures for you guys too, but I have a feeling I'll have to wait until she's strutted her stuff on the catwalk (our lounge room floor) several times first. 

Well until then I am super duper tired now and I need to go to bed. I will hopefully be back tomorrow with new photos, but until then stay awesome my lovely readers and for all of my American readers I hope you all had a wonderful Thanksgiving full of good food and happy families.

Adventures in baby sitting, baking and sewing

I almost don't want to keep putting posts up here at the moment. You see last night's post was post number 69 for me, and given that that is my favourite number (for obvious reasons) I would love to leave it right there, just so that I can come back and giggle every time I see it. I never said that I was mature, in fact most people who know me would say that I'm the exact opposite.

So it has been an absolute circus at our house today, we had children in every corner of the house since mum and I seem to be the only people in the world who don't like doing things on weekends, we were the only ones who could be pinned down long enough to watch every child in our family. My big sister is very lucky enough to have a wonderful husband who has taken her to Melbourne for the weekend to celebrate her birthday, and my little brother and his wife were spending this weekend moving house, so to make sure their little girl was out of the way she came here and had a play date with all of her cousins. So a child in every corner may have been an over exaggeration, especially given there were only three extra kids in the house, but there were times when it sounded like we had a whole soccer team squashed into our lounge room.

Given that we had such a packed house today, I thought it would be a perfect time to prove that I could be domestic if I wanted to, by sewing a quilt cover for Miss K's new Dr Seuss bedroom, baking banana muffins for dessert, and making sure that Miss K's current bedroom was spotless when she went to bed. (This was no small task since she and her little cousin had spent a good half hour earlier in the day pulling every toy, book and piece of clothing out of it's home and throwing them on the ground.)

Out of all of these tasks, the one that proved the hardest was sewing a quilt cover. You wouldn't think that sewing a piece of fabric into a rectangle shape and attaching some snap buttons on would be so hard, but it actually ended up taking me about 3 hours to do all up. Of course I had lots of little helpers who were very curious as to what I was doing, and took great pleasure in walking and sitting all over the fabric while I was trying to measure and pin it. But the real problem was the fact that I have so very little sewing experience in my life, and I struggle to sew in a straight line. Add in tricky things like snap buttons and hems and I come completely undone. But I managed to get it finished in the end, and it is even big enough to put the quilt in, which is no small accomplishment for me given that I never have enough attention span to follow the old measure twice cut once rule.

So with all the really big jobs completed for Miss K's new bedroom, it won't be long before I will be able to put the whole thing together and watch her enjoy her new space. Of course I'll have photos up here very soon of the progress I've made so far. And given that I've managed to get everything done so far for about $50 I'm even considering going on eBay to buy some Dr Seuss books for the picture border, as I still can't find a second hand store around here that sells his books.

Well I'm off to bed now, as tomorrow is looking to be another busy day and I'll need my beauty hibernation if I'm going to be able to chase around a group of kids for another day. Stay awesome my wonderful readers and I'll be back again soon.