Flower Girl Dress

It's the time of year when brides are planning for spring weddings.  A friend asked me to modify a flower girl dress for her wedding.  The nice part is that there was an available dress that fits the flower girl and is pleasing to the bride, the flower girl, and her mother.  The original version of the dress was decorated with pink flowers.  The bride's color is purple, in all shades.  The dress required a redo to change from pink to purple.

The dress consists of two pieces, a sleeveless dress and a tulle overskirt.

The first modification to the dress was to remove the green ribbon at the hem and replace it with purple.  The second modification was to change the flowers on the bodice.

The original pink rosebuds came off easily. I was considering several options for replacement, including embroidered organza.  However, a friend I took to the fabric store found this great trim.  The flowers are about the right size and color.  After cutting them apart, I hand sewed them to the bodice.

The overskirt has two layers of tulle, with silk flower petals between the layers.  I opened the side seam and replace the pink flower petals with purple ones.

The original petals were held in place with hot glue on the back side.  I used the same method and placed the petals at the exact same locations as the originals, to hide the spots of old glue.

Finally, the ribbon tie for the overskirt was replaced by a purple ribbon. Now the lightly used flower girl dress is ready to go and has a new mission.

Come back next week for more fun with a sewing machine.

Tree Skirt

Need a quick, last-minute addition to your Christmas decor?  This tree skirt could be just the thing.

It's made of plain polyester cotton fabric in festive red.  There's no pattern, just a circle on the outside and a circle on the inside.  I folded the fabric in quarters before cutting it.  The slit in the back makes it much easier to get around the base of the tree.

I dressed up the tree skirt with some quick stitching Christmas designs from Embroidery Library.

Some of the colors has to be modified to work on red, so the poinsettias are white instead of red.

 The outer edge is finished with a built-in decorative stitch in the shape of flowers.

Have a wonderful holiday and come back next week for more fun with a sewing machine.

Fun with Fleece Part 2

It's definitely winter now, even here in the Tennessee Valley.  It's a great time for a fun, warm, and cozy coat.

I liked McCalls's 6800.   This pattern calls for wool coating material or something similar.  Fabric like that is not only quite expensive, it's a bit excessive for the fairly mild winters of northern Alabama.  I elected instead to use fleece.  Since fleece has mild tendency to stretch, I used a completely non-stretchy lining fabric, polyester satin, to help the coat maintain it's shape.

The particular version of the coat I made has an asymmetric hemline, a lot longer in the back than in the front.  That let's the lining show when you wear the coat, so I choose a purple lining, just for a fun flash of color as I walk.  I also found that the shape of the hem made getting in and out of cars while wearing the coat a whole lot easier.

 Winter can be a rather dreary season, so why not brighten up winter clothing with some cheerful embroidery?  I chose some Hungarian style florals from Embroidery Library.    The purple from the lining even appears in the design, although it's not prominent.

The skirt of the coat is quite full and the hem quite long, giving me space for lots or repetitions of the design.  Usually, I try to embroider pieces before sewing them together, but that wasn't possible for this design.  The entire body of the coat has to be assembled before the embroidery along the hem was done so that the designs could be evenly spaced.  Many of them are embroidered over a seam.

Smaller elements from the design along the hem brighten the lapel and the bottoms of the sleeves.

Come back next week for a Christmas themed project!

Quick Embroidery Project

Ham radio operators often wear clothing or tags with their call signs.  This helps them recognize other people that they've talked to on the radio, but might never have seen in person.  A friend recently got her first ham radio license and I thought I would surprise her with a gift of a shirt with her own call sign on it.

I bought a simple solid color T-shirt.  I was careful to choose one that wasn't quite as thin as some of the ones being sold -- the embroidery needs some kind of decent substrate and I'm sure the recipient would like to wear the shirt more than once or twice.

Step 1 is to design the embroidery.  Since only simple letters are required, it would have been possible to just use my embroidery machine to do the design.  However, I decided to use my Floriani Total Control software instead.  using the software gives me a much larger choice of fonts.  I chose simple block letters for the call sign, since that's the usual and customary choice.  I opted for a more script look for her name.

Step 2 is to do the embroidery.  I attended the International Quilt Show in Houston last month.  There were thousands of vendors and some of them had products related to embroidery.

This tape claims to be just the thing when you are trying to keep parts of a garment away from the hoop and the needle, which can be a real challenge when dealing with T-shirts.

The tape proved to be noticeably stickier than painter's tape and to be capable of holding the shirt very well.  It left no residue on the fabric.  Overall, this new to me product met my expectations.

There you have it: a simple project, a review of a new product, and a happy ending.

Come back next week for a new fun project that involves a sewing machine!

Fun With Fleece Part 1

Polyester fleece is a fairy new and readily available material.  It's got a lot of nice properties.  It absolutely won't ravel, it's warm, light, wears well, has a little stretch, and embroiders well.  The usual use for fleece has been blankets and active wear style jackets.  I decided to explore different possible uses for fleece and came up with a few.  This series will explore some of the more successful experiments.

One great pattern for fleece is McCall's 5252.   This pattern has been around a while, possibly because it's such a wardrobe staple.  The pattern was originally designed for fleece and comes in variants with a hood or as a vest.

For the purple edition of the jacket, I embellished it with Art Deco Swan designs from Embroidery Library.

The swans on the front were difficult to do: the straight lines of the frames were very hard to keep straight so near the edge of the fabric.  The feather designs on the sleeves have a tendency to curl; the designs are a bit too dense for the fabric.  Still, it's a striking and useful jacket.

A different version of the jacket was originally intended as a cycling jacket.  That's the reason for choosing the very bright chartreuse color.  This version has elastic in the bottom and ends of sleeves to keep the wind out. 

I decorated this jacket with metallic embroidery, including one design on the upper back.  The metallic thread has held up well over several years.   However, fleece isn't particularly wind proof, so this jacket has some major downsides for cycling.

The third edition of this jacket was the most successful.  The light blue color is for the sky, and it's decorated with hummingbirds.

Each of the 8 hummingbirds is unique and I chose them all to residents or visitors to southern Arizona.  The hummingbird designs are dense, but they are also so small that they don't cause problems with the fabric.  This jacket is very popular among my bird loving friends.

Raincoat Part 2

Last week, I discussed modifying the design of a raincoat to produce a garment capable of really keeping the water out.  Now it's time to cut and sew the coat in a way that maintains the waterproof integrity of the fabric.  The fabric is coated on the backside with a polyurethane layer that's waterproof.  The problem is that any holes, for pins or for seams make permanent potential leaks.

To start, the fabric has to be cut without pinning the pattern to the fabric.  That means that the fabric can't be laid out on my usual cutting table, since it's not long enough to lay out all 4 yards of fabric simultaneously.   Fortunately,  I have a piece of floor that's big enough.  The pieces have to be help down to the fabric some way.  Fabric weights can be used for this purpose.

I don't have any fabric weights, but anything small and heavy works.  I found items meeting this description in my silverware drawer.

Some completely new pieces had to be designed -- the storm flaps.  These are not hard to create -- they are just rectangles an inch longer than the zipper(finished dimension).  The right one is 3" wide (finished dimension) and the left one is 2 3/4" (finished dimension).  The pockets are also not like the pattern consisting of a patch pocket and a flap, all of which are simple rectangles.  The sizes can be cut to suit your taste or available fabric.

With all the pieces cut, they need to be sewn together.  It's recommended to use polyester thread for this purpose, not cotton thread.  General purpose sewing thread usually is 100% polyester.  I bought seam stick tape to stick the seams together before sewing.

The idea is that you stick the two pieces of fabric together (no holes), sew the seam, and then the tape dissolves the first time you wash the garment.  The tape did a great job of dissolving on washing, but it didn't do a very good job of sticking the fabric together.  It might work better on other fabrics, but on the nylon, it didn't stick well enough to deal with curves seams.

I did have success with pinning the fabric together inside the seam allowance, where the holes don't matter.  The piece shown here is a sleeve tab.

For any seams where the holes penetrate to the interior of the garment, the seam must be flat felled, then sealed with seam sealing tape.

First the seam is sewn in the normal manner.  Then, all but 1/4 of the seam allowance is trimmed off of one side.  Note that the right side of the fabric is purple while the wrong side is white.

The longer seam allowance is folded over the narrower one and the whole thing sewn again.

Finally, seam sealing tape is put over the seam and sealed to the garment with an iron.  When cold, the tape isn't even sticky.  It has a matte side and a shiny side.  The matte side goes down on the fabric.  Use the silk/wool setting and don't even try to slide the iron on the fabric/tape.

Areas that don't get seams, but where stitching penetrates the garment also have to be sealed, like this small rectangle of Velcro sewn on the opposite side.

To create the pocket, sew a strip of Velcro near the top, then sew two pocket pieces together to create a patch pocket with right sides on both sides.  The patch is then attached to the front of the garment.  Pins can be used close to the edge to attach it before sewing, since the whole thing will get sealed later.  The pocket flap is similar, but it sewn to the front on one side, not three.

The sleeve flaps can be put together in a similar way.  Note that top stitching is necessary to crease the fabric properly.  I had to stitch the bottoms of the sleeves after this photo was taken.

The storm flaps are also attached to the fronts before sewing them to the rest of the pieces.  Attach a full length strip of Velcro to each, stick them together, then center over the zipper (which has yet to be sewn in at this point).

Most of the rest of the garment was assembled according to the directions from the pattern.  The zipper is added when the lining is attached, sandwiched between the outer fabric and the lining.  Those seams don't seam to be sealed, since they are protected by the storm flaps.

This raincoat proved to be quite waterproof.  The day after I finished it, I wore it in a serious rainstorm and I stayed dry.  Careful attention to details and the right materials worked.

Come back next week for more fun with a sewing machine as I start to explore all the fin you can have with fleece.

Raincoat Part 1

I live in Alabama and it does rain here.  I don't have a proper raincoat that fits and it seemed like the time to remedy that situation.  Besides, I found Vogue 1564 at the fabric store and it seemed like a very interesting pattern.

There's a very limited selection of fabrics available in my town, so I've been looking for online sources for fabrics.  An search for raincoat fabric turned up Fashion Fabrics Club out of St. Louis, Missouri.  I ordered a nylon fabric with a waterproof coating on the back.  The fabric as reasonably priced, arrived in a good amount of time, and was as described on the website.  I plan to use then for future purchases.

The coat does have a lining, fortunately, I had some suitable lining material left over from another project sitting in my stash.

Once I got the pattern home and started really looking at it, I discovered that it really wasn't going to create a really waterproof garment, just one that was most water resistant.  That might work fine if I was looking for something to keep off a list misting rain between the car and the grocery store, but I really did want something that could handle a heavy rain and keep me dry.  The fabric I bought is waterproof, so the challenge is to keep the seems and front opening from leaking.  The original pattern calls for latch closures -- 8 of them.  I did find some at my local store, but they were about $5 each.  Ouch!  Not only are they expensive, they don't keep out the rain very well.  Buttons aren't any better in terms of keeping water out.  Also, the welt pockets where the water can just run right down into the coat?  They have to go. 

I got this garment out of the closet as inspiration and a source of ideas.  This is the top for sailor's foul weather gear, more or less designed to keep you from getting more than just damp while in a car wash or a storm at sea.  One of the features of this coat is storm flaps protecting a zipper to close the front.  There's one flap on each side of the zipper and they close together with Velcro, completely covering the zipper.  The second feature is that the seams are taped on the backside with special seam sealing tape.  The original pattern called for flat felled seams, which does help with water intrusion, but a flat felled seam sealed with tape is waterproof.  After surveying the available options online I chose this heat-sealed tape.  It's designed for garments, not tents or packs.  The pockets on the foul weather gear are completely external.  You can get things in and out of them without compromising the waterproof integrity of the coat.  Finally, the sleeves have adjustable tabs with Velcro so they can be tightened around your arms and leak a lot less.  Fortunately, the original sleeves already have decorative tabs, which can be adjusted to a new purpose.

Now that the basic design is set and all the materials have been decided on an obtained, it's time to move on to making the garment while maintaining the waterproof integrity of  the fabric.  We'll take that up next week.

Spoiler alert: The day after I finished this coat, it rained about 2" and  I had errands to run around town.  That's a serious test of a raincoat and this one passed!

Custom Dive Flag

I received a request from a friend to make a dive flag for the Wake Island Scuba Club.  This isn't something they could send out locally because Wake Island is a tiny sandbar in the middle of the Pacific Ocean and a long way from anywhere.  The idea was to use embroidery and/or applique to create the design.

Here is the original design.  The essential elements are apparently the red and white "divers down" flag, the outline of the island and the shark.  This design does have details that would be hard to capture with applique or embroidery, so some modification for the new medium is required.  There's also the question of exactly what items would be best executed with embroidery vs. applique.

I started with a JPG map of Wake Island.

I was able to bring this image into my Floriani Total Control embroidery design software as a background and then digitize the outline of the island.  (Actually, there are 3 islands here.)  I was able to do the same with the shark, picking out the eyes, mouth and gills as essential details to retain.

Here's the final design.  There's some big areas to be covered in both black and grey, so I decided to do these as applique and leave the shark details and lettering as embroidery.  The island and shark have to be worked as one piece, so the maximum size of the design is set by what will fit in my Bernina Jumbo Hoop.  The shark is superimposed on the island, so the island must be appliqued first, with the shark on top.  To maximize the size of the design, the lettering is done separately from the applique, after rehooping the fabric.

The first task was to create the flag itself.   The flag and all the applique are made from heavy weight flag nylon.  Some of this was obtained locally and some of it was sourced from Sailrite, an internet retailer of anything and everything related to both boats and fabric.  Sailrite also had the special flag tape and nice grommets for finishing the flag.

There's no standard dimension for dive flags.  After some research, I found that common aspect ratios for flags include 3:2 and 5:3.   I chose to use 5:3 although on further consideration 3:2 might have been better.  With the size of the applique design set by the jumbo hoop, I elected for a 30"x18" finished size for the flag.

I used paper to create patterns for the flag.  I wanted the white stripe to be nice and visible, so it's 6" wide.  The cutting mat marked in 1" squares sure made the job of creating the pattern a lot easier.

Here's the finished flag.  The seams for the white stripe are all flat-felled seams and the three edges are hemmed.  The left edge is bound with flag tape and set with brass washer grommets.  This finish isn't strictly necessary since this is going to be a wall decoration rather than flown as a flag, but it's a good finishing touch.

With the flag complete, it's time to move on to the ornamentation.

The applique design is printed at 100% scale and then cut out.  The paper pieces are applied to the black nylon with temporary fabric adhesive.  Then the pieces are cut from the fabric.

The machine is busy appliqueing the outline of the island.  It's a very complex shape, much more suited to machine applique than hand guided applique.  Once the island is down, the shark is appliqued on top, and then the eyes, mouth and gills of the shark are embroidered.

I used just a simple tear away stabilizer for this project.  The fabric is dimensionally stable, so a sticky stabilizer is not required.  There needs to be no stabilizer remaining on the back of the flag, so the simple design a tear-away met that requirement nicely.  The top and bottom lettering was done with two different hoopings of the fabric.

This project has already been sent off to Wake Island.  My projects are certainly getting world wide exposure!

Come back next Saturday for an all new project that's also related to water.