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.