A Matching Outfit for Amelia and Mom

I decided to do the Oliver and S Cinema Dress/Hide-and-Seek Dress Sew Along when they announced it last month and make matching outfits for Amelia and myself.  Unfortunately, once the dress was finished, I was not happy with the color and fabric selection of my dress (although it looked great on Amelia's dress.  I then decided to make myself a tunic after seeing the one posted on the Oliver and S website with some left over fabric from another dress I had made for Amelia.

Here are some pictures of the finished tunic:

 

I used white fabric and a blue flowery Liberty fabric for the yoke.  I learned a lot doing this tunic:

1.  Don't use white fabric (except for detailing and piping) unless you have to.  It shows every little mark.

2.  I really need to learn how to iron.  I went on youtube to learn how to iron sleeves and I can't believe it took me this long to learn how to do it (and how easy it is).

3.   Don't take clothes you make to the dry cleaner hoping they do a good job ironing.  It came back worse than when I dropped it off.

4.  Don't use colored thread for basting (especially if it is going to end up inside a seam) because you may not get a little piece out and it will show in the white fabric.  This goes back to number 1 of again not using white fabric unless you have to.

All in all I am really happy with the tunic and can't wait to tackle my next project.  

Here is the matching outfit for Amelia which I had made a couple of months ago.  It is still a bit big on her but should fit her in the coming months.  She can wear it when we go back home to Puerto Rico and on our visit to Mexico since its clearly not a winter outfit.  I may try it with a turtleneck and tights on her).  It is the Oliver and S Badminton Dress.

I am really loving sewing for Amelia and for myself.  I have done a lot of stuff for her the last couple of months and hope to blog about them shortly.  And about all the new stuff  I make for us in the future!

Amelia!

Since my last blog I have had a beautiful baby girl and have begun quilting and sewing for her. While I was pregnant, I made a quilt of 4 by 4 inch squares and enjoyed picking out the fabric for each square.  Here is the finished product:

I really enjoyed doing it and learned a lot.  I finished the binding on this one (I still have to do the binding on my first one).

Also, I decided to learn how to sew so I can make little outfits for my daughter (and eventually maybe a thing or two for me).  My first project was a smocking dress.  I got the pattern for this dress from Purl in New York City.  I have always wanted to learn how to do smocking and this gave me step by step instructions on how to do it.  Here is the dress halfway done with the smocking:

The part I found the most challenging was doing the armholes with bias tape.  I found a good tutorial in the seamstress erin blog and it helped me a lot and made me realize that the armholes binding was very similar to quilt binding.

Here are two pics of the finished dress.

I am going to try to make a matching diaper cover and will show them on the model when it fits her in couple of months.  Next projects are a quilt for my nephew who is joining us in august and the diaper cover!

My First "Finished" Quilt

After lots of sewing, and lots of sewing mistakes and seam ripping (using an instrument to undo your sewing work), I am done with the front part of my first quilt.  The last step was to apply a sash that unites the quilt blocks together.  After joining the blocks I did not align them to the lowest common denominator and looking back this made it very difficult to pin the sections together.  Here is a picture of the quilt almost done:

I am not sure if you can tell in the last one not sewn how all the
blocks edges are a bit different.
This is what I did not align and should have.

After finishing, and then redoing a couple of seams to make sure that fabric that had lines going down (they are in the corners) had those lines straight, I took an iron to the whole quilt and this is the final look:

Top of my first quilt

Since I will be in Palm Springs over the weekend, the teacher is giving me a makeup class on Tuesday to show me how to (i) add the cotton batting (cotton that goes in between the front and the back of the quilt), (ii) add the back of the quilt, (iii) bind it all together and (iv) machine quilt it at the end.  I am a bit nervous about the machine quilting since I dont really like all the flowery stuff that people do with the sewing machine after the quilt is done.  I prefer straight lines.  Straight lines are easier to do so hopefully I can tackle that.  Most people send their quilts in to someone that has a long arm quilt machine for the last step.  Here is a picture of one:

Long Arm Quilt Machine.
I cant even imagine how much
one of these things costs.

I will update after the class but more than anything I am excited to start my new quilt.  I have learned a lot from my first quilt (and class).  I would never have chosen this quilt or design but am glad to have one under my belt.  Now for the next quilt I am doing a pinwheel quilt and am using a combination of the following fabrics for the pinwheels (mixed in with a white fabric for each pinwheel):

Boho Moda Fabric

Happy Go Lucky Moda Fabric

I will probably use the Boho Moda Fabric mostly since it seems to have more primary colors and take the blue from Happy Go Lucky since it might give it a good color contrast.  I will use only fabrics with tiny designs for the pinwheels as the amount of fabric seen in each quarter pinwheel is not very big.

Hope you enjoy my blog.  Next time I may include some of my crochet work that I have been working on and include the throw I crochet for our living room a couple of months ago.

Thanks for visiting and please feel free to leave me comments.

You Have to Start Somewhere

I bought my first sewing machine three months ago and signed up for a beginner sewing class right away with the goal of learning how to make beautiful quilts.  We learned the essential details of how a sewing machine works and how to sew straight lines (or at least attempt to).  Here is the pillow case I made at my beginner sewing class at Fancy Tiger in Denver:

I am hoping to take more classes there in mid May but unfortunately I am out of town for the zipper class which is the next class I want to take.  In the meantime I signed up to take the Beginner Quilting Class at Snappy Quilts in Greenwood Village which started three weeks ago.  And I am totally hooked.  We are doing the Penny Lane pattern which consists of twenty five 10 by 15 inch blocks.  Here is a sample of two blocks which I have already sewn together:

We are supposed to have all twenty five blocks sewn together by Saturday.  In that class we will learn to do the vertical sashing in between the rows of five blocks.  I am almost done but due to some beginner cutting errors because I got too comfortable cutting, I need to go buy three more fat quarters (18 by 21 inch fabric cuts) tomorrow to finish three of the fat quarters.  By the end of class on Saturday, I will have instructions on how to finish the whole front of the quilt.

Now this quilt is not one that I would choose to do and I am not really in love with it but its a good learning experience.  My goal right now is to do a quilt like this one.  And even though I have yet to go and pick out fabric and plan everything out, I could not resist today to try to do one pinwheel from the scrap fabric that I had around from the first quilt.  Here it is:

I loved the trick of lining the middle of each of the four squares to the 45 degree angled line in the instructions to make each of the squares square by trimming around the ruler with the rotary cutter.

I ordered some fabric that I should get this week and I hope to get more done before class on Saturday that I will post in the next entry.