My Clara Dress

This is where it all began. I'm sure many of you can relate. Find something cute on Pinterest and then just have to make it! I am not a garment sewer, I am not a garments sewer, ... This is what I told myself, but the obsession had begun.

I finally talked myself into making this dress a few weeks ago. If I can make dresses for the little one, I can do it for myself, right? Pattern and fabric were purchased, now for the hard part, actually sewing it. Bonus: this pattern comes with a step by step video tutorial to show how to put the whole thing together.

Pattern cutting is easy and when there are straight lines involved, I cheat and use my rotary cutter. The bodice is the first piece to be constructed. No real problems here.

Then it comes to this point, the dreaded sleeves. Play dreaded tune here. I swear sleeves are the bane of my sewing existence. Maybe I am just too particular, maybe I am not supposed to do curved seams, or maybe I just need practice? The sleeves took me a few hours just to get the first one on. Once I get the sleeves on the rest of the dress just kind of comes together.

This dress has elastic in the waistband. The only other part I had any trouble with was getting the elastic stretched enough while sewing it in. The first attempt was not stretchy enough. Enter Jack, the seam ripper. This particlar seam was a doosy because I used a tricot stitch, a zig zag with three stiches per zig. One hour later, I had the elastic removed, stretched more, and resewn. Wow, much better.

 

 

The Clara Dress is a challenging pattern made easier with the video tutorial to accompany it. Other than the sleeves, I had no troubles. The outcome is a super cute dress. I am already shopping for more fabric so I can make another. The second is always easier than the first.

 

 

Heather

 

 

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Fireworks

It must be the 6 year old's time for handmade goodies. She had never helped me pick out the pattern or fabrics for one of her own quilts. I finally decided that it was time for this to happen. After tour through my extensive pattern stash, we chose the Fireworks pattern by Thimble Blossoms.

That decided, it was time to make a trip to my favorite quilt store, The Quilt Patch. Amazingly, this was a quick trip. She immediately fell in love with the Daydreams line by Kate Spain. In and out in less than 30 minutes, I think this is a record for me!

I was so excited to start this project that it was allowed to jump to the front of the project line. This line gets longer everyday. There are several goodies waiting that will appear on here before too long. So off to the cutting table for me. This is not my favorite part of the process, but handling beautiful fabrics makes me so happy. Aren't they such pretty piles of fabrics?

The blocks for this quilt took quite a bit of time to put together because there are many pieces in each. They are not hard to put together acurately, just time consuming. The only beef I had with this project is all of the waste. I don't know about you, but I hate wasting good fabric.

All of the flying geese pieces are made with a rectangle and two squares. This means that there are four triangle pieces of waste. My solution to this was to draw two sewing lines on each square making the flying geese units and two half square triangle units at the same time. I will share some of my projects using these left overs soon.

This is only part of the pile of extra half square triangles I had left over!

My daughter laid this quilt out with very little input from me. Have you ever tried to do this with a 6 year old? It can get a little sticky, but she is my last and I have learned a little bit about working with little people on this type of project. She did a great job and it turned out fabulous!

Here it is getting quilted with swirls as requested.

 

All in all, this is a great project that looks amazing.

Happy Sewing

Heather

 

 

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