On the other hand

...a few reasons why I don't make many of my daughter's clothes.

Because you never know when you're going to inadvertently kneel in still-wet leprechaun tracks. (And because the paint at Kindergarten is not as washable as the paint at preschool.)



Also, because who thought it was a good idea to give Kindergarteners real pens?



And also, because this. (Yes, that's two pairs of leggings ruined in less than a week.)

I'm not saying my daughter is suuuuuch a tomboy, she does like twirly-girly things, but she is sort of inattentive to general matters of kemptness. (The kid who neither notices nor cares that she has magic marker all over her face? That one's mine.) And she's enough of a tomboy (or whatever; actually I kind of think that term is problematic) that her primary sartorial concern is: Can I stomp in rain puddles effectively while wearing this?

My man commented the other day that the clothes that I make for my girl hardly ever get worn. (Not that she doesn't wear them; it's not that she's rejecting them, it's that I rarely suggest them.) For the past several years I've made her a dress/outfit for her birthday, and one for Christmas. And maybe, in fact, that's all my schedule can support!

But I'd like to make her more (and for them to be worn more). Partly because I have tons of ideas and it's fun to make adorable kids' clothes, and partly because I like the idea of being able to make her exactly the garment that she has dreamed of.

I have this really distinct memory of wanting, when I was in maybe third grade, a prairie dress with "pink and blue rosebuds on a fawn-colored ground," an idea I must have gotten either from the Little House books or the In Grandma's Attic books. No, I never had that dress, but I remember how much I wanted it (and how vividly I imagined it). And I think how cool (and how much easier, in an age of indie pattern companies and Spoonflower) it would be to fulfill that sort of wish for my girl.

So, anyone have any tips on getting over the fear of handmades getting ruined, so that they can actually get used?

Sewing inspiration from South Lake Union

Late last week I had to go to South Lake Union (it's one of Seattle's up-and-coming neighborhoods, and a biotech hub) to do an interview for work. The interview itself was great, but as soon as I left the building a seagull pooped all over my head and shoulders. I cleaned myself up (very poorly, as I later found out), and thought I would go get some lunch at a Tibetan dumpling place a few blocks away that I'd been wanting to try. When I got over there, I found that the dumpling restaurant had closed down. Phooey on you, South Lake Union!


In an attempt to salvage the whole experience, over the weekend I made a sketch of an outfit I saw while wandering around looking for the restaurant. I liked the mix of browns in the outfit (and if I'm remembering correctly the woman wearing it had auburn hair, too). But what really intrigued me was the top: a loose-fitting sweater with a waist tie that emerged through two buttonhole slits in the fabric, and a floaty, ruff-like collar made from white chiffon.

Of course, she may simply have been wearing a sweater layered over a chiffon-collar shirt, but I decided I really liked the idea of a knit top with a woven collar. Perhaps that pattern I recently traced off would be a good candidate, if I can get it to work. I bought a jersey knit sheet at the Goodwill and cut out the pieces for a muslin on Friday night, so now I just need to sew it together. I'm realizing this is the stage at which my attention/motivation often flags. That's right, I love everything about sewing, except the sewing part.


Anyway, my girl got in on the fashion illustration action too, and has requested a purple dress with a print of pink and green roses, and solid purple short sleeves. (About those funny lines emanating from the dress--she colored in so thoroughly that the paper warped from the wetness!) So I guess I'd better get busy.

Look!

My plan is working.



I was so excited about this I couldn't take a decent picture to save my life.
 

(I tried; there were multiple photoshoots. But I wanted to get this up so I'm just going to figure you get my general drift.)

 

I'm sort of gobsmacked that my bulbs came up at all, and that they have the effect I was imagining. 



(Of course, I'm hoping that they'll fill in a bit, or "naturalize," in coming years. But this is a really good start.)



It's crazy, but I almost like my cheesy rock wall.

The pot of gold at the end of my rainbow

is, of course, my little leprechaun-girl.



We got into the spirit for the St. Patrick's Day party at kindergarten with a bright-green cardi and and a skirt in rainbow colors.

"Let's put the green part of the skirt in front, Mom!" Good idea.



How I wish I could say this is a moss-covered forest path! Sadly, no, it is our moss-covered front walk.



Please indulge me while I relate one short anecdote, just to show that she really is as mischievous as a leprechaun.

A friend was over for a playdate the other day, and they were playing a board game. She was farting around, being silly, etc., and her friend was losing patience. "Come on, do you want to play or not?" he said. And she looked at him and said, witheringly, "Why are you acting like my mom?"



St. Patrick's Day proper isn't until Sunday, so there's still time if you want a twirly rainbow skirt of your own.

How to store printouts of tiled PDF patterns

One of the great sewing-related things about the Internet is the advent of tiled PDF patterns. Yay for instant gratification! Yay for no shipping charges!

(And I was going to say Yay for the long tail, but it turns out that means something different than I thought--I always thought it was about the Internet's ability to keep more things available over time, that is, to prevent books, albums, patterns, etc. from going out of print. But that's not quite it. Anyway, Yay for whatever phrase actually does describe that phenomenon!)

But the trouble with tiled PDFs is that once you get them printed out and taped together, they are hard to store. Folding them up to manila-envelope size makes them horribly bulky and unwieldy, for example. (And even though I tend to trace my patterns onto Swedish tracing paper, I often like to keep the copy paper printouts around, in case I want to make another size of a garment.)

But I've just hit upon a tidier, more efficient way to store these patterns. You will need an empty wrapping paper tube, a rubber band, some tape, and a tag and pen for labeling.



Roll the pattern sheet around the wrapping paper tube. (I rolled with the printed side out, as I think that will make it easier to keep the paper flat with pattern weights when I unroll it again.) Secure with a rubber band. Write the name of the pattern on the tag and tape the tag to the inside of the tube.

 

When I have more patterns to store this way, I plan to simply remove the rubber band and wrap the new pattern around the existing one on the tube, then add it to the list of pattern names on the tag.

Pretty simple but I thought it might be a useful tip.

(In case you're curious, the pattern shown in these pictures is this one, and it's free--Yay Internet!)

How do you wrangle your patterns, PDF and otherwise?

Easy Half-Square Triangle Cage Match

My mother-in-law is an avid quilter. Wedding, new baby, big-girl bed: she'll make a beautiful quilt to honor any and all of these transitions. To piece a quilt, she begins by tracing paper templates for each of her pieces onto fabric, over and over, and then cuts them out with scissors one by one.

Not me.

I'm impressed by her purism, to be sure--she has made dozens of quilts and does not own a cutting mat, a rotary cutter, or even one quilting ruler.

But I'm all about the clever shortcuts that enable one to make two or four or eight blocks at a time.

It's not just that I'm impatient--though I am. For me there's also a kind of mathematical pleasure in seeing these tricks work out. In using fabric to play with geometry. So I'm impatient AND nerdy. Yeah, I'd say that pretty much sums it up.

But some shortcuts are better than others. Case in point, half-square triangles. Working on my sister's patchwork star pillow cover gave me an opportunity two compare two quick-and-easy half-square triangle methods head to head. Here are the results of my "cage match."

Over in this corner, we have the four-at-a-time method: cut two squares of fabric, place them right sides together, and sew all the way around the perimeter. Then cut the square in half on the diagonals, press the resulting pieces open, and voila! Half-square triangles.

Four-at-a-time.

There's no denying, this method is super quick and easy.

I used this method about a year ago to make a pillow cover for my mom, and with roughly 4-inch squares the results were pretty good. (In fact, at the time I described the tutorial I'd used as "mind-blowing.")

But the smaller 2-inch squares used in my sister's pillow brought out the weakness of this method: one you press those half-square triangles open, the sides of the squares are all on the bias. And somehow, sewing those short seams to join those tiny blocks makes things get wonky fast.

In addition, this method is not mathematically precise. The tutorial I've linked to above says that the beginning square size is the size of your desired HST divided by about 0.64. What this means is that you are in for a lot of fussy trimming.

Trim, sew, trim again...I felt like I needed to square up my block after sewing every single seam. Argh! And the results were not even that impressive--skewed points, wavy edges.

I am not doing a very good job of building narrative suspense about the outcome of this cage match, am I?

Anyway, over here in this other corner, we have the eight-at-a-time method: cut two squares, and draw two lines from corner to corner on the wrong side of one square. Put the two squares right sides together, and sew a quarter-inch seam on each side of each diagonal line. Cut along the marked diagonal lines, then cut each of the resulting four pieces in half, press open and voila! Half-square triangles.

Eight-at-a-time.

This method is much more precise--both mathematically in calculating the size of the starting squares, and because it works with the grain of the fabric. In fact, the genius here is that you sew the bias seam in the center of a piece of fabric rather than along an edge, which stabilizes the bias seam.

I'd go so far as to say that this factor makes this supposedly "quick and easy" method superior to the uber-traditional method (cutting two triangles and then sewing them together along the bias) where precision is concerned.

(I used a tutorial with the same approach to bias seams to make my flying geese quilt a couple years ago, and I think that lucky choice of a good tutorial was a big part of the success I had there.)

Obviously there's more work up front with this method. But I'd say that means less work later, and if you hate doing a bunch of trimming (ugh--the waste! the tedium!) the effort of drawing a couple of lines instead seems like no biggie.

A downside, though, is that this method commits you to making eight half-square triangles at a time. Which is definitely part of the quick-and-easy factor. But what if you don't need that many HSTs from a given pairing of fabric?

Well, in that case, here you go--a two-at-a-time version.

Here are those two pictures again, just to make absolutely clear that the eight-at-a-time (or two-at-a-time, if you prefer) method is the hands-down winner:

Four-at-a-time: mismatched points, ripply edges.

Eight-at-a-time: precise and shipshape!

You can see the difference in my finished star pillow, too: those four blocks in the center (pieced with the eight-at-a-time method) just look straighter and crisper than the rest of it (pieced with the four-at-a-time method), don't they?



Anyway, I'm glad I've got that figured out, because someday....

Weekending

Nothing kills my blogging mojo like typing the words, "In my next post, I'll..." I should learn not to write that unless I've actually completely written the next post!

So, yeah. HST cage match still to come. In the meantime, here's what we've been up to. (This is two weekends' worth of weekending, so don't imagine that we're SO productive around here.)

Got out the oil pastels thinking to introduce my girl to special! big girl! art supplies. Her interest quickly flagged.

But me, every time I pick up my oil pastels (once every seven years, I wish I were not exaggerating),

I think: why don't I do this more often?



Then she told me about combining watercolor and oil pastels (which apparently she learned about in her art class. Silly me, thinking I still had anything to teach her).

That was fun, too.

By this time she had moved on to yet another medium, and a costume for an elephant.

Then we made pretzels.

Looks messy and unpromising.



But voila! Perfect.

Scratched an itch.

My work cut out for me. (Har.)

Reorganized my art and craft supplies. My girl found the fabric paints. On the one hand: oy. On the other hand: well, that's what they're there for, right?

Spoils from IKEA. I have high hopes for these babies, even though so far my office merely shows evidence of a bunch of deck-chair-rearranging. Still: high hopes.

Thanks Anotheryarn for the nice shout-out to this series of posts.