I finally got a chance to work on a cute little outfit for Iago! I used McCall's 6022 and made the Shorts (G) and Top (D). The fabric came from JoAnn's. I'm not great at choosing fabrics/colors/etc and being able to imagine how they'll look together. I looked a long time before I found these and put them together. I was keeping my eyes open for ladybugs, and then I had to figure out what to put with them. After pulling these two bolts I went over and asked the lady who sold me my sewing machine if these fabrics would work together for the pattern I had picked out. She gave me a thumbs up, so I went with it. I think they did end up working great together! It reminds me of a summer picnic!
For this pattern I also had to use fusible interface for the first time. I picked that and the red rick-rack up from Hobby Lobby. I've been making excellent use of coupons, sales, and special discounts, and I've got a small stash of remnants acquired along the way too, from which I'll make some more shorts and tops for Iago and SB3.
Initially I thought I would make Top C from this pattern, but I decided the fabric I had would work better with Top D. It would have also been cute in a sleeveless top, but I'm not a huge fan of sleeveless tops in general. So, I made D, with the little sleeves. I didn't have quite enough fabric after squaring to make top A with the sleeves that have elastic around them. Anyway, that's how I ended up settling on D, and I think it was a good decision.
The first thing I made was the little set of shorts. Somehow or other, I managed to royally screw up and sew the waist together instead of the legs together (I don't know HOW I managed to do that!), but after ripping those wrong seams out, I got it all put together properly so they were actually wearable shorts! On the kids' jammies, I have to stop and think every time they were them to figure out which is the front and the back of the jammies bottoms. For these shorts, I decided to make a tag for the back! I cut a strip from a little scrap of the shorts fabric. Then I used the computerized font on my Opal 650 sewing machine to program in the size (that could be handy info down the road) along with my initials. I also considered using the year. But for this tag, I just went with size and initials. Programming the script was easy enough. Then I had to do a little playing around to get the size characters that I wanted sewn. Finally, the embroidered script is actually kind of scratchy feeling, so I put the tag in the waistband such that you have to flip the tag over to see the size/info so it won't rub on the skin when Iago's wearing the shorts. No one likes an itchy tag! I didn't get a tag put into the shirt when I was sewing it, but I will probably go back and add a tag to it (because this particular Top doesn't really lend itself to an obvious front and back either). Anyway, I was quite pleased with my simple creativity of adding an embroidered tag to the shorts! (Yes, I'm easily amused! haha!)
Doing the gathering for the bodice and the sleeves was also not intimidating this time around. I was happy that I remembered what to do from having done the gathering on Iago's jammies, but I did check just to make sure I had the spacing right.
The hardest part of doing the top was probably assembling the yoke, which wasn't really hard, but I did sort of fumble my way through it. I still don't think I did one step of it the way the instructions said (understitching a hem or something), but what I did do ended up working just fine anyway, so I'm happy with it.
The other hardest part of assembling the top was getting those darn sleeves in correctly. I knew what I was doing, I remembered how to do it, but for some reason it was just giving me no end of troubles this time. I did ultimately manage to get the sleeves each properly set in and looking okay, despite the multiple times I sewed bits of sleeves into seams and had to rip them back out. Ultimately I got everything fixed and done right (or right enough!).
The last thing to mention would be choosing the rick-rack. I found white, lime green (matched the green fabric beautifully!), and red. Again, I'm not great with seeing how things will look together, but my sweetie is, and he said go with the red rick-rack. When you held them up to the fabric, the white didn't really look right, the green didn't really show up enough, but the red was great. So, I used red rick-rack and red thread. When I did try to tack the turned under hem down with the lime green thread (which matched the green fabric beautifully!), it looked really weird when the green cut through a ladybug. But the red thread just looked like it was supposed to be there. So, that was the finishing touch. I got it finished in time to get us to church just a bit later than usual (we're always late for church!), and she was so stinkin' cute!
(ps--ignore all the dates on the photos--they were taken today, not in 2011!)
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