I have finished some projects

I truly have got a couple of sewing projects finished by the start of school holidays.   The first is a tunic shirt for me.

This is a LONG story but I will cut it short a bit.  I like tunic type shirts and I was looking for the perfect pattern.  I finally found it, took my measurements and made it to suit but found it was so HUGE on me it wasn't funny.

Used myself as a pincushion and pinned, tucked and squished it up all over until it felt much better.

Then I made my own pattern from that now very horrid looking shirt.

I'm much happier with the result, even if it's a boring, basic colour but I was using scrap material to make a prototype as you probably could call it.  I'm happy with most of it although it did need some kind of embellishment.

 

This time it was with some of the stitches on my new sewing machine.

I did the same stitch around the hem, around the neck and around the bottom of the sleeves.  It makes the whole tunic look so much better and I'm happier wearing it now.  It is only a muck about the house shirt and NOT one I would be going out in.  I will work on the pattern though.

The other thing I have finished is this dress for Little Miss R.  It's a 'Miss Molly' design from The Handmade Dress, and I'm pretty happy with this one too. 

Little Miss R loves it which is what counts but I know I could make it so much better.

I nearly didn't attach the ribbon between the skirt and the yoke because I thought it looked fine as it was and attaching the ribbon was a little bit too scarey for my skills.

I'm so glad that I made myself give it a go because it was fairly easy to do (even though I did make a number of mistakes), and it really does finish the dress off.

The biggest problem with my new hobby of sewing is that I have to iron.  Now my iron has been in hibernation for YEARS and if anything needed ironing, then it didn't even come close to being in this house.  So much so that my four year old son had no idea what an iron was until a couple of months ago as he'd never seen one before.

Now I really have to iron as anyone that sews knows that an iron is essential to being able to sew properly. 

The sacrifices we make for our hobbies.

Over the school holidays I've also been making some things with the kidlettes.  We've had a lot of fun with beads making bracelets and necklaces.

The other crafty goodness I've started doing over the school holidays is embroidery.  It's not as easy to get any sewing done with two very active kids around the place so I've been doing more crochet and having a go at embroidery.  They can easily be done in the lounge or outside wherever the kidlettes are as they like me to be near them.

I started off doing this small daisy circle which I thought was cute and would get me used to some basic stitches.  I think it's worked out quite well and I'm very happy with it.  My French knots were a problem though and really DIDN'T work out until I went to this site and saw a fabulous video tutorial and I've got it all worked out now. Yay!

Will I never cease to astound, astonish and just plain stupefy my family and friends by my current habits.

xx Susan.