* E is wearing one of her T-shirt pants. Pattern here.

(pants Ottobre 1/2011, sun hat Little Things to Sew, vest improvised, bloomers IPB)

Hurray for a week full of sewing; It's been great to see all of these fabulous creations in the flickr pool and to know myself in the company of more than 500 seamstresses!

Hope you all had a lovely Easter weekend. We're currently in Germany presenting little E to her impatient extended family and recovering from a very wonderful weekend of celebrations (and food). Before leaving Edinburgh I made a batch of these little bunny hats for E and her cousins and friends. The project is super simple; I just drew a rabbit hat straight onto the fabric (the width is her head circumference divided by 2, and from there on I just eye-balled the size for the older kids), cut out two pieces and sewed them together. The seam-allowance is taken care of by the stretch of the fabric and the twin-needle did a good job as always. Next year I might be a bit more ambitious in my Easter efforts, there is so, so much awesome inspiration whirling around the web right now!

Normally it's the mother who deservedly get all the gifts when a little one arrives. Not that, being a mother myself, I mind this gift and attention bias, but in this case a made a baby gift especially for the dad to be. Since he is sartorially very versed and can tell a liberty fabric from a mile away (probably the only person in the country who would ever exclaim 'wicked' upon seeing my fabric scraps bin) sewing something for him and baby was really quite obvious.

The patterns for the baby outfit come from IPB and the bow-tie pattern is from Martha Stewart. Having made a bow-tie which was slightly on the small-neck side before, I was glad to come across this nice tutorial on how to make the strap adjustable.

Sewing the pocket square I simply cut and hemmed a 13'' piece of the ohso soft Liberty Pepper fabric. All pieces individually did not take longer to sew than 30 minutes which is the maximum time my little co-pilot is still happy to play under the desk.

First another penguin. The book gives one yard as fabric requirement, buying one meter of the black denim I had easily enough to make two backpacks. The denim was quite sturdy I made only parts of the straps out of it as they would have been a bit too bulky for my strap adjusters. I’m not entirely sure where her colour preferences are right now, but thought it would be a safe bet to insert a pink zipper (topstitched with pink yarn) and to choose a flowery lining. Since I sewed all while entertaining a little baby and being distracted I actually made the very same error I made with the first penguin: attaching the lining to the backpack with the zipper closed. Bad idea...

Number two is another dress from this book, dress B. I followed the pattern more or less, but made it bubbly by gathering the skirt hem together with the lining and adding piping on the pockets (I’ll post a little tutorial soonish). And, having a big headed girl myself, I made some extra room by cutting into the back of the yoke.

And finally with the very last sad rest of the flower fabric (used for the first time here and bought on a trip to New York in this fabric elysium) I sewed a little bucket hat. 

Sewing for a four year old is definitely fun!

Materials: felt or fabric of your choice, little box (a match box would be cute), paint (optional), old headphones (broken ones or the crackling ones you get on airplanes), cotton balls, safety pin, tape

1) pin felt/fabric squares together, right sides facing each other 

2) draw a ♥ on one of the squares

3) sew along the drawn line, leave a generous inch open 

4) turn inside out (a chopstick might come in handy) 

5) stuff with cotton balls one strand at a time 

6) sew the little opening together 

7) poke a hole in the ♥ (a knitting needle works well) 

8) cut one headphone as short or as long as you want 

9) thread the headphone through the hole of the ♥ 

11) paint the box, let it dry 

12) cover the little inside pad of the box with fabric & fix it with tape 

13) put the ♥ in the box 

14) give it to somebody you love

I was sewing on and off on this little Penguin backpack in almost black denim for the past week and just finished it in time for the third birthday of a little friend of ours. It's coming into being turned into a progress report of Little E; while I was tracing the pattern from the book, talking to her about all the different parts, she fell asleep on her blanket next to me, napping for the very first time on the floor. While I was piping the feet she rolled from her belly to her back. While I was busy with the zipper she grabbed tightly around her red wooden play-ring. And when I showed her the final product she firmly reached for Penguin's beak and put it in her mouth. 

The pattern comes from Little Things to Sew and was great to follow. Putting the bird together in so many little steps and with only one eye and a quarter of one's mind focused on the task at hand, really shows when instructions are clearly written; and these are. I had no difficulties sewing the backpack and more importantly finding my way back into the project after every interruption. 

The only mini alteration I made to the original is the added piping on the feet, the beak (cut from an old skirt of mine) and the belly (the latter then also being 'stitched in the ditch'). The original pattern pieces have practical pivoting dots, so it's really easy to add the piping; just cut little notches where the piping will meet the dots to curve the cord along the stitches.

(viewers of the photo will certainly ask themselves whether this darling baby is a girl or a boy).

Yet, as it turns out simple patterns make for great starting points. To make the overall more interesting I shifted the invisible zipper to the right, and added little pockets with piped edges. And this time I managed to align the stripes, more or less.

Inspired by the flaps on trench coats, I added windbreaker wings (is there a correct term?) on one side and the back, also with piping. To be honest, the blue right side is not an intentional design element. I stupidly cut this piece on the wrong side and did not have enough fabric left to cut a new one. But with time it has grown on me and I like how it plays up the piping which uses the same fabric. Luckily, the material of both the stripy and the dark blue fabric is very similar.

 And for the sheer cuteness of it and since I've sewn so many ears in the past year, I also added some ears to the hood. I was to lazy to completely redesign the hood pattern, so I merely sewed them onto the sides (it's a bit like sewing darts). So far Little E seems to like her new trench suit and be it only because it makes her even more oblivious to the wind than she already is in her sling. The easy in and out with the zipper might help as well. Given the pace of her growing I'm however afraid this outfit will be much too small by the time she can spot the yellow elephant. But then again, by that time we might actually see some sunshine. Even in Scotland..

Ever since I laid my hands on Tomoko Nakamichi's Pattern Magic 2, I wanted to make a dress for Little E with ball-shaped accordion (jabara) sleeves. There are lots of other pattern ideas in the book, equally unsuitable for children's clothes, that looked like a great challenge to try out, but the puffy sleeves seemed especially marvellous. And then I saw this stunning jabara version on rastacuero and knew I had to give it a try as well. Ignoring any sense of practicality and spending the middle of a couple of nights tweaking and twitching little piecs of fabric, I was quite conscious of the fact that, - let's face it - this dress will presumably not be worn a lot. It's a size 1, and by this time E will probably have entered the district of crawling-almost-walking and a bubble dress with enormously sleeves might not make the cut when faced with serious competition by (also Mama-made) more practical dungarees and T-shirt pants. But I wanted to try this design and so I did. The instructions given in Pattern Magic are all rather on the minimalistic side, Nakamichi gives you just enough to get your head racing; seamstress tangram! But I had a lot of fun figuring out a pattern and since I was in learning  mode I thought it might be nice to try my hands on a bubble dress while I was at it.

I didn't have a bubble dress pattern for this particular size but there was one size 100-130 cm in the originally Japanese 'Joilies tenues pour fillettes coquettes', a beautiful book despite it's unfortunate French title. Looking at the instructions I figured out the basics of a bubble dress (as I understand it in a nutshell; make it wide and add a shorter and thinner lining). These are really easy to sew and if you have a blouse or simple smock pattern you can make it bubbly in no time.

At the moment I'm following with much admiration and awe the super talented creations over at PR&P and since they have a sew-along competition each week I'm tempted to enter my jabara dress. However, part of me feel like this would be cheating as the challenge this week was to choose a decade and design a children's outfit based on the fashion trends during that era. Basically, this dress is an utter mess when seen through the lens of fashion history. The accordion sleeve might place it in the Mary Stuart life guard category, the Peter Pan collar reads 1920ies, the bubble dress came along in the 50ies, and then the colour, very much 2011. If this was not just me playing around with a bit of cheap fabric I could see Tim Gunn peeking over my shoulders being concerned about my 'editing', or more to the point the lack thereof.