Mmmm-Hmmmm....

Last Saturday I was happily lolling around the house, revelling in my laziness when my mother called and asked me if I would like to have my niece, Sadie, spend the weekend. I should really learn to stop "mmm-hmmm-ing" everything my mother says, because before I knew it, I had agreed!!

Although I was a touch horrified at the thought of having a "tween" for a full weekend, it did give us a chance to work some more on our VERY BIG PROJECT, which is teaching Sadie how to sew. We actually got two projects finished, and planned out two more.

The first project that we finished was Simplicity 3887. She made the shirt entirely on her own except for the neckline, which I did for her; and I helped her with the handsewing on the waist tie. She insisted on having thimbles on every single finger, which did hobble her somewhat.


Sadie wanted to sew the top with the waist tie, but wanted the short flutter sleeves, not the gathered sleeves. The first issue that we had to address was what size to sew for her? My niece, although 11, is a very tall girl and her measurements are 33 1/2, 27 1/2, 37 1/2, which means that she does not fit at all into the children's patterns, even the size 14's.

But, this does present a bit of a problem, as many of the Jr. and Misses' patterns are way to adult for her. So we had to work a bit to find a pattern that was youthful enough for her, and not revealing.

Also, her measurements place her between 10 and 12 for the bust and between 12 and 14 for the waist and hips. But, we cut a size 8. Because it's Simplicity, and Simplicity is ALWAYS huge. That was tough to explain to a beginner after talking to her about how important it is to measure yourself and go by THOSE sizes, and not the sizes you wear in the store!!

She did very well guiding the fabric under the presser foot, and understood the instructions very well, which were also well-illustrated. Overall, I am surprised at how well everything went together with this shirt, and how well she handles the sewing machine...her seams are perfectly straight, and does a great job overall. Much better than my earliest attempts at sewing!!

This turned out to be a great project for a beginner. All the pattern markings and notches are right on, the sleeves are put in "in the round," but are not really set in because of the way the neckband is attached. The gathers at the neck and waist are simple to do, and other than those gathers, there is no easing anywhere. Also, no buttons or zippers! But for all the simplicity of the construction, she got a wearable shirt that is fashionable, and she will be proud to show off.

I would highly recommended this pattern to anyone who is a beginner themselves or teaching a beginner to sew.

Here she is in her shirt, she was so very proud!



Coming off of her fantastic success of her first shirt, Sadie immediately wanted to move on to her next project. She dug into the "stash" that I had made for her, and determined that she wanted to do PANTS! Can you hear the panic from there? I won't even sew pants for myself! Why do you think I wear so many dresses! I hate pants! I suck at pants!

But, I couldn't let my student think I didn't know what I was doing, could I? So she selected her pattern, Vogue 8523. They are a wide-leg pant with back zipper, and darts at the waist. The first thing was finding out what size to cut. I took her measurements and checked the pattern envelope and it indicated a size 12. A SIZE 12!! She's just a baby! I cut a 16 for me!! So I took her measurements again. And then I did flat pattern measurements. And then I scratched my head. And then I made her go upstairs and get the jeans that she was wearing earlier, so I could measure them. And I was able to determine that she was between a 10 and a 12. So, this pattern runs pretty close to size. I asked her if she wanted them to be tight like jeans, or if she wanted room to grow. She said "room to grow!!" so I cut out the 12 and we started on our alterations.


Since Sadie only has a 25 inch inseam, and is also short in the rise, we had to alter this pattern. Fortunately, Vogue was kind enough to include "shorten or lengthen here" lines both above the crotch and below. We slashed the pattern and created a one-inch overlap above the crotch, shortening the rise by two inches (overlap by one inch, shortens each piece of the pattern by one inch, two inch loss in length overall). We then slashed again on the leg, and overlapped by two inches, shortening by four inches overall. We could have gone three inches, though, since I cut off 2 more inches from the bottom before I hemmed them.

She was absolutely amazed at how pants were actually sewn together, since you sew the crotch with the leg side seams open. She said "It looks like an apron, Aunt Missy!" Once I helped her pin up the side seams, the light came on and she said "Now they are pants!" I also showed her how to put in an invisible zipper, and she was pretty worn out after all that basting.

Here is the finished product:



The back ended up fitting better than the front, we could still take the rise down by a centimeter or two. But for our first attempt and with a drastic shortening of the pattern, I think that they turned out really well. She'll just use them for uniform pants at school, so it's not like they had to be incredibly fashion-forward.

Grandma did say that she wore them to school on Monday and had to tell everyone, including the principal, that she made them.

So, good job, Sadie.

Next time we get together, we are going to tackle knits. Fortunately, I am a lot better at those than I am at pants!!

The Ottoman Empire

When I was in graduate school I was broke. Completely. Utterly. Disastrously. Broke. I think that is one of the reasons that I learned how to do so many things for myself because, really, if I didn't build it, chances were, I wasn't going to get it.

When I was in grad school I also desperately wanted a kilm-covered ottoman that Pottery Barn was selling for a mere $650.00. I'm not sure why I ever started receiving the Pottery Barn catalog, lord knows I couldn't afford to buy anything from it. But I wanted that ottoman. I wanted it so damned bad I could taste it. Every time a new version of the catalog would come I would immediately search through it looking for that ottoman to make sure it hadn't been discontinued. Because you know, then I could buy it.

Well, I never did buy that ottoman. Mainly because I never found myself with $650.00 just lying around. But, I did find that I still needed a coffee table. Come on, I was a grad student, not a complete heathen. So, I decided that I would MAKE an ottoman, and I would make it for a hell of a lot less than $650.00. Not only did I make it, I made it so sturdy that I still have it 10 years later, recovered for the third time to match the current decor.

Here is my version:

Here is what you need:

1 piece of 3/4 inch plywood, 36 inches by 48 inches. They will cut it at the store for you, you don't need a saw
4 ready-made legs, you can buy these in the same part of the store where you get trim and and parts for stair rails
Sandpaper and stain for the legs. Try to get a 1-step stain and finish in one. It doesn't have to be super-perfect, they're not really going to show that much
4 clinch nut plates
20 1 inch Philips screws
2 yards of upholstery fabric
2 yards quilt batting
Upholstery foam, 6-8 inches thick, measuring 36 inches by 48 inches
Staple gun
Electric drill with Philips head driver

Once you have all your materials assembled, the ottoman is super-easy to assemble. Other than staining the legs, it only takes a few minutes to put together.

The first thing you need to do is sand and finish your legs. When you buy your legs, make sure they already have screws inserted in them. I used a foam brush to apply the stain and polyurethane. I also used water-soluble poly. This makes me a heathen, just ask my father. However, I have now been using this ottoman for 10 years and it has lived through 4 moves, so I think it was just fine.


Next, clear a place on the floor and begin to lay out your materials. Lay out your upholstery fabric (upside down) on the floor. Then top that with your batting. On top of that, center your block of foam. Then, on your foam, place your piece of plywood.

Now starts the fun part, stapling the fabric.

Starting on one side, grasp the center of one side of the fabric and batting and pull it up on top the plywood. Staple. Repeat on the opposite side. Then do on the last two sides until you have four staples in place.

Now start stapling the fabric around the ottoman, tucking in the fabric on the ends like you are wrapping a birthday present.


When you are finished stapling the fabric, lay out your clinch nut plates and using the electric drill, start driving in the screws. The screws are short so there is no reason to drill guide holes. They will go right through the layers of fabric, also. If you don't use the clinch nut plates and just insert the legs directly into the plywood, eventually the holes will strip out and the ottoman will not be strong enough for someone to sit on. Once the clinch nut plates are in place, insert the legs.


The fabric is easily removable and can be changed as your decor changes. Mine currently matches my red and gold living room, but it has been a variety of other colors. Not only was it inexpensive to create, it is easy to completely change the look for just the cost of a new 2 yards of fabric.


Since I finished grad school and have a job, I could totally afford $650.00 for an ottoman, but now I don't even want it. So there, Pottery Barn.

A BIG New Project

A few weeks ago I was visiting at my Grandmother's house, and because I was also intermittently watching my baby nephew while my brother went to a funeral, I took a couple of sewing projects that needed cutting out to work on while the little guy napped.

My 11-year-old niece, Sadie, was there also and the whole time that I was cutting the fabric out she was right there with a million questions, collecting and pocketing the fabric scraps. I finally asked her "Sadie, do you want to learn to sew?" and she very nearly passed out. So, I set aside the cutting, bundled up the munchkin, and we went to the fabric store to pick out a project.

At Hancock's, the Simplicity patterns were on sale for $1.99, so I handed her the catalog and we talked about what an appropriate pattern to start with would be. She is hard to fit, because she is a tall girl, and developing, so the little girl's patterns are too small. But the big girl's patterns are too skanky!! She eventually selected Simplicity 3887, with the waist tie and puff sleeves.


She selected for her fabric a white quilting cotton with red balls and black jacks on it; which I thought might be a touch young for an 11-year-old. NOT that I was going to point that out to her. With the battles (often resulting in tears on both sides of the dressing room door) that I have waged with her over low-rider pants, tummy-baring shirts, and high heels I wouldn't have said anything if she picked a fabric with pink fluffy teddy bears farting hearts and glitter.

Over the past few weeks, we have been spending Sunday afternoons together learning about the sewing machine, and working on her shirt. Last weekend I gave her her own sewing machine (which will live at my house until she can get through a whole pattern on her own). I found for a good price on Craig's List a Singer 403 in a table. Since she is used to using my Singer 401, it is an easy transition for her. Also, these old Singers are built like little tanks and there is very little that she can do to the machine that I can't fix on my own.

Here she is putting her machine through it's paces, really just playing with all the cams and getting used to the foot control:



She was so excited that the machine was "hers." I taught her how to oil it, and we cleaned all the lint out of it. It was a great deal, just $65.00...much less than even the most basic of machines than I would have been able to get her new; and any machine for that price would have been complete garbage.

Since she has continued to be excited about sewing, this week I took advantage of another pattern sale at Hancock's and some clearance fabric to make her a small "stash," so she would be able to work on a few projects.

For just a few dollars a yard, I got her fabric for a jacket, pants, and a knit shirt:


With the knit with the flowers, she can make either the scoop-neck shirt from Simplicity 4076
or the tee from New Look 6735. Using the gray suiting, she can make either short jacket from Simplicity 3565 or the vest from Vogue 8523. She can use the black to make the pants from the Vogue pattern, New Look 6836, or McCalls 5710. All those patterns are now in her "stash" thanks to the sale at Hancock's. She also has some fancy buttons, a few zippers, thread, bobbins, pins, scissors, chalk, and all the things that she needs to get started. I put everything into a big rubbermaid tub that will be "her" sewing kit.

Hopefully when I see her tomorrow she will be happy with it, even though she didn't get to pick out the patterns and the fabric. I also hope that the sewing will help with other areas of her life. Unfortunately, these lessons are one of the things that she gets to do when her mother doesn't pick her up for visitation. She is supposed to see the children every other weekend, but since she is a crack-head, living in a motel, with no transportation, currently on parole for cooking meth, and in arrears for thousands of dollars in child support I am perfectly happy to fill that Sunday with a sewing lesson so she doesn't mope around about her mother not showing up again.

I also hope that these lessons will help Sadie with some of the other challenges in her life. Namely, building some self-esteem. With a mother on parole, who may or may not be actively working as a prostitute and/or a hustler, I am generally horrified at the items that she will give Sadie to wear. I do what I can to counteract this, when I take Sadie shopping for her school clothes, but it is hard to combat when her mother buys her things like thongs. Thongs! For an 11-year-old! And I'm not talking about flip-flop shoes. But, working on patterns does open the door to talk about things like raising necklines and lowering hems and what is appropriate and what is classy and why no one wants to look at the crack of your butt.

She also struggles with reading and comprehension, and I hope that working through pattern instructions and illustrations will help her with that. If she is able to work through these issues with something she is interested in, perhaps that will spill over into her schoolwork.

I also hope that this opens the door to her understanding the importance of learning useful skills for the future. Because her parents are not setting any useful example for her at all. While I love my brother (mainly because I have to, I think it may be the law or something), he is a terrible example for his children. He can't hold a job, and is constantly dumping them on relatives, mostly his mother. So Sadie doesn't have a strong adult role-model; one who can show her that a good work-ethic is important, and that skills are important in making and maintaining a home. Hopefully this will provide her with an alternative to what she has seen.

Her Uncle Ricky, who is a machinist, also pointed out to her that patterns are just like blueprints, except you cut them apart. And if you can run a sewing machine, you can run a mill at the shop...which started the gears turning in her head....

I Won't Let it Beat Me!

McCall 5468, I can't let it defeat me!!

So I tried to make this dress, and let's just say it didn't work out. It may have had something to do with the pattern drafting...it may have had something to do with my "frankendressing" it. I suspect that because I only retraced pattern pieces that already existed in the envelope that the problems had to do with the draft to begin with because:

a. It was drafted for someone much shorter-waisted than I am, because if you look at the drawing and the pattern envelope artwork, the dress clearly hits at the waist. Now, part of this has to do with how large chested I am, but even on the back this dress does NOT hit at my natural waist.

b. The dress, like most "Big 4" patterns, is drafted for A and B cups. It doesn't even have darts, just gathers around the waist. This is part of the reason that the front of the dress is short, because it is pulling to fit over my chest.

I believe that the solution to these problems is two-fold. One, to add a a full-bust adjustment; the second is to lengthen the bodice by two inches, which is pretty standard for me when using Big 4 patterns. I hope that the combination of the two will place the waistband at the natural waist and add the blousing effect that is shown on the pattern image.


To the left you can see the original dress with "waistline" marked.

In the side view you can see how the waistline curves down towards the back.

To add the FBA, I utilized the instructions provided by Debbie Cook on her web page for empire waists, since that was what this one basically started it's life as!

I started with my original pattern piece that I drew by morphing the scoop neck front, with the armscyes from view B:


I then drew in the slash marks indicated by Debbie:


I then cut along those marks and spread the pattern as needed, and used it to redraw a new piece:


Here is the new piece with the completed FBA, with the dart aiming in the appropriate direction, toward the bust point:


But remember, the FBA is only half the fix. I also needed to lengthen the bodice on the front and the back:


You may ask, Michelle, why have you finally succumbed and given in to the FBA, when for so long you have skated along without it? Well, I have finally admitted, even though I did not want to, that I do have...a full bust. I went to Nordstrom's, I was drug into a fitting room by a well-meaning saleswoman who, with the help of a tape measure and many, many, many bras was able to convince me that I was not the 38C (or possibly a D) that I had for so long assumed I was but I am in fact a...are you ready for this? A 34DDD. Now, if I am a C-cup, I can possibly convince myself that I can get by without an FBA but there is no amount of self-delusion that can make a DDD anything but a full bust. I am sure that the only thing that has gotten me by so far is the fact that I am cutting such a large size, since my bust measurement is so much larger than my high bust and my rib cage.

Here the top is already looking better. I'm seriously considering turning the inside and outside waist bands into a foldover band and making a shirt or two like this:


And here is the completed project. I did make a couple additional changes besides the FBA and the lengthening of the bodice. The pattern calls for cutting only two waist ties and then hemming. I cut four instead and then doubled and turned them. I also kept my original raised neckline, and the morphed-on sleeves and armscyes from view B, even though I was using the front from view D.


Look, Ma! No pregnancy bump!! And considering that this is my first FBA, I'm actually pleased that the darts are facing in the right direction:


In the end, I am much, much happier with this version than with the original. I got my "70's dress" even though it was more work than I had anticipated.

Dropped Ceiling Remedy

When I first moved into my house, one of the items that I hoped to remedy was a dropped acoustic panel ceiling in the kitchen. You are familiar with these, I'm sure. If you work in a warehouse. Really, these things have no place in residences. They hold dust and grime, and in kitchens you get the bonus of grease. Which of course helps the dust and grime to adhere to the panels! So, one of my first projects was to get rid of this disaster.

I assumed that I would just pull down the dropped ceiling and then either a) repair whatever it was hiding, or b) clear up the mess and hire someone to come put up a dry wall dropped ceiling. Unfortunately, what I found when I lifted the panels made both of these options impossible. The dropped ceiling was concealing the fact that all the wiring and plumbing for the upstairs was in between the original and dropped ceiling.


Pretty grim, right? But I still wanted to get rid of those 2x4 acoustic panels. They just looked so...industrial. So, I searched for options for dropped ceilings. What I found was American Tin Ceiling. American Tin Ceiling is a company that manufactures both reproduction tin ceilings, the kind you nail up to a 2x4 framework, as well as two easier options: a snap-lock nail up ceiling that will attach directly to drywall, as well as a panel made to replace the acoustic tiles in drop-in ceilings. SCORE! So, I called to place my order.

One of the greatest things about this company's product is that they paint all the panels for you. And not only do they paint them, they use a technique called "powder coating." What that means is the panels are pained like your appliances (refrigerator, washer and dryer), the paint is actually baked on to the panels. Which means, you can remove them and wash them if necessary. A great option, especially for those panels that sit above the stove. In fact, the paint finish is so sturdy, the panels can also be used for back splashes (my next project!).

If you decide to undertake a project like this, make sure that you also buy 2 or more cans of spray paint from the company. They sell paint that matches the panels, because you will need to paint the suspended frame to match the panels.

The first step in this project is to remove the old acoustic panels. But don't throw them away! You are going to use them later.

You then need to turn the 2x4 foot grid into a 2x2 foot grid. You can pick up a snap-in spanner from any hardware store that sells dropped ceiling supplies. Be sure you do your homework and compare prices, though. I got my spanners for 32 cents at Lowe's, but Home Despot was asking 1.23. That is four times as much! Snap the spanners into the frame.


When you reach the edges, you will need to cut the spanners if your ceiling does not end evenly. I used tin snips, although my dad pointed out that I had three hacksaws in the basement (at least two of which I pilfered from his tool bench). He also added that sometimes he suspected that I was a little 'tarded. I thought he could have left that last part off.

Once you have your spanners up, you can begin dropping the tin panels in. You will probably notice that once you replace those squishy acoustic panels with tin, that it gets a little echo-y in the room. This is where those old panels come in. Break them in half and tuck them into the ceiling on top of the tin panels. This will help the panels not only lie flat, but also muffle some of the sound.


When you get to the edges, you will have to trim your panels as well. I used just plain tin snips, and ended up with the blister to prove it. American Tin Ceiling sells cutters, and if I ever do a project like this, I will go ahead and spend the money and get it. Mainly because not only did I get a blister, the snips also bend the panels a bit as you cut and you may have to tap them back flat with a rubber mallet. Now if you have a family like mine, your uncle that owns a metal fabricating shop will take one look at your lovely finished ceiling and say "You cut these panels by hand?? I think your dad might be right. You are a little 'tarded. You could have brought them to the shop and I would have cut them on the shear for you! It would have taken 15 seconds! Dummy."


I decided that I also wanted to add crown molding, since the elaborate ceiling seemed to "need something." For this you will need help. Mainly because you need about six hands to hold the lengths of molding while someone nails it. Fortunately, my dad and uncle took pity on their mildly 'tarded relative and offered to help.


One thing that is often difficult if you don't have a lot of expensive equipment is mitering the edges of the molding so it meets cleanly.


Even with the equipment, it's still not that easy. Fortunately, there are ways to get around this. You can add something called "corner blocks." If you have a perfectly square room, all you will need are 4 "inside corner" blocks. I, on the other hand, had both inside and outside corners. You simply nail these up over the corners, then you can cut the end of the molding perfectly flat to meet with the block, rather than trying to miter the corners. Keep in mind that your other uncle who is a contractor and restores old houses will most likely ridicule you and your father for your inability to miter edges, and imply that your 'tardedness may have been passed along the paternal line.


Final step, patch your nail holes and run a bead of paintable caulk along the bottom of the molding to fill the seam between the molding and the wall. Now you are ready to paint! Here is the finished product:

Also, if there is any advice that I can give regarding painting, it is do not be afraid of dark colors in small rooms. In the kitchen, the hot-white of the ceiling helps open up the space, even though the walls are actually much darker than they appear in the photos.


The single color of the walls, trim and baseboards also helps disguise the fact that over the years this kitchen has been plastered, paneled, and g0d-knows-what else to disguise some seriously damaged walls. By going "mono-chromatic" it helps smooth out all those varied surfaces, and class up the joint a bit.

Oh, and that big painting of the wine bottle? 5 bucks at Garden Ridge.

Fixing the Stupid

This is my house:


I bought my house in 2004 intending to renovate it. Unfortunately, a lot of the renovations have been put off in favor of major, if not cosmetic, projects. Since I have moved in, the plumbing stack has been replaced, necessitating the rebuilding of a bathroom wall; we have completely reconstructed the structural support of the front porch; my brother and I installed the privacy fence; new windows were put in the dining room; and a new roof and gutters were put on. As you can see from the photo above, the second floor of my house is essentially a series of dormers, and with all those peaks, that roof was NOT cheap to put on.

Since restoration has been tabled in favor of reconstruction, a lot of what I have done to the interior of the house has been temporary fixes rather than the final restoration that I would like to do. The house was built in 1920, and still has the original butler's pantry, woodwork (although it has been painted), and even some of the original windows. Because of this, I would like to be "true" to the era of the house in the renovation that I do, and not just replace everything with white tile and stainless steel. (The couple that live around the corner from me even restored their house's summer kitchen...a little brick building connected to the back of the house by a breezeway. I love them and hate them for their perfection all at the same time. Their house is fantastic. They even sanded and restored the original swing-out storm windows.)

But, over the last 88 years of this home's life, not every owner has had the same attitude about conservation that I do, and a lot of what I have had to do in the house is what I like to think of as "Fixing the Stupid."

One of the stupidest things in the house is the way that the upstairs bathroom was built. I know that it was added sometime after 1960, because I have met the daughter of the family that owned the house before that time, and there was no upstairs bath. Apparently, the front porch also extended all the way around the corner of the house, and met the back porch, making a huge veranda, and some numbskull decided it would be a FANTASTIC idea to just rip that the hell off. If I ever meet the person that did that, I'm going to hit them with a hammer. The claw side.

But, the level of stupidity involved in deciding to tear 3/4 of a beautiful porch off the house is similar in scale to the stupidity involved in building the upstairs bathroom, so I suspect it was the same person.

Because the upstairs is essentially an over-sized attic (even though I do actually have an attic, that I can crawl into through a tiny hole in my bedroom ceiling), many of the walls are sloped, including one of the bathroom walls. One of the four bathroom walls. But apparently, the person who put the bathroom up there thought that it would be a fantastic idea to put the bathtub under the sloped part of the wall.

This means that if you are anything over 4 feet tall, you constantly thwack your head on the wall reaching for the shampoo.

Oh, and this is what the shower curtain rod looked like when I moved in:


Now, eventually this entire bathroom is going to get torn up and the bathtub is going to be moved to the other end of the room, where the ceiling is not sloped, and you would have to be 9 feet tall to hit your head on it. Instead, the toilet will go under the highest part of the peak, and the sloped part will be enclosed to become a linen closet, so I didn't want to do anything drastic in fixing the bathroom, but that curtain HAD to be fixed, because clearly a man had come up with this set-up. I can almost hear the train of thought "It's ok that the shower curtain only extends half way down the tub, I'll just stand so my body blocks the water from the shower...the floor will only get slightly wet that way..."

Well, an only slightly wet floor was not ok with me, and I needed a shower curtain that fully blocked the spray of the water. After racking my brain trying to figure out how to create a sloped shower rod...sewing a curtain to fit....how would I keep it from sliding....I came up with a simple solution.

Forget trying to alter a shower rod and curtain, just find a way to hang a standard one. I just needed a "stop" for the other end. But how to make that something attractive and not just some chunk of 2x4 screwed into the wall?


Easy enough...I went to the hardware store and in the trim aisle found a variety of bits and pieces of trim for windows, doors, stairs, just about anything your could imagine. I just played around stacking different pieces on top of one another until I came up with something that I liked. This is two pieces of trim, both ready-made and readily available in any big lumber store. The bottom piece is floorboard (attached upside down), and the top piece is a piece of door and window trim.


I painted both white with leftovers from the wall/bathroom repair downstairs. I then used some liquid nails and two screws to attach the larger piece to the wall. I used another spot of liquid nails and four finish nails to attach the square piece to hide the screws. I used a nail-set drive the finish nails below the surface level of the wood, then four dots of spackle and some touch-up paint and....voila:


A shower curtain that extends the full extent of the bathtub. Problem solved. The stupid has been fixed. And this will more than suffice until the bathroom can be fully remodelled and the bathtub relocated.

The Ugly-Suit

So my neice...

Every now and then, when she visits, she likes to "shop the stash." Normally, that is fine with me. I give her the box where I keep the remnants from other projects and she just plays for a while.

But not this time. This time she managed to drag out from the pile of knits the UGLIEST FABRIC IN THE ENTIRE WORLD and announce "This! This, Aunt Missy! I want you to make me something out of this! As my grandmother would say, "That kid...all her taste is in her mouth."

I don't even know where the fabric came from. I think that some company I order fabric from must have put it in a shipment just to get rid of it, knowing full-well that I wouldn't spend the money to send it back ;). The photos truly do not do it justice because not only is it turquoise AND leopard print, it is also COVERED with gold glitter. I had to wash it three times before the glitter stopped coming off on everything it touched. Amazingly, I had a turquoise knit that I had picked up on the bargain table at Hancock's intending to use it for muslins, but it just so happened that it perfectly matched the turquoise in the leopard print monstrosity. It's also shiny, so she adored it on sight.

So, I decided to make for her New Look 6762. She is stuck between girls sizes and misses' sizes, so she is a little tough to fit. Her measurements are 32-28-35. Based on the pattern sizing, it indicates an XS in the shirt and an S in the pants. However, the finished garment measurments indicate that there is zero ease in the shirt, and only about one inch of ease in the pant at the hips. Since the quickest route to "Prosti-Tot" would be to sew a skin-tight, sparkly, leopard-print shirt for my 11-year-old neice, I opted for sewing both items one size larger than indicated. In fact, with the stretch in both the shirt and the pants, I can actually get into them. NOT that I would take any photos of THAT...but hopefully that means that they won't be too revealing on a little girl. I also changed the sleeve length to 3/4 sleeves, since it is the dead of winter, so no reason to make short-sleeve t-shirts.

In the process of constructing the shirts, I found two issues: one, the shoulder darts make pointy little shoulders. Not that Sadie cares. she's 11. And she wears sparkly turquoise leopard print shirts. Pointy shoulders aren't even on her radar! However, if I ever make one for myself, I'll be redrafting the sleeves to remove the dart. The second issue is that the notches on the neckband don't properly correspond to the notches on the neckline of the shirt. So just ignore them. I attached the neckband by quartering it and easing it the way I would any other t-shirt binding. The pants went together with no problems at all.


Overall, I'm very pleased with the way the shirt and pants turned out. I initially bought the pattern as a way to use up knit "leftovers" and the shirt certainly fills that bill nicely! I even made a second version of the shirt with some leftovers from the pants and a shirt I made earlier this year.

After completing the outfit, I folded it up and took the outfit over to my Aunt's house where we were all meeitng for a big family dinner. When I got there, I took Sadie into the bathroom to try the outfit on and the pants were WAAAY too long, which was frustrating, because I had called my mother on the Thursday beforeand asked her to measure Sadie's inseam for me.

On Thursday night my mother calls me and says "Her inseam is 34 inches." I told her "That can't be right, Mom. 34 inches is Jeremy's inseam. That's a MAN's inseam." So my mother gets frustrated and argues with me and says "Well, I measured it twice, and that is her inseam, and she's very tall, so there."

I assumed, OK, she misundersood..she didn't measure her inseam...she measured the outside of her leg, from the waist. So rather than argue with my mother anymore, I just measured 34 inches down the outside of the leg, and hemmed the pants.

Well, needless to say, that was totally wrong, and the pants were too long.

When Sadie was trying them on, I called my mother into the bathroom and said "Mom, Sadie's inseam is NOT 34 inches...point to me where you measured her inseam from!" She points to where Sadie's legs meet, which of course is correct.

I look at my mother and said "You measured from the wrong end of the measuring tape, didn't you?"

She just looks at me and says "You want a glass of wine?"

So, the next day I had a chance to get the pants hemmed...to the proper length this time...and took them over to my grandmother's house, where Sadie and y nephew were visiting.

I was finally able to get a couple photos of Sadie in her outfit. She loved it, and had to, of course, wear it for the rest of the day.