Lacy skater

Pattern: Lady Skater dress by Kitschy Coo

Fabric: 3 m rayon or cotton/rayon knit

Haberdasheries: none!

So, when I didn’t have any trouble using my overlocker for my KittySkater shirt, I thought: this is going so well, let’s carry on with the next Lady Skater dress straight away! And as soon as I put this fabric under the machine, it started skipping stitches like mad, and driving me crazy as before. WHY?!

I wanted to take this dress on holiday with me so I was determined to finish it quickly, but don’t ask what it looked like on the inside… Or well, I’ll show you:

The only reason I got away with this and could actually wear the dress, is that the lace design hides the gaps in the seams. I have now fixed those by zigzagging the missing bits on my regular sewing machine.

I’ve got a lace print shirt I really like, so I was looking for a lace print fabric for a Lady Skater dress and found this:

I was happy to find something so close to what I was looking for (that doesn’t often happen!) but I didn’t like the border, as I think it looks too different from the rest of the print. So I bought three metres and hoped that would be enough to avoid using the border. When I came home I realised that unless I wanted a black lace band running down my front and back, I’d actually have to cut the fabric perpendicular to its grain! I had no idea whether that would be acceptable (the dress might start stretching too much lengthwise after repeated wearing), but as it had similar amounts of stretch in both directions, and I didn’t like the vertical print option, I just went for it.

Pattern matching this was a bit of a nightmare as all the lace patterns had different widths and their centres didn’t line up, but I think I did a nice job!

Halloween cushion covers

Pattern: None

Fabric: printed cotton, black cotton, cream cotton

Haberdasheries: 7 buttons, 4 black tassels

First: making cushion covers, making buttonholes on my own sewing machine, actually using the buttonhole foot!

Last month I visited my friend Nienke in the USA, and ended up buying lots of Halloween decoration materials. I also decided that I’d make some envelope cushion covers when I got home.

I bought the fabric for the first cushion cover specifically for that purpose, so I had enough for what I wanted to make, and decided to take it seriously and do French seams for a neat inside:

 

The second and third covers’ fabrics were gifts from Nienke/leftovers from her projects. I think they were fat quarters (weird name…) and this meant I had a bit too little fabric, so I couldn’t do French seams, and just made narrow regular seams and zigzagged them. I decided to add black tassels to the black cats one.

 

  

  

I like the black cats one so much I might actually leave it for the rest of the year as well!