Finding Time to Sew

With a full time job as a teacher, it is sometimes difficult to set aside time to sew.  It is something I really need to do though, as the act of sitting down at my machine and sewing feeds the creative side of me like few things do.  It doesn't even matter what I make so much, either.  I just need to put together the pieces of whatever I happen to be working on and come up with a finished product.  It can be an outfit for one of the grands, a quilt, a top or pants for me, a set of placemats or any number of other things.  The outcome is simply the satisfaction in knowing I've created something unique.

School Dresses Done!

It's hard to believe with the temp here at 103 today, but school is indeed just around the corner.  I've loved the last few weeks spent with the granddaughters visiting here.  One of the agenda items we managed to finish over a week before school started was the traditional Grandma-made school dresses. We've had several ideas over the summer, but when it came time to actually cut and sew, there were a few surprises.

Early in the summer, Miss V picked out a dress pattern that took two different cotton fabrics.  She recently went with me to see my Mom, and we made our yearly stop at Needle Nook Fabrics in Wichita.  She fell in love with a knit that has a white background and two pinks in what I think looks like a cheetah print.  All I had to do when I got home with her was to figure out which of the patterns we already owned to make up.  We chose Kwik Sew 3959.  Since this is the south, short sleeves were in order!  The dress is just a simple A-line and the Medium fit her to a T!  I think this is the first time I haven't had to alter something for her.  To make it a little more schnazy I used double fold elastic around the neck and sleeves, but not just any double fold elastic--it was white and had small hologram circles maybe 1/4" in diameter on the "good" side.  Her eyes lit up like Christmas trees when she saw it on her dress.  Dress #1 done -- check!

Early in the summer the twins told me they wanted watermelon fabric.  I bought some with some cute chevron stripes to match the colors of the melons and made what I thought would be Miss K's dress.  It was too big for her.  It was too big for Miss E as well, so back to the drawing board.  While Misses K & E are starting kindergarten, they are on the petite side, and I mean really petite.  I had to dig through my stash of little girl patterns and found different dresses to do for them as one wears and size 2 and the other a size 3.  Miss K got well loved stash fabric with an off-white background and tiny little flowers of pink, lavendar and blue.  I used matching blue baby rick rack around the neck and about 2" above the hem to trim her dress.  She got really excited about the fact that her dress has a zipper in the back, which Miss E can unzip for her when they need to change.  She loved it.  Miss E got well loved stash fabric with a yellow background and small flowers of pink and red.  Her gathered skirt part of the dress was trimmed down the front in the center and on each side with red midi-braid.  The top is peasant style and she can just slip it over her head.  She loved it.  Dresses #2 & #3 done -- check!

I wonder what I will do for Mr. O when he starts kindergarten in about five years.

Getting Organized

I got really frustrated the other day--I wanted to sew up a new top pattern and couldn't find the knit fabric I wanted to use.  It's not surprising, but quite irritating, to be sure.  Why isn't it surprising--I have way too much fabric and I just didn't know where things were.  This incident made me finally do something about it, though, and that's the good news!

It is important to preface the rest of this blog with the fact that I've been actively sewing for 45 years now.  Geesh, that makes me sound old!  Of course I'm not, though.  Being the fabric-holic I am, that means I have fabric around that I got when I started sewing or with a decade or so after, for sure!  I've already stated that I've made things for the grands with fabric I got for their Mom and Aunt, so you get the picture.  Actually, unless you sew, you probably don't.  I could insulate a house with the amount I have, and there are very few things that I'm not interested in using anymore.  Other things I bought for when I retire, which is getting closer, by the way.

My big accomplishment over the last week has been to actually take out, measure, snip off a piece for the notebook and catalogue ten BIG bins of the stuff.  I've sorted it into categories like spring/summer knits and pant weight fabric.  Each bin has a page or three of fabric swatches with the specific yardage and any other information I thought was pertinent.  Each bin is numbered and the notebook where all the information resides now lets me see where specific pieces are in the stash.  The bad news is that there's lots more to go through--haven't even started on the quilting fabric yet.  Sigh.

Summer Sewing Begins!

I love this time of year.  The weather is getting warmer and the summer stretches ahead.  It's been a rough year with the knee surgery and recovery and getting both pneumonia and strep on opposite ends of the school year.  I am SO READY for summer!

Since we're enjoying a long weekend, it was time to do some cleaning off & out in the sewing room.  I have a bag of goodies ready for donating and a cutting table I can actually use again.  In fact, I got it a bit messy yesterday again when I cut out and sewed up a onesie for my three and a half month old grandson.  I think Mr. O will love the softness of the outfit, and for hot weather it's perfect.  It's probably a little big now, but he'll probably grow out of it before the summer is over.

The pattern is a McCall's and I got the great baby boy print when I was recently in Wichita at the Needle Nook. I love that store!

I've also finished a set of placemats for my Mom (had to bind them) and did a little mending.  Trying to decide what to do next--maybe some more shorts for Miss V.  Next time I see the granddaughters I have to get the measurements for the twins as the ones I have are too old and I really want to do some more sewing for them.  They start kindergarten this year, so I see some really cute dresses in their future!

Sewing Again Celebration!

This knee thing has gone on way longer than I anticipated, but I can now do two things that knee recovery made impossible for a few months--wear blue jeans and sew!  I am super excited.  I love to be comfortable (the jeans) and I love to sew.

Today I cut out a pair of shorts from the pattern I made in Wild Ginger's Child's Play software last week when Miss V was here for Grandma Camp.  I not only cut them out, but finished them in less than 1.5 hours.  Yeah!  I need to cut out a few doll clothes pieces next and get them made up, too, since the finished clothes will be part of the Easter stuff for them this year.

Christmas is over!

And what a special Christmas it was!  We haven't had our whole family here for many, many years, but the girls and their families were all under one roof on Christmas Eve through Christmas morning and it was wonderful  The granddaughters are such fun ages for Santa.  They had such fun opening gifts, singing their carols and the Happy Birthday to Baby Jesus.  My usual going overboard with gifts didn't happen this year as I was mobilely challenged, but it didn't matter much.  They had plenty to open and enjoyed playing with what they got.

I'm almost caught up on the laundry.  I think I have one more bed to wash and fold a bunch of towels.  Miss V (age 7) has stayed behind for a week of Grandma & Grandpa Camp, so we're still moving at a leisurely pace.  We're into hand embroidery (see the picture on the left with her first hand stitching with a sharp needle, and yes, she stuck herself), cooking and using the sewing machine for the first time this week.  Hopefully she will have a few neat things to show Mom and Dad when she goes home next week.

I love this part of the year!

Recovering With No Sewing

Surgery was week before last for the knee.  It went well and now I'm in the "recovery" period where I have gone from a wheel chair or two crutches to one crutch to now using a cane when I am up, but I still am not up more than 4-6 hours a day including meals and all the other everyday stuff you have to do.  I see the surgeon on Wednesday and hopefully will be allowed to drive a bit again.  I haven't seen the grands in over a month and of course that makes me a bit grumpy!

One bright side to being made to keep your leg up, though, is time on the computer to do all kinds of things. I'm all caught up on work paperwork and I've watched webinars, investigated online sites I've never taken time to visit, and read many, many books.  I also have been playing with new software for my Pfaff Creative Sensation machine, and I am having a ball.  And all of this can be done with my computer in my lap or on a breakfast tray with my leg straight out in front of me.

To me, digitizing designs is like painting pictures with thread.  I don't use a lot of outlining in what I do generally, and I want my work to look like it has texture and dimension.  The tools have come a long way since I started over a decade ago, and it still relaxes and challenges me when I work on the complex kinds of pictures I want to create.  I have several software packages and for many years, taught both the Brother PE Design and the Bernina artista products in stores around the state.  It's always fun to begin to play with a new product or a new version to see what's been added and to see how far I can push it.

This product is called TruEmbroidery and was designed to work with a Mac.  It's native to the Mac so runs on Mac OS.  That means it does things in a Mac-like way, which for many things is different than my PC Windows machine. The picture above is the first sew out of a design I want to put on a burp rag for my soon-to-be-born grandson.  The artwork comes from an iron on transfer book I've had for years with Cherished Teddie designs.  I don't sell designs, and intend them only for my personal use.  I want to make that clear so the copyright police don't try to get me.  I manually digitized the whole thing, which means I defined all the different areas and told the software what color, what type of stitch, the angle I wanted it sewn out at and a myriad of other things as I worked on the design.

The TruEmbroidery software has many types of stitches you can use to create designs, and the patchwork quilt was my way to explore some of the pattern fill stitches.  I think there are 276 of them included, so there is a lot to explore.  I have always loved bears, so the making sure the stitching was just the way I wanted it was important.

I've tweaked a bit of it now that it has been sewn once, and when I get somewhere to pick up the right flannel burp rags, I'll get it sewn out for our soon-to-be-here family member.  For now, though, it is back to the software to see what else I can design!