Why can't we have Protour day?

So, tomorrow is "footy colours day" at P's kindergarten. I confess I did see the notice about this a week ago but as I have absolutely no interest whatsoever in Australian Rules Football I ignored it.

Had it been declared to be Protour colours day I could have got excited about that. I could have happily stencilled a big pink T on s shirt and sent him off as a Jan Ulrich from Team Telekom in the good ol' days

Or even more fun for a crafty mum, how I would have loved to get some paint out and knock out a Mapei kit à la Cadel circa 2002

Or, without making anything, P might still be able to squeeze into his own yellow jersey, seen here in celebratory pose after Cadel Evans' win in the 2011 Tour de France:

Eeek. he looks so little!

Yet today when I picked P up from kindy he said he HAD to wear footy colours tomorrow and declared which was his team. I suspect that choosing your team (rather than inheriting one from your folks) could actually be a really monumental moment in a kids life, but as I don't think he has the faintest idea of what it's all about, I'm remaining dismissive of the whole thing.

As a supportive, loving mum I did, however, volunteer to make him a footy colour T-shirt for kindy. He got all whiney on me and wanted to buy "a real" one from a shop. That lead to a really long discourse from me about branded merchandise from which P was eventually rescued by A spotting a garbage truck and shouting about it very loudly. I hadn't even got to the bit about offshore manufacturing and child labour.

The deal breaker in the end was that if we made our own P could do the painting of the logo. My kids seem to respond to paint like others respond to candy or some grown-ups to crack cocaine.

We did an internet search for the logo of his chosen team. All I know of this team is that their training oval is nearby and is a great place to fly a kite on a windy day.  We hit up Spotlight for the Setacolour fabric paint and then I cut out a freezer paper stencil.

 



 I don't know if my anti-merchandising tirade was at all effective, but the power of paint certainly won him over and P declared this to be much better than buying a shirt after all. Yay!

We let the paint dry in the afternoon and in my evening sewing time I've pulled out the overlocker (man I love that machine) and whipped up yet another Oliver + S Field Trip raglan T-shirt.

I'm wishing I put the logo higher up

I've just snuck into his room and popped it on the foot of the bed. I hope he'll be pleased and, if I can be forgiven for trying to influence my children, I hope he'll quickly lose interest in AFL football.

Prototype Pants : Pattern Mash

I've been planning a pair of pants to go with the "too scary" tiger jumper. I don't have a pattern for the jumper, or ribbing for the cuffs (thanks everyone for your tips), nor did I have a pattern for the pants. But none of those technicalities can keep this good idea down.

 

The trousers that I want to make are a copy of a pair of pants that I picked up on sale for P back when I was buying clothes for the kids. The front has articulated knees and a faux fly and the back has a full leg with a yoke at the waist area. There are some wonderful stitched details on the pockets and some little fancy designer tags that I'm going to pilfer for my knock-off copy-pants. They fit wonderfully well for a long time but he is finally outgrowing them.

 

Without a pattern that had all the required elements I decided to mash a couple of patterns and see what came of it.

 

I had the front of the pants covered with my Field Trip pattern and then the back looked like it wanted to be a pair of After School pants.

 

Can you make the front of one pair of trousers and stick them on the back of another? I had no idea, but I was prepared to have a go. Or, in more fancy sewing talk, to make a wearable muslin (ooooh,... I find it quietly hilarious when I start sounding like I know what I'm doing)

 

I figured as long as the front and back pieces ended up the same length along the side seams it would work. And it kinda did. There's probably a bit more 'room' at the rear than there needs to be and there may have been a little bit of tugging to get some bits to line up and be sewn but in all they look like one pair of pants.

 

The fabric that I used is a light weight drill with a self stripe that may have a bit more bias stretch than the fabric intended for my ultimate pants. I may make some minor adjustments to my pattern pieces or I'll just cut it with my fingers crossed for luck.

The pants were a pretty quick sew as I left off the cargo pockets and did minimal top stitching in keeping with them being a practice run. Then I spent ages in paint.net making myself a little Pattern Mash button!
 

 

The other element of my designer daks that I wanted to copy was a thin section in the inner leg. The After School pants has an outer leg stripe which had to be taken out of the pattern piece that I had for the back pants. I held my fingers against the pattern pieces and guessed that the back pattern piece would need to be a few fingers wider to make up for the lack of the side leg section. I think I effectively cut the size 5 pants piece but took the side seam out to the size 8 line.

then I sliced the front pants pattern piece to give myself this inner leg section:

In order to do this I had to fold the articulated knee pattern piece in the middle to make it the same width as the adjusted upper and lower leg pieces. By folding it I was able to preserve the knee darts of the original pattern piece.

To make that mash more palatable here's the summary:
1. Field Trip front pants - narrowed by a inner leg strip
2. After School rear view - widened to side seam
3. Field Trip rear pockets rather than the smaller After School ones
 

So there's my Pattern Mash pants. I'll tweak them a bit for the final version I think...

Here is the button that I made with some HTML code for anyone else to have it too.

<a href="http://bartacksandsingletrack.blogspot.com" target="_blank"><img alt="Pattern Mash ; Bartacks and Singletrack" src="http://i93.photobucket.com/albums/l58/sette_budini/patternmash.jpg" /></a>

I'm not kidding myself that anyone else will want to grab my button I just wanted to learn how to write the code to do it! Thanks to Teacher Blogging Basics for the clear instructions.

 

And here's P hanging out in his new pants.

 

 

 

 Today's photo shoot was brought to you by Puffin and Big Bird.

 

This one has a little car....

One of the books that I'm reading over and over again at the moment is Dr Seuss' One Fish Two Fish Red Fish Blue Fish.

I'm pretty certain that I could recite it in my sleep. I've been hanging out for a rainy day at work when someone might bring in a particularly wet dog and I can turn to the nurse and say "Say, look at this wet pet. You never yet met a pet, I bet, as wet as they let this wet pet get"

Anyway, back to sewing.... When A gets dressed (amidst the screaming) she's been asking for her "car top". I hadn't had a clue what she meant as she doesn't have a car top. There's a top with vespa scooters on it, but no that wasn't it. Finally,  we happened upon a photo of her from summer wearing a T-shirt with a car appliqued on it. So that was the car top.

OK, handy mummy to the rescue. I can do a long sleeve version of that. She chose the fabric, she chose the car picture. So now, this one has a little car.....

But do you think she'll wear it?....

Sorry folks, more pegged up clothes photos coming up:

Pattern: Oliver + S Field Trip. Size 2 straight up. Cotton/lycra

And a close up of my car. I used fusible web to attach the car bits then handstitched the edges with a blanket stitch

 

 I've been a bit bothered by my necklines on knit sewing as the seam allowances don't stay down and the neck tends to roll in, so this time I tried sewing it down using the double needle. Have to say I love the look of it.

Next I need to try a little bit of bias binding to cover the seam allowances and give the insides a really clean finish. Then I think I'll feel like the master of T-shirt sewing.

There are so many wonderful illustrations in the Dr Seuss books I can see myself doing lots of T-shirts with images on them. I should try Transfer Artist Paper and save myself some sewing time, especially if it's to be consigned to the won't wear it drawer. Sigh.

From there to here and here to there, funny things are everywhere......

I've got another one of those ideas...

... that just has to be made.

It all started with an awful bit of purple fleece fabric that was gifted to me, along with some off white fleece knit that I used in my Roller Skate Flip.

As an aside I salvaged the too small sleeves from that dress and cut the rest of the Sailboat top to match. I let A choose the buttons in the hope that she'd like the top if she'd chosen the buttons. I made the top, she screamed at it, I got cross enough that I just shoved her into it and we went out for the day, with her plucking at it and carrying on as if it were made of burning hot prickles for the first 10 mins. After that she wore it happily and it's now a favourite and in high rotation. Maybe I should dress her more forcefully more often. :)

I decided the purple fleece would be perfect for a jumper (you might say sweater, sweatshirt or something else altogether) for A with a particular print on the front. She declared the print "too scary" and said she'd rather an aeroplane.

The whole point of the exercise was this particular design, so the purple aeroplane jumper will be for another day. Not to be thwarted, I ran the idea past P who said it would be cool, but not in that icky purple colour. It would have to be green. OK, but that meant buying more fabric. oh well, I can manage that...

So now I just needed to create the perfect jumper to paint my design on.

The style I want is a round neck, loose-ish fit with ribbed cuffs and waistband, a bit like this lovely example circa 1980-something.

I can't bring myself to pay for a pattern on Ebay that I feel I should be able to find in garage sale. Or better, I'll happily pay for one that could be adapted and is from a modern, independent designer and I can download it.

The two patterns that I already have that are somewhat similar are the Flashback Skinny T and the Oliver + S Field Trip. Both of them are really far too slim fitting for what I want but since I had the Field trip pattern out after making A's pants I thought I'd try upsizing that.

I cut a size 7 width to make up for the fleece having almost no stretch, and kept the length at size 5. My plan had been to cut the neck band almost twice as wide as the pattern suggests to try and get more of a ribbed cuff neck look. Then I was gong to add ribbing at the cuffs and the bottom hem. However my perfectly colour matched leftover ribbing from Spotlight is awful. It stretches, a lot, but has no real memory and just looks awful as trim.

I should have taken a photo of the neckband as it was when I first attached it as it was truly disastrous. My salvage was to fold it in half (back to the original pattern's width) and then stitch it down using the double needle. that actually worked quite well. But it wasn't looking at all like the sweater I wanted, so I just finished the sleeves and hem with the double needle.

So here's another fleece top I hadn't planned to make, that I'm not going to paint a design on, but which P wanted to wear immediately and has hardly taken off since. Score I guess.

Now, if anyone can recommend a good pattern that is either what I'm looking for or could be adapted somewhat (eg a hoodie without the hood) and please, do you know where the good quality, thicker ribbing for cuffs can be found?....

Can I buy a model please?

I've been sewing what I think is just about THE cutest outfit.....

....And I do have a pretty cute daughter. But do you think she'd team up with the outfit for the sake of some blogging pictures? Definitely NOT!!!! I'm starting to wonder if I should raffle off one garment a month on the blog as I can't stop making things and she can't stop saying no to me (sigh).

 First up was a wee pair of Size 2 Field Trip Cargo pants. I've made two pairs of these for P and when Oliver + S had a recent half price pattern sale of course I just had to have the smaller size for A.

The fabric is a designer stretch, cut corduroy that I found on sale at The Fabric Store. I bought a metre and a half each of this pale aqua and some pale pink.

It seemed a bit stiff at first and I almost got a great photo of the pants, during construction, standing up entirely by themselves waiting for the waistband to be ironed. As I sewed it softened a bit with handling and I think they'll be superb after a wash or two.

This time around I did all the topstitching with just a single thread of co-ordinating cotton so I saved myself all that re-threading.

The feel as you run your hand along them is divine, and while my daughter agrees they're lovely to pat she still wasn't putting them on for a photo.

So, here are some more pegged-up pants pictures...

 

And then, to go with my Cargo pants I had just enough Miller Miller flannel leftover from these pyjamas to make a little Music Class blouse. Bless the fabric stash fairy as those aqua dots perfectly match the pants.

This is definitely a multi-night garment for me. There's one evening's work just in those little pintucks and assembling the front and back panels. Another in the collar and preparing the sleeve plackets, and then 1 or 2 more, depending on how late I'm prepared to go, in setting the sleeves in, sewing the cuffs and then seven little buttonholes and buttons.

One thing I do save a bit of time with, is in not hand sewing the collar down before edgestitching it. I use 1/4" Heat'n'Bond quilters fusible web and just iron it together. Then there's no pins to sew over and everything remains nicely where it should be so the inner collar looks (almost) as neat as the outer.

The same trick works well on cuffs. I made this shirt once before in a flannel and I just love it. This time I remembered to sew the buttons on vertically. How professional of me that I know that kind of stuff now. :)

So there's my lovely outfit for A. hopefully I'll get some modelled photos another day.....

Here's teddy, putting in a cameo as Iron Man and photo-bombing the blog shoot (at P's insistence)!

It's the little things....

... that no-one will notice that can be oh, so satisfying.

Placket love with the Music Class blouse

Guest posting at Oliver + S (Eeek!)

Hello little blog audience, today's a BIG day as I've been invited to guest post on the Oliver + S blog.

As you can imagine, I'm more than a bit excited,... totally stoked in fact!* Come and have a look:

I'm blathering on about haute couture for kids, topstitching, trompe l'oeil and pattern mashing.

Thanks Liesl. Having a little spot on your blog is a real treat for me!


* Sure sign of extreme excited-ness or slight drunken-ness (or both) is when I go a bit 'Aussie'