deadlycraft

Before we went away for our trip my daughter asked if I could make her a new dress.  She came to the fabric store in Surrey Hills with me, and chose some wildly inappropriate (light and difficult to wash) fabrics, after I steered her away from the Collette Dinnigan silk. I made the Scirocco Dress from Figgy' s, which she chose because of the flouncy tiers and open twist back. She is pretty happy with it.  We layered the fabrics she chose and included some optional details, like the trim either side of the central pleat. Pretty neat, if I do say so myself... She is right on the upper end of the size range for these patterns, so am glad I got to make this for her this year.  The fit is fairly good, though I wouldn't want it to be much smaller. The twist back is interesting.  We added a contrast fabric to line it with - so there are peaks of pale green at the twist and when she moves.  The construction was fairly straightforward, but if you do want to line with a

When Closet Case Patterns released the Sallie Jumpsuit a while ago I bought it straight away.  I don't have a jumpsuit and have never been sure if they would suit my figure, but this one looked flattering and comfortable.  I also love Sallie Oh's blog and her style , which was an influencing factor! While I love Heather's black, long and wide legged pant version ( here ), I was staring down the barrel of a trip to Greece in mid-summer, so I modified the pattern to make a shorty version. I used a black and white print I have had in the stash for ages (result!  stash busting!), with a contrast red version (same print) for the lining and the tie. To make the shorts from the pants I made two changes - first was to shorten them to the length I wanted (plus hem allowance).  The second was to modify the shape to make them essentially straight leg shorts - a little wider than they would be if they were the top of pants.  I did this by drawing a straight line from the top

This is one I made some time ago as a pattern tester, but never blogged as I wasn't sure when it was released.  It's the Sloan Travel Bag from Sew Sweetness . This is definitely the biggest bag I have ever made!  I used a blue and white kind of weird fabric from the dreaded Spotlight: The reason I say this fabric is weird is that it is kind of like an ikat, in that it has the opposite colours on the reverse side, but it's actually two fabrics glued together.  I have no idea what that's called (aside from kind of weird). As usual with Sara's patterns, this is an easy to follow pattern, even for more complicated construction elements.  There is lots of cutting out which always feels like it takes forever (I just want to start sewing dammit!) but lots of cutting it out is how you end up with lots of pockets, so it's totally worth it. This bag doesn't look so big just sitting there in a picture does it?  Here it is with me for scale: So -

So I haven't posted SINCE MAY.  As my six year old son would say:  "what the...?" I did go away to Greece and the UK for a while but tbh, that was only 3.5 weeks of this time! Anyway - no apologies, straight back into it with some catch up posts. When we got back from our trip, I realised that the dreaded book week was nearly upon us.  I really loathe book week, mostly because I usually don't remember about it until it's upon us, but also because as a parent who can sew I feel a totally ridiculous (and largely self-imposed) pressure to sew something for it! This time I was fairly organised and this is the result - Darcy from the Magic Ballerina books: Sorry it's blurred...I didn't realise until now! I made the dress and we had some fun painting the shoes to be the special red, magic ballerina shoes. We used fabric paint from Spotlight and then I sewed some red elastic for the "ribbons".  I didn't want to use actual ribbons,