Kid's Clothes Challenge Day One

It's Monday! First day of the challenge. I promised myself that if I spent the morning writing my lecture on the Neandertals I could sew after lunch. After a bit of hemming and hawing I settled on the Bo Peep skirt as first cab off the rank. It's the one that I've found most challenging in terms of fabric selection (mixing patterns and colours!) and the one I've been most worried about:

After an hour I was at this point with the ruffles sewn on one side panel and the other side ready to assemble:

I couldn't bring myself to stop though as it was both challenging and fun to wrangle those ruffles into a straight line and get them sewn down, and when I'd done that it seemed it was just a short step to get the sides sewn to the front and back panels and then before I knew it I'd hemmed it and got the elastic in :P Probably...2.5 hours all up? Hazel really likes it and so do I - photos to come tomorrow!

Happy Mother's Day Mum!

Ruth and Jacqui, originally uploaded by Hazelnutgirl.

And yes there is a small child (me) in that backpack, not just a jacket and scarf!  This is my favourite photo of me and Mum, out on a frozen lake somewhere.

Pattern snobbery

I've realised that I'm a pattern snob, that all brands are not the same. I started thinking about it today when I was relieved that I found a Burda kid's pattern that I liked better than a Kwik Sew one. And it wasn't just that the Burda one was more what I wanted, I was relieved I didn't have to buy a pattern from a company that spells quick the way they do. Plus Burda is European - inherently more stylish right? So I started to think about my list of pattern coolness and it goes something like this:

1. Pattern you draft yourself from scratch (you are massively cool and clever)
2. Pattern you draft using instructions (still very cool and clever)
3. Pattern from a foreign book or magazine, like a Japanese one (ooo foreign)
4. Pattern from indie pattern company like Oliver + S (sticking it to the man, go indie!)
5. Pattern from a magazine like Ottobre or Burda Style that you have to trace out and put on seam allowances. (foreign! stylish! different! takes a bit of effort! Might even have to order magazine from Finland!)
6. Pattern from a craft book - Anna Maria Horner, Amy Butler, Betz White etc. (support fellow bloggers and style mavens!)
7. Pattern from an online tutorial or magazine (go the little guy and freebies!)
8. Pattern from Burda (Slightly edgy sometimes, great for kid's patterns, but the fabrics can be a bit weird in pattern illustrations)
9. Pattern from Vogue (they take nice photos and hey, Vogue is a stylish magazine right?)
10. Pattern from McCall's or Simplicity (not very exciting but reliable - like a comfy pair of old trakkies)
11. Pattern from Kwik Sew (same as above plus appalling spelling and even less excitement)

I'm sure I've forgotten a pattern source in there somewhere! So what do you guys think - what order would you put them in?

I've started getting together the patterns for the kid's clothes challenge starting on Monday and one of the projects is making some long-sleeved tshirts out of merino to use as undershirts/layering items. I was going to adjust a tshirt pattern out of an Ottobre magazine - it's a turtleneck and should be easy enough to turn into a scoop-necked style. But today I came across this Burda pattern and got very excited about it:

Long sleeves! Short sleeves! Hoodie! It has it all. Including a really crap review at Pattern Review :( Oh well, I'll check it out thoroughly before I start cutting that's for sure. Further to the pattern snobbery I was slightly loathe to buy it in some ways becasue I felt like I should be using the Ottobre pattern I already had and just altering it (may yet do that if this pattern is as bad as the review suggests though!). Not surprising considering that option would have been #5 on the list, plus a little of #1, up against a lowly #8. On the other hand, ease of construction and flexibility of 4 different styles counts for a lot!

Fooling with a real macro lens

After my brief flirtation with fame and macro Mat offered to bring home his work macro lens for me to play with.  He also brought an extension tube to make it even more macro-y (a technical term I swear!)  I started out this morning trying take photos of our 3 resuced-from-the-garden Monarch butterfly chrysalises on the window sill but that was a dud because I just couldn't hold the camera still enough. I tell you what, if you want to feel reeeeeally old and shaky just try and use a macro without a tripod.  Lesson #1.  Then I tried outside and managed one of a post on our deck - mainly because it was really wide and where the zone of focus was didn't matter so much!

Then I moved on to a scented geranium in our backyard and that was more successful but still difficult!  I don't know if it was the colour of the flower or the camera or the lens or what but getting the stamen in focus was incredibly hard.  I'm sure *I* wasn't a factor at all :P  The leaves were also kind of fun.  I like how the photos come out looking sort of abstract.

When I pulled these into Photoshop they looked incredibly saturated which was neat so I left them untouched (the leaf has been cropped a bit) but that's all disappeared now that they're on Flickr. But you can see the details a bit better so it's not all bad!

Handmade Beginnings and other fab announcements

I'm so excited to announce that I'll be hosting Anna Maria Horner on her Handmade Beginnings blog tour!



My date is the 26th of May so look out for a Q & A with Anna and a give-away of a copy of the book. In the meantime you can follow along with the tour as she visits the blogs below AND enter yourself in the fabulous sewing machine giveaway "One winner will receive 1 SINGER® Confidence™ 7470 sewing machine, 5 yards of Anna Maria Horner fabric, a copy of the book Handmade Beginnings: 24 Sewing Projects to Welcome Baby"  Luckily I'm allowed to enter myself in that :) Waaah US residents only I'm afraid - the rules weren't available when I posted this originally.

May 3  Craft
May 4  Indie Fixx
May 5  Sew Mama Sew
May 6  Pink Chalk Studio
May 10  Wise Craft
May 14  House on Hill Road
May 16  The Purl Bee
May 18  All Buttoned Up
May 19  Alabama Chanin Journal
May 20  Homemade by Jill
May 21  True Up
May 22  Oh, Fransson!
May 23  Prudent Baby
May 24  Sew Liberated
May 25  Handmade by Alissa
May 26  Hazelnuts
May 27  Petite Purls

I've also finally got my mysterious project up as my new header. Phew. I'm quite pleased with it on the whole, although the trowel leaves something to be desired. I should think of some other way of doing it, maybe in felt? I did the text straight from the font Stitch and Bitch and the rest is down to my mad embroidery, button and portraiture skillz.

Kid's Clothes Challenge Patterns and Fabric

I loved how Hillary over at Wee Wonderfuls laid out her proposed patterns and fabrics for Elsie Marley's Kid's Clothes Challenge so I'm doing the same.  Frankly it's doubtful I'll get them all done in a week but aim high right?

Clockwise from top left:  Bo Peep Skirt by Anna Maria Horner, Oliver + S Jump Rope Dress (probably view B but still need to discuss this with Hazel), Leggings from Clothes for Girls, and two merino tops from Ottobre 3/2005.  Centre is a refashion of an old cardigan of mine. I have no idea what I'm doing with this one so it will be the first into the to-hard basket I think!

The one I'm most nervous about is the Bo Peep skirt because it involves mixing colours and patterns. Eeep!  Hazel wanted the brown fabric with trees, and I've added in the other ones.

I'm planning on having the brown as the centre panel, the pink as the back section which will have the blue and pink floral largely covering it as ruffles with some ribbon at the top.  I'm feeling rather insecure about this distribution though, not sure if I should have the darker fabric in the front, will it make the skirt look unbalanced?  I could find a plain brown to use instead, but that doesn't seem quite right either...  Ack!  Anyways, all doubt aside, I'm really looking forward to getting stuck into this lot.

Still here

Sheep tracks, originally uploaded by Hazelnutgirl.

Sorry for the lack of posts this week!  Somehow the days have slipped by in a haze of lecture-writing (I've finally got my groove on with those) and at-home days with Hazel who is being very demanding of my time at the moment.  Plus sewing and getting patterns ready and fabric chosen.  Non-bloggy stuff :)  I need to take some photos tomorrow! 

Tonight I've got a very sore toe - a blister gone wrong I think.  Teach me to wear heels, my feet are woefully unused to standing in them (no matter how comfy which these ones are) let alone for an hour straight without much moving while I lecture!  I guess I looked good though.  :-/

Oh I'm a martyr to fashion!  I read somewhere that the higher your level of education the lower your heels and I must say that women tottering along in very high heels at University is something of an oddity so perhaps it's true. I know I mostly live in flats but sometimes I don't want to be sensible!

I had a very interesting conversation with another lecturer about wearing colour.  We both had on very bright coats the other week, hers was leaf green and mine was a peachy-pink.  She commented that we stood out on campus and we both agreed that in general most people were wearing shades of black and grey and white.  I've been noticing this for awhile and know that visitors also comment on this predilection for dark colours in NZ.  So then, being academics and all that, we had to try and figure out why!  I proposed that it was a lack of confidence thing, particularly for women, as I've had numerous women tell me that I'm "so brave" for wearing red. The first time it happened I was floored because to me it's just my favourite colour.  With subsequent comments I began to realise that many women see bright colour as too confronting, too "look at me" to wear. Which is such a shame because it's just colour!  Talk about socialisation... So that was my theory.  Hers was that coloured dye costs more so nice true clear colours in clothes makes them more expensive.  Now that's really interesting because I have noticed in the past that when I see gorgeous colours or prints in clothes they're generally more expensive.  Of course that also comes down to printing processes etc., but it's an interesting take on it.  Would love to hear your opinions on wearing colour and why many people won't!