Summer Tee Dress

I have been inspired to make a quick, fun summer knit dress. This one is from a Butterick pattern 5456. I used black stretch knit fabric for the top and bottom band, and a print knit for the skirt. The changes in the pattern were... no lining, turned and top stitched edges for the arm and neck openings, and the skirt was pleated and stitched down for four inches instead of gathered at the princess waistline. (this makes a smoother waistline) The back has a cute fabric tied keyhole opening.

I think this would be a great bathing suit cover up for pool or beach. The inspiration is a trip to a tropical destination that we have booked later in February! Canadian winters can feel too long without an escape!

New Quilt....

I have finally decided the next quilt design, and started the first few squares. I am making this one in my old familiar way... small squares, quilted as I go, then huge job of banding the squares together to make the whole.

The design is log cabin, but with the twist of ignoring the typical light/dark or one colour/other colour organization of the "logs". Instead it will be black square in the center, random green and aqua pattern cottons for all the rest. The backing is black and white cottons, cut to 11 inches. I layer the batting over the backing square, then center the small black center square. Pin in place. Then I work the logs around the square, building out to the edges. Each seam is 1/4 inch and flipped and ironed before the next log is laid out. The seams effectively quilt the layers together and no further quilting is necessary, but as you will see I wanted to add detail....

When I am done, I measure and trim the whole block to 10.5 inches square, and set aside for further quilting. The top quilting is done by hand (old-school) and I use a black quilting thread to spiral a running stitch from the center out to the edge. The spirals are about one inch apart, and when I run out of room (near the outer edge) I finish with a small star detail! Cute.

I need lots and lots of these, so will plug away at them when the spirit moves me.

Plain to Fancy Tee

I made a long sleeve Tee a while ago, and found it a bit bland. Cool print but otherwise yawn. The new trend of embellishing tee shirts (in every store you find a range of somewhat embellished to extremely embellished) had me thinking, I could do that too.

I started with fabric scraps, one of the same fabric, and two of contrasting sparkly fabrics.

I cut rough flower shapes out of each one, getting just a bit smaller each time. This I repeated for three flowers.

I stacked them and using a needle and thread, pinched the back of the flower and tacked the pinch in place (gathers the middle just a bit). Then I tacked the whole flower onto the tee, using just enough stitches from the back to hold it in place. I arranged three of these from the shoulder towards the middle close to the neck ribbing.

no more yawning.