Corrinne Elise complete

Posted by Claire on Oct 25 2010

It was a weekend of ‘bits and pieces’ sewing. I made piping and finished up the few inches of remaining smocking on my niece’s winter bishop, getting it ready for construction; I sewed the underarm seams and started the bullions on her Christmas dress and I finished up this heirloom style dress too, marking its buttonholes, adding the buttons and popping out the petticoat.

The pattern is “Corrinne Elise” by PBJK. I blogged about it a couple of weeks ago, when I was having trouble deciding how to finish the yoke. Overall, I liked the pattern. The styling was excellent and the directions offered both heirloom and non-heirloom options, as well as smocked and unsmocked version. You’ll have to forgive the pictures – my good camera is having battery issues and until I get it into the shop, I have to resort to my teeny-weeny Samsung :(.

The pattern pieces fit together well, and I’d be tempted to make it again in a print fabric for a more casual look. I’d probably draft a collar in that case, because the pattern doesn’t offer one and I think that would set off the yoke nicely, but that would be the only change I could see myself making.

The directions are overall, quite clear, although they could do with additional directions/diagrams on how to incorporate some of the heirloom techniques. I’m a confident sewer and if I can’t figure it out, I’m fine winging it but there were parts of the construction that could have been more explicit.

Now that it’s finished and I can hang it on Stanley, the sizing seems off to me. It’s either too wide or too short proportionally. My gut says too wide, given that the petticoat I made to go under it (Kwik Sew for Toddlers, whose sizing I trust) won’t button on Stanley but the dress does without strain. I need to see it on the little girl I made it for – she’s tall for her age – before I deliver a final verdict.

Also, a table of contents would have been useful. I didn’t sew the dress in one sitting. I’d work on it, set it down, come back to it and work on something else. This necessitated me flipping madly through the double sided sheets looking for a tiny measurement or construction detail a lot more than I enjoyed because the pages, while labelled internally, didn’t have a master list saying “sleeves” pg 4-5, cutting directions pg 1 etc. Would have been a nice touch and cut down on my flipping.

The one area of the pattern that does need to be addressed desperately is the smocking plate. I design original smocking plates for magazines. I’m totally happy working from vintage designs. I trust my smocking skills and my ability to decipher instructions. I can usually smock correctly the first time out and rarely have to rip work out.

Unfortunately, this plate was so small and so indistinct, and the written directions so unclearly written, that I ended up ripping out and redoing the all of the sections at least once, because I was two or three rows into the plate, having finished the featherstitching, before I discovered that the directions would create a design that was too deep for the limited number of half-rows I’d pleated and wouldn’t allow me to smock the half waves as intended. Grr.

I ended up making it up, referring to the photograph, and winging it but I imagine not all smockers would be able to do that. A bigger, clearer plate that is not 3 x 4″ is a must for any future reprints of this pattern IMHO. I’m glad I stuck with the pattern but I’ve set designs aside for less and the introductory frustrations I experienced in the smocking made me leery as I continued with the sewing portion of the dress.

I did however enjoy working the hem and the yoke. The featherstitching was strangely lulling and I found myself in no hurry to finish it. I worked two bands of it around the hem, and ultimately, around the yoke, too, to tie the upper and lower halves together.

Overall Pattern Review: B-

Pros:

lots of options for a variety of finished looks
pattern pieces fit well
instructions were clear and detailed

Cons:

the smocking plate was miniscule and almost impossible to decipher
a lack of a table of contents made navigating through the instructions difficult
some of the heirloom techniques could have been more fully explained for novice heirloom sewers

Finally, I need to tell everyone just how much this dress cost me to make (or didn’t cost!). There’s this sense that heirloom sewing is prohibitively expensive. It certainly can be, if you’re using silk and expensive English netting and silk ribbon. But the whole dress, including the petticoat and the pattern, cost me less than $30. Seriously.

Pattern: $12
Fabric: $1.50 (seriously, $1/m on the discount table!!)
Entredeux: $5
Lace: $4
Pearl beads: $0.75/bag (yeah, that’s right! And I’ve got a whole bunch more left on the waxed string!)
Floss: $1.50 (and that’s only ’cause I ran out of white floss and didn’t have the darker shade of pink – everything else was stash)
Buttons: stash from a SAGA basket win
Batiste: $3.00
Total: $27.75

Cool, huh?

Free 1940s Smocking Plate

Posted by Claire on Oct 13 2010

I saw this cute late 1940s smocking pattern offered for sale on a vintage pattern site recently. I didn’t buy it but I was struck by the charming banded smocking pattern, which so typifies designs of the period. There’s a wealth of ideas to be gleaned from early patterns. I often study vintage pattern illustrations, breaking down the elements one by one and making note in my sketchbook of unique or unusual details that I might like to replicate in my own projects.

Variations on bands of diamonds and cables appear in lots of the pamphlets and iron on patterns during the period. As is common, they use very simple stitches (in this case, only cable, seed and trellis stitches) and a very limited palette of colours: white and floss in a darker shade of the fabric colour.

The pattern itself is a classic square yoke dress, with a very shallow partial yoke, a small peter pan collar, sash and puffed sleeves. The sleeves have a slight ‘cap’ishness to them, and are finished with what looks like a simple folded band. The skirt is very short to modern eyes but that was the style well into the 1960s for very young girls.

One stylistic element of interest is the fact that the back of the dress has a small yoke, to which the lower bodice and skirt appear to be gathered in one piece, like the front. This is different from many contemporary patterns, which see the skirt gathered to the back bodice with a seam along the back waist line but it does create a very relaxed, informal silhouette.

Replicating the design exactly makes for quite a deep design, worked over 20 1/2 rows. You can download a pdf of the plate by clicking here. If you are working this on a dress with a deeper partial yoke or for a younger child, I would simply omit one or two of the lower bands to shorten it.

Pleat 22 full space rows. Backsmock the upper holding row with two strands of floss before smocking design. Smock the design using three strands of floss.

Row 1: Beginning with an under cable over the centre two pleats, work cable stitch in coloured floss across the row.

Row 1 1/2: Work an echo of row 1 in white floss.

Row 2 – 3: Beginning with an *over cable over centre two pleats and using coloured floss, work a four step trellis down to row 3, work seven cable stitches, starting with an under cable, four step trellis back up to row 2*. Repeat from ** across row.

Row 2 1/2 – 3 1/2: Echo row 2-3, using white floss.

Row 4 – 5 1/2: Mirror image of rows 2 – 3 1/2.

Row 3 3/4: Work seed stitch in the centre of each diamond, using coloured floss and tying off between each stitch.

Rows 5 1/2 – 9: Work in the same manner as Rows 2 – 5 1/2 except that the cables and diamonds now alternate from the band above.

Rows 9 – 12 1/2: Work identically to rows 2 – 5 1/2

Rows 12 1/2 – 16: Work identically to rows 5 1/2 – 9

Rows 16 – 19 1/2: Work identically to rows 2 – 5 1/2

Row 20: Mirror image of row 1 1/2 in white floss.

Row 20 1/2: Mirror image of row 1 in coloured floss.

As always, you are free to share the link to this project with sewing friends and use it for personal or charity sewing. Please credit my website and don’t repost or resell the plate or instructions on your own site. Enjoy!

Rustic Quilted Tree Skirt

Posted by Claire on Oct 11 2010

This past spring was a particularly busy time for me design wise, as I created more than six different projects for various holiday and winter articles.

The payoff, of course, is seeing my projects in print. This easy quilted tree skirt appears in the Holiday issue of Create & Decorate, a magazine that specializes in country and folk styles.

Here are some pictures of the tree skirt – my pictures never look as lovely or as beautifully styled as the ones in the magazines. They make my work look so nice.

None the less, I am getting better at remembering to take pictures before I package my projects up. I’d like to say that I always get my designs done in plenty of time and am never rushing around at the last minute(and if any of my editors are reading this, I always have your projects done early! *whistling innocently*) but somehow, life can and usually does get in the way of interruption-free sewing and creative time.

That said, it’s funny what shows up when you look at an object through the lens of a camera.

I think I would have added more definition to this pot, for one. It looks too flat, now that I see it laid out.

On the other hand, I really like how this star pops and the quilting echoes the shape.

And the bias binding on this circle is really, really smooth. Some days my bindings go in ripple-free and other days nothing I do seems to make a difference. The day I bound this quilt, it was the former!

But no quilt is ever perfect and in this case, it’s not the sample but the instructions that have the boo-boo. An eagle-eyed reader, Carol B., was kind enough to point out that somehow or another I transposed my numbers as I was writing the directions and there is an error in the cutting instructions.

In the cutting directions on page 63, Step #2, it should read “From the brown print fabric cut (16) 9 1/2″ x 3 1/2″ squares and three tree pot appliqués.” rather than the 8 1/2″ x 4 1/2″ inch rectangles specified in the original instructions.

Mea culpe. And thanks Carol for being so on the ball! Extra presents under your tree, for sure.

Costumes That Go Bump in the Night

Posted by Claire on Oct 07 2010

After the great Jedi debacle of 2009, when Luke’s mother found herself sewing the elastic into the young hero’s pants at 8am on the day of the Hallowe’en party, she swore to herself next year would be different.

The force must be with me because because this year, I have my Hallowe’en costumes done…EARLY!

I know. I know. And they said pigs couldn’t fly, either.

First up is Mike Wazowski, the loveable, one-eyed assistant from Pixar’s Monster’s Inc, modelled here next to his human interpreter. 🙂

Andrew informed me in August of his costume intentions (no doubt encouraged by big brother’s timely assertion that he was going to be a certain English wizard) and when I found this wonderful double-sided green fleece, I knew it was perfect.

In a break with tradition, I didn’t draft my own pattern. Instead, I used Kwik Sew 3803.

The pattern was fantastic (frankly, I’ve never had a bad KwikSew pattern). Total construction time, including cutting and the ‘one big eyeball’ applique was three hours, start to finish. It took me another hour to make the pants, which are simply KwikSew jogging pants from Sewing for Toddlers. Given how chilly Canadian weather can be at the end of October, I added sleeves, using the sweatshirt pattern from the same book, and they fit perfectly. Hoorah for interchangeable pattern pieces!

All of the appliqué fabrics were stash except for the white polar fleece, which is actually the reverse of the green. I had far, far too much fun making the eyeball and eyelid, which included quilting the ‘iris’ and adding a little gleam courtesy of a tiny doll button.

And the the pees dew ray-zistance: the hardhat.

Again, it’s not new. It’s just a repurposed toy, painted with those great plastic paints and adorned with a very tiny, hand painted Monsters Inc. motif. Total cost, excluding the pattern: $21.

Quilted Trick or Treat Bag

Posted by Claire on Oct 07 2010

If you’re a sewer with kids, October is definitely the month you come in to your own.

After all, nobody ‘oohs’ and ‘ahhs’ over the neatly shortened pants or the nice new curtains you made for the kitchen windows. Those boring, everyday things are just done by the sewing fairies. *laugh, snort* Nope, the real glory revolves around…drumroll, please… HALLOWE’EN!

Here’s an easy tutorial for a charming quilted trick or treat bag that’s sure to take your coolness quotient from ‘wonderful’ to ‘absolutely-the-coolest-sewer-that-ever-lived’ :). I made my bags for the boys a couple of years ago and they love them to pieces: the evidence is in the slightly wrinkled, been through the wash a number of times look my sample is sporting in the photos.

It’s a nice kid-sized bag, with sturdy ribbon handles and big enough to hold a good haul. However, it’s not so enormous you spend the entire night trundling round the neighbourhood, standing at the end of countless driveways, as the kidlets try to fill it! 🙂

Materials

1/2 yd orange cotton fabric

1/ 2 yd light orange cotton fabric

18” x 36” batting

8” x 12” square black cotton fabric

1 yd 1” green grosgrain ribbon

6” reflective safety tape (optional)

1 spool orange thread

1 spool black thread

Supplies & Notions

temporary fabric spray adhesive

fabric marking pen or tailor’s chalk

quilter’s ruler

rotary cutter

rotary cutting matte

pins

8” x 12” piece of Wonder Under paper-backed fusible web

iron

sewing needle

Directions

Using the rotary cutter and quilter’s ruler, cut both orange fabrics and batting into 14 1/2” x 31” rectangles. Set the light orange rectangle aside temporarily.
Spray the batting with temporary spray adhesive and smooth the dark orange fabric on top.
With the fabric marking pen, draw randomly spaced vertical lines (from 1/2” to 2” apart) down the fabric to simulate the lines on a pumpkin. Using a straight stitch (L 2.5-3.0) and with the orange thread in the bobbin and upper, quilt the vertical lines.
Print off the pumpkin face pdf by clicking here. Trace the face onto the paper-backed fusible web. Following the manufacturer’s instructions, fuse the tracing onto the wrong side of the black fabric with a dry iron. If you’ve never attempted machine appliqué, check out this youtube video for step-by-step instructions.

Cut out the eyes, nose and mouth from the black fabric.
Make a mark on the quilted bag fabric 6 3/4” down from the top edge and 7 1/2” in from the left edge using the fabric marking pen. This is the center of the face.
Position the pumpkin face on the quilted fabric, referring to the photograph for placement and centering the face over the mark. Following the manufacturer’s instructions, fuse the pieces in place.

With black thread in the upper, appliqué the pieces onto the fabric using a narrow zig-zag stitch (L 0.5, W 2-3). Stitch around each piece slowly, pivoting carefully at the inside and outside corners.
Pin the reflective tape on the right half of the quilted fabric, if using. Stitch around the tape to secure.
RS facing, fold the quilted fabric in half and pin along the side and bottom edges. With orange thread in the bobbin and upper, stitch using a 1/2” seam allowance. Trim the corners and press open the seam allowances.
With the bag still inside out, align the side and bottom seams at one corner so that they form a triangle. Using the quilting ruler, draw a horizontal line exactly 2 1/2” from the bottom corner. The horizontal line will be 4” wide and when sewn will form the box corner. Stitch across this line. Trim the seam allowance and press. Repeat for the opposite corner.
Cut the grosgrain ribbon in half. With the raw edges aligned at the upper edge, center one handle on each side of the bag, with each end 3” from the edge. Pin in place and then stitch the handles in place inside the seam allowance.
Fold the light orange rectangle in half, RS facing. Pin. Stitch around the outside of the fabric, leaving a 5” gap on the long side for turning. Press the seam allowances to one side.
Form the box corners for the lining as in step 11.
Insert the quilted bag inside the lining, RS facing. Stitch around the top of the bag through all layers. Trim and press.
Turn the bag right side out. Slip stitch the opening closed.
Fill with candy.

You are free to share the link to this project with sewing friends and use it for personal or charity sewing. Please credit my website and don’t repost or resell the appliqué or instructions on your own site. Enjoy!