Sew Fussy

I can’t seem to stop buying fabric.  Anyone know of a 12-step program?  Better yet, does anybody have project ideas for me, since I’ve no idea what to make?

Denyse Schmidt and Kaffe Fasset wovens-

 Various knit fabrics, including the softest knit fabric I have possibly ever felt (top left), which also happens to be a Japanese import.  Looooove it.  Aren’t those mushrooms adorable as well?

More Japanese imports – some double gauze that will make beautiful children’s dresses (top left, bottom right), and two canvas fabrics that I haven’t decided what I want to make from yet (top right, bottom left).

I am so excited about the newest embroidery designs I found recently – they look adorable on the diapers! What do you think? I also put the bird design on some women’s shirts and I love how they came out.
I hope to have a little stocking featuring these designs in a week or so, but there might only be a few more diapers than what I’m showing here unless I can really kick ma graisse derrière into gear.

All right. Mini-pictures above. I don’t want to have to look at them full size because they’re not-so-nice, so you’ll have to click if you DARE. Mwuhahaha.  (Edit Nov. 2 – I took the scary pictures down!)

For what it’s worth, after the photographs were taken I cut the long sides off myself with a handy little razor comb, which is now my favorite hair tool. I told the hair stylist I was considering very very short (nearly shaved) sides but I also told her she could do whatever she thought would work best with my face – my fat, round, chipmunk-like face. After seeing the pictures, I felt like the extra hair on the sides of my face just made me look rounder, so I razored the sides off yesterday and I like it so much better! I don’t have to mess around with my hair throughout the day anymore, because without the long, fussy sides nothing needs fiddling with.

I’ll probably let the top of my hair grow and keep the back and sides short for a while. I really wanted to have the top much longer than it is, but when I got the cut my layers were already pretty short so it’s currently about as long as it could have been with this style.

Oh, I am wearing my part machine-sewn, part sewn-by-hand linen dress in the photos, in case you didn’t notice!

Blah blah blah, loads of excitement, right?

Woohoo, I’m so excited! I finally got a chance to get my hair cut on Friday. It’s rare that I have somebody to watch one or both of the girls so I was grateful that Bill could watch Zella while Anya was at school.

I found The Upper Hand Salon through Houston citysearch. It had great reviews, it’s a Bumble and Bumble salon (B+B are the only products that work in my fine hair, everything else weighs it down), and they made time for me with less than 24 hour’s notice.

I spent most of the night before poring over these hair galleries a friend pointed me to. I’ve never seen so many interesting hairstyles in one place, what a find!   I was going to post some individual pictures but I can’t pick any favorites because I’m so very fascinated by all of them. If I were 10 years younger and patient enough to grow my hair, I’d be styling like one of these lil’ thangs. I’d be trying, although I’m not sure I could carry it off well.

I don’t have pictures yet but my hair is  short (as always), very choppy, and still my natural brown and blonde. If I could have magically given myself any style (working with my current length) I probably would have gone with something like the pics below, but that’s not what my hair looks like. I’m really happy with what I got, though!

Man, I am so freaking sick. Anya is carrying home the germs of a thousand children and apparently I am very receptive to the buggers… She brought home some flu-like virus on her first week which I caught right away, and ever since then we’ve been passing it back and forth. My point, dear anonymous readers, is that I’m being lazy about posting because I haven’t done much of great interest in the last month.

One of my few sickie projects includes an attempt at Simplicity 4116.  Doesn’t it look cute in the line drawings? Nice and fitted at the waist?

I really thought this could be a cute girlie dress. I’ve never made anything in this style before, most of the things I wear are much simpler (much more simple?) and less frilly. I had ordered a bunch of linen – my favorite non-organic fabric – from fabric.com a little while ago during a sale and thought one of the colorways would look cute made into this pattern. Echhh… I was so wrong.
Since I didn’t actually finish this dress I almost didn’t post about it, but I decided to pin the skirt to the bodice and take some photos to show how it would have looked if I had finished. And it actually looks pretty cute on the dress form. Trust me when I say it looked a hundred times worse on my body. I put the bodice on for my husband and laughed at myself while he said “How could you even possibly think….???” Oh, it was bad.

Aside from this style being seriously unflattering on me in anybody’s lifetime, I think one of the problems is the fabric I used. It was a relatively stiff fabric, not quite light canvas-weight, but similar. The pattern called for fabrics such as lightweight linen and linen blends, crepe de chine, crinkled gauze, and silk linen (What? Such a thing exists? It’s my new mission to find and purchase some.) I think my linen was slightly too heavy, even though I would never call it a heavyweight fabric. My collar is funky, my sleeves are stiff and silly, and the whole dress makes me look like a clown.
Although the pattern information makes it look as if the dress is fitted, the waist is actually straight and roomy, not very fitted at all.  That was disappointing.
Finally, the size 12 I cut should have probably been a 10 or even an 8. Sucker was huge on me!

After hemming it, I plan to sew an elastic band into the skirt – I was hoping to find some white cotton/lycra knit that I could fashion into a stretchy waistband but all I have is black at the moment. It’s a shame to waste the bodice, but I’m not sure how to salvage it in a way that will look good on me so it will probably be trashed. Any ideas?

I’ve been promising to post some pictures of my new (since April) sewing room for a while, and now I finally have a reason. After many, many, many trips to the shop with my Brother Innovis 4000D embroidery machine – so many trips I’m sure that my customers started to think I was making it up – I gave in and traded the evil thing for the monster below (aka the PR 600II). Buh-bye, 4000D. You did embroider 13 million stitches in the two years I had you, but I needed something way more reliable.

It’s going to take some getting used to, but it’s definitely sturdier than any of the Innovis series machines. And at more than a hundred pounds, it better be – I’m not sure how Bill got it up the stairs when we brought it home. He was so mad at me that day, after I tricked him into coming with me to pick it up and then he had to put it all together. Well, he offered, but he still gave me some dirty looks for most of the day. Heh heh.  This is how I make you pay when you don’t let me paint our house anything other than white, black, or gray.  Sucka!

I still have more work to do on the room because I have too much crap, but it’s better than it was. It’s obviously still a mess, though…  the pics were taken mid-cleaning session.

But it’s not for another two months. I got the most awesome mail this week!

A while back, I did a trade with Laura of ElBee Baby – who makes the most amazing diapers in the world – and here is what I got from her the other day. These diapers have short organic velour outers and have been hand dyed, I *love* the seafoam/orange color combination, and the dip dyed diaper is possibly my only non-fussybutt dip dye. We’ve already washed and worn both of these and I’ve only had them for two days.

*love* *love* *love* *love* *love*

I should add that I only sent her one diaper (in retro apples print, coral colorway), and she was supposed to send me one in return. Not two! But how awesome is that?
I love these diapers.

Next, I received this gorgeous black onyx, silver, and red fire agate bracelet and earrings set from Michele of Jonah’s Gems! It wasn’t part of a trade, it was just something incredibly sweet she wanted to do. Thank you Michele, I adore the set!

I wanted to add a picture of the diapers I am finishing up. They still need doublers and front panel snaps (as well as better photos), but you get the idea… I have about a dozen AIO diapers to list at the same time as these fitteds.

So, what have I been up to lately? Lots and lots of nothing exciting, for sure.

In the past four weeks I have made over 3 dozen pocket diaper prototypes, and I’m still trying to decide which version I actually want to head into production with. I know that I prefer the prototypes with no leg casings and a slightly curved front panel, and I think I’m set with my pocket opening after trying three very different styles. Now I need to decide whether to go with an entirely turned and topstitched diaper, or the Fussybutt standard – part serged, part turned. Below are two fully turned and topstitched diapers I whipped up yesterday. Both of them fit Zella well, and neither has any visible serging.

I had/still have a lot of factors to take into consideration with this design. I’ll list just a few…

-I want to be able to embroider these diapers after they’re sewn together, so the pocket opening must be large enough that the outer layer of PUL can float on my hooped embroidery stabilizer without me having to hold back the edges of the diaper the entire time it’s being stitched on (embroiderers, you know what I mean, right?) Ah, I have a photo. Imagine the tee shirt is a pocket diaper. It’s basically just sitting on the stabilizer, the embroidery hoop isn’t holding it down at all.

-I had planned to make these diapers more affordable than my current fitted diaper and all-in-one diaper lines. However, it’s been hard for me to design something that I know could be done better. Most of the little details that make the diapers better, in my eyes at least, cost money.

-The front panel on the pockets behave differently than the front panels of my other diapers because the materials I’m using (PUL and microfleece) are stretchy and thin. This caused the front panel to flip down when worn, and the only solutions I could think of were to add elastic to the front panel or to contour the front panel. I went with a contour, but it’s super tricky to serge the front panel nicely now.

-I was hoping to get some sewing help with these, whether that means hiring a local seamstress or having the diapers manufactured by a USA-based sewing contractor. I think the decorative serging could be problematic because it might not be something a contractor is equipped to do, and none of the potential seamstresses I’ve talked to own sergers. Even if I were to buy a serger for my help, it takes practice and skill to do decorative serging well (especially on curves and PUL fabric!).
On a side note, I highly highly highly recommend the Baby Lock Imagine or Evolve to anyone who is in the market for a serger. I’ve tried three other brands of sergers – Baby Locks are by far the easiest to use, and they produce the best results.

That’s probably a long enough list, but there is so much more to it! The whole process has been pretty exhausting, to say the least. It’s also been fun, and I’ve wound up with a great stash of pocket diapers for Zella, even after sending out several rounds to testers.

If you’ve made it through this whole boring post, you deserve a cookie. I don’t have any cookies, but I do have a few reject pocket diapers to offer! “Reject” is the key term – they’re still perfectly functional, just not perfectly sewn. I’ve got two gender neutral larges, a gender neutral medium, and a lavender outer/brownish inner medium. If you’re interested in anything (one item per poster, please!) just post a comment to this post with the diaper you want.

This project is actually a few months old, but whatever. I don’t have any post-worthy pics of my current projects yet and I wanted to get a post in this morning.
This dress for my 5 year old is a combination of Burda 9885 and an old Laura Ashley dress I found at Costco a few years ago. She wore that dress so much it is now holey and can’t be passed down to Zella. Actually the only thing I carried over from the L.A. dress is the fullness of the skirt – you can kind of see from the first picture that the Burda dress isn’t supposed to be so full.

The L.A. dress is pleated in a different (more subtle) way and I actually prefer it to the Burda pleats, but I didn’t want to get all crazy for this project because I always mess things up when I put forth too much effort. Here ya go, strange pleated front…

Oh yeah, I have already posted a picture of Anya, then not-quite-3, in a dress I made from Burda 9885 (with no modifications – it was one of my earliest attempts at sewing a dress from a pattern) at the bottom of this post. I’m a sucker for cute black clothes.