Matching Jumpers

This weekend I made my daughter and I matching jumpers.  If you would like step by step instructions on how to make either one of these email me.  But here are the pictures.

Little Girl Jumper

So I was getting out my daughters 24 month clothing and discovered that I had no dresses.  A must for a little princess so I dug into my sewing closet and found this really cute fabric and jumper pattern. By the way this is a lined bodice.  All seams are sewn on 5/8 in unless it says otherwise.

This is the bodice front and back lined up.

Step 1: Sew the shoulder seams together. On both the lining and the actual bodice.

Step 2: Sew the lining to the bodice. Sew around the neck and arm holes.  Clip curves. 

Step 3: Open up the lining from the bodice.  Sew the side seams together .  

Step 4: Sew the center back of the lining and bodice together.  Clip corner.  Turn right side out. Point out corner.  Iron everything down so you get nice clean seams.

Step 5: Sew side seams of skirt together and sew skirt center back together.  Remember to serge/pink/zig zag all the raw edge seams so your skirt won't fray away in the wash (not necessary on bodice as all seams are enclosed).  Also leave the top few inches of the skirt center back open for the zipper. This is why I serged each side of this seam separately and not together as I did on the side seams. 

Step 6: Sew gather stitches along top of the skirt.  To sew gather stitches use a 5 stitch length (or the longest on your machine) and sew 2 rows of stitches.  One at 6/8 in and one at 4/8 in or (1/2).  I stop and restart at every seam and also in the center of the skirt front.  I do this so there is less chance of the gather stitches breaking and ruining all the gathering you were doing.  

Step 7:  Gather the skirt to fit the bodice.  Pin the skirt to the bodice matching up at every seam and at the center of the front (skirt and bodice).  Then you can gather in between all the pins to be even and fit.  To gather take either the needle threads or the bobbin threads and GENTLY pull. Tip: for every section you gather take the end you are not pulling and wrap around a pin so your gathers don't fall off the other end.  Pin as you get each section gathered to your liking.  When you finish gathering a section wrap the pulled threads around a pin.

Step 8:  Sew the skirt to the bodice (not the lining or vice a versa depending on which one you choose) . 

Step 9: Iron the bottom of the lining (or the bodice which ever one is not sewn to the skirt) up 5/8 in(the amount you sewed the bodice to the lining). Then pin it to the skirt (this should be the opposite side from which you sewed before, thereby enclosing the waist seam).  When you go to sew the seam you have a few options.  If this is the front of the dress I would recommend either sewing 1/8 in from the edge or hand sewing so it is invisible.  If you are just sewing the lining to the skirt then you can hand sew it so it will be invisible or you can do what I did (you will notice on this blog that I avoid hand sewing at all costs).  I used the "stitch in the ditch method".  I put on a blind hem foot and leave my needle in the middle.  Then I sew from the front right up against the other seam, this makes the stitching from the front invisible but you risk not catching the back in all the places and it can look a little sloppy on the inside.  

Step 10:  Put in the zipper.  Unzip the zipper and pin one side so the fold lines up right against the teeth or a little over (whatever you want).  Using your zipper foot (which requires you to move your needle, I usually move it closer to the needle) sew straight down one side.  Zip up the zipper and pin the other side of back so it matches up with the other side of the back.  I start from the the previous side (the end of the zipper) and sew across to the other side and then sew straight up the other side. Tip: when you get close to the pull of the zipper, put your needle in the fabric lift the presser foot and move the pull by either zipping the zipper up or down (whichever gets it out of your way for the longest time).


Step 11: Hem the dress.  (sorry I spaced a picture here)  I typically try the dress on the individual and fold up where I want it on a side seam.  Then I take the dress off measure how much I folded it up, fold it up that amount all the way around.  With her dress I did a size bigger than she actually is so she can "grow into" the dress.  So I hemmed it up 4 inches.  I like doing a "rolled hem".  Since the hem needed to go up 4 inches I fold/iron it up 2 inches all the way around then I fold/iron that over again and then sew it down usually 1/4 in from the top fold.

Here is my princess in all her glory with her little dress on.  She was being a difficult model that is why in the second picture she has a graham cracker in her hand.  

Here she is full length.  My favorite thing is how long this dress is.  That is a problem I have with a lot of little girl dresses is they are all knee length or higher.  I wanted a long dress (especially since winter is around the corner) and this can easily be layered with a long sleeved blouse.

Quilts/Blankets/Pillows

This is a quilt I made for my Young Womens Project (an LDS church thing) to take to college with me. It's just square blocks sewn together.  If you look really closely the white fabric is printed with little spools of thread. 

I have made many blankets over the years but have just recently really started in on the quilting process.  Before it would just be 2 pieces of fabric sew together, or the occasional square block quilt.  I now have done a few more but the block quilt is still my favorite and I revert back to it often. 

This blanket we lovingly refer to as "Confused".  It has Scott's 2 favorite college football teams, BYU and Nebraska.  It has just 2 pieces of fleece fabric serged together. It makes for a great stadium blanket though.

This was a blanket I made to start expanding my idea of quilting.  It reminds me of a back to school blanket with all the apples.  This was regular quilt blocks that were slashed into triangles (like cutting a sandwich into fourths).  Then we mixed up all the fabrics and sewed them together. 2 triangles together then that triangle sewed to another 2 triangles sewn section.  That makes a square and then you sew squares together.  That is essentially how quilting works I've discovered.  Take whatever shape you have and somehow create a square and sew squares together. 

This quilt was randomly created.  I was at my husbands grandparents home in St. George October 2005.  My husband and his grandparents were enthralled watching some football game and I was bored.  So his grandma (an avid quilter I might add) told me to go into her fabric closet and make a quilt.  So I did and this was the end product. 

This was going to be quilt.  I started piecing this together at a teaching conference I went to.  It's a pinwheel pattern.  You can kind of see it.  But I never finished piecing enough together to form a decent sized quilt so I just used them as covers for preformed pillows. ( I made 2 of them)

This is just a piece of muslin fabric that I stitched everything in with some embroidery floss.  My sister taught me how to do this. Then I just took some leftover fabric I had laying around my house and formed a pillow that I stuffed.  

This is a T-shirt quilt I made for my husband for fathers day this year (2010).  It has 3 of his favorite t-shirts from high school, and then the rest of the quilt is made of Christmas pajama fabric (a tradition in his family that I carried on).

This is by far the nicest quilt I have ever made.  It is also the most time consuming.  I followed a pattern for this one.  The pattern was called a Trip Around the world.  It is really simple in that it is just little blocks sewn together but you had to sew them together in a certain order to get the branching out effect.  I loved this one so much that I even had it professionally machine quilted (a $100 expense). 

This was a cradle given to me by my mother in law.  She had the foam in there already but it was covered in a fabric I really didn't care for (Sorry!!). So when I had my baby girl my husband encouraged me to just recover it.  I was a little apprehensive but it turned out great and made the cradle look really cute. 

Now those are all the pictures I have of blankets and such that I have made that are still lying around my home.  Now in my last post I mentioned pictures of people in some of the items I'd sewn but I forget to include them so here they are.

This is a bridesmaid dress I made for my sister in laws wedding.  It was a plain purple fabric lining a sheer overlay.  It then has a sheer white wire ribbon at the waist and hem for an added flair.  We made 4 of these for all the bridesmaid to match.

This is my daughter in her blessing dress that I sewed.  She was very good a posing for the overload of pictures I took.

This is my son in his blessing outfit I sewed.   He was not so good at posing for pictures, therefore we only took a few.

Christmas Jammies- oh so festive!

These are the Christmas Jammies I made in 2006.  I made jammie pants for my husband and I.  Then I made a sleeper for my son.  It had feet and snapped underneath and up the front.  

These are the jammies in 2007.  Again pant for my husband and I and a sleeper for my son.  This had a zipper in it (much easier than snaps) and it had a collar and cuffs for the sleeves in a matching knit fabric. 

2008 Jammies.  This time I did pants for my husband, son and I.  (I didn't want to make 2 sleepers) Then for my daughter I made a more interesting type sleeper.  She was only 2 months old so I made her more of a sleeper sack.  This has no legs it really is like a sack with arms and a zipper. 

Now we have the most recent 2009 jammies.  I made a sleeper for my daughter but opted out of doing the feet and just put a cuff on the bottom of the legs and the end of the sleeves.  I used the same fabric to do a collar for the neck. I did make pants for my son, myself and husband but we did Christmas by ourselves this year and therefore we don't have a picture of the 4 of us together. 

This is the dress I made for my brother in law's wedding that I included in my last post.  

That sums up this post next I will have a step by step guide to a simple little girl jumper that I just made for my daughter.