Workbasket * On Pens & Needles

A modest amount of progress on the Dolly Dearest Project. I had some time while waiting in the car. I made good use of it.

Gson#2 had asked for his mom to buy him a tie. She told him that he should ask me, and of course I said “yes”. My only question to him was “what color?” I should have known it was going to be purple. Poking at the inter-webs I found two patterns: The bow tie tutorial on Scattered thoughts of a crafty Mom

and the long tie tutorial and free pattern on Zune’s Sewing Therapy

He was so delighted with them, that he went through my fabric stash and picked out more fabrics for me to make more ties.

A little bit before or around Christmas time, DIL asked that PJs be made for Louis, he being naked and it being cold.

I told his measurements and purchased fabric and then the project sat, waiting for me to eventually get back to it. As DW says, “it isn’t going to sew itself”, so back to the internet I went. This time in search of a Doggie PJ pattern. I wanted it to be fairly simple in construction. I found a pattern on Mimiandtara.com. This links to an Etsy site to purchase the pattern for download. Based on the measurements that I took, the extra small size was purchased. Being that I purchased the fabric before the pattern, It was a challenge to squeeze the pattern onto the 1/2 yard wide piece. The back was nearly too wide! The instructions were pretty straight forward… If one was paying attention. Apparently I was not. I ended up sewing the front shoulder seams to the back sleeve edge. I did not realize this error until after, very carefully, sewing the sleeve on. I discovered my mistake when the instructions said to “sew the back legs”.

Back to square one, cutting more fabric. This time I was successful in sewing the front and the back together the correct way. This made it much easier to sew the arm and leg sleeves. I stopped at this step, wanting to have the PJs tried on Louis before getting into the fiddly finishing steps. It didn’t make any sense to get it completely finished only to have them not fit.

Any they didn’t fit. They were too tight to get his little arms into it. Back to step one. This time using a scrap knit fabric for a mock up and also making the sleeves larger.

Dang! Still too tight. Maybe it is a body length issue… Stay tuned for further development.

Over this last past weekend we headed for Medford. DW was teaching an advanced motorcycle class and I went along for the ride (pun intended). I did ride in one of the classes (thank you Aria), but it also left me plenty of time to work on projects. I could only take projects that packed small, so as not to take up too much room in the motorcycle luggage. A perfect project was embroidery. Moved this project from UFO to WIP!