Just wanted to show you Frida in her new dress – I think she’s beautiful, but I may be biased…

The sun showed itself yesterday! Following days and days of nothing but greyness, it was quite amazing to see the long shadows that were cast on the snow. I was driving in the car with Frida, and she complained about getting the sun in her eyes. Complained! Of course, I had to tell her to get her priorities straight – not sure she knew what I meant, though.

I made her this dress a few days ago, and I love it – it looks even cuter on her. I’m sorry to say it’s made from Onion 20022 again, but seriously this pattern has been worth every øre (penny or dime would sound better, but it just wouldn’t be true) I paid for it. Check out everything I made from the pattern right here. This dress is made from Hilco velvet (love, love, love it) from Malika & Rosa and cotton from Joel Dewberry found at Fabric.com.

Now, it’s Friday night, and I’m looking forward to the weekend. Let’s do a quick wrap-up.

Mads will be home in an hour or two after a few days of work in Stokesley, UK. Remember the photo of Ronja in the Lucia parade? Well, it just won a global Christmas season photo contest in my company, and an iPod Touch will be arriving in the mail soon. Nice. Also I have realized that there are job opportunities out there, and some of them seem not so far off – so now I just need to find the right one, and get it! It’ll be a nice weekend!

Well, I made them in a size 74, which fit perfectly at the time – but Frida is growing a lot at the moment, and within a month they were starting to look a bit short on her. As they are still nice and wide, I decided to lengthen the legs, using the contrast fabric. And this is the slightly blurry result.

I simply cut off the legs just above the elastic, making sure the edges were alike and even, and made a pattern for the added length based on the shape of the legs above the cut. Sewed the pieces together, topstitched the side seam as above the cut, attached the new leg bottoms to the overalls, topstitched the seam, and finished with elastic at the bottom – just as they were before. Easy-peasy.

In my opinion, they’re even cuter now than they were before – this is definitely one of my favourite patterns during my time as an Ottobre subscriber. I may just be making another pair soon.

This is Ronja modeling her rose dress.

I must say that I find the [lack of] light at the moment utterly uninspiring – which leads me back to dreaming of spring. Can’t wait!

I love the shape, the pleats, the pockets, the front bib - and the things that didn’t turn out quite the way I expected, don’t matter that much. However, I’ll tell you about them anyway, because there is at least one thing I would do differently another time.

I used a rather sturdy corduroy for these overalls, because it is still pretty cold in Denmark. I combined it with a fine cord from Hilco for the pockets and bib. When I was hemming the bottom edges of the legs, I didn’t consider the fact that the heavier fabric would take away some of the elasticity in the elastics, but that is what happened. So for someone else making these in corduroy, I would suggest that you take out a few cm of each elastic, in order to gather the legs a bit more.

I used some quite big wooden apple buttons, and they were just about to give me trouble because of the size of the button holes needed. Inside the bottom of the front bib, there is some seam allowance from the joining of the two pieces, and it kind of puts a limit to the possible button hole size. Still, I managed, and I can’t wait to see Frida wearing them! I topstitched the sides of the pants, to make the seam lie nice and flat on the inside of the overalls.

Wonderful pattern – warm recommendations from me! 

By the way, I wanted to bring your attention to this searchable Ottobre-database that Teri made (who does beautiful sewing herself – go take a look at her blog, it’s worth it). The database is brilliant, because it means you can search for the things you want to sew. For instance if you search for “pants” and “74″, it will show you all the patterns for pants in size 74, that Ottobre has brought throughout the years – and now know in which issue to find your pattern. Great job, Teri!

 That’s it for now – I’ll see if I can get a modeled pic of Frida wearing the overalls later on.

I have been looking at the fully lined “Betty” pinafore dress from Ottobre 06/07 a few times, but earlier the number of pattern pieces kind of scared me, so it took me a while to work up the nerve. However, with this fabric it seemed like an obvious choice, so I decided to go for it.

The dress did present a challenge to me, I assure you. I haven’t tried making pleats before, so that was something new - but that wasn’t really what I found difficult. The cursing started while I was making the pockets. Gathering the pockets and attaching the binding was terrible -  probably because I chose to make the bias tape for the binding from a very light weight quilting cotton. Next time I would definitely go with something more sturdy – a medium weight would do it, I believe. The binding continued to give me trouble, due to the light weight fabric, which was a bit of an agony. Also, I seem to never be quite sure as to how to finish the binding at the ends – folding it under, around, or whatever. I think it ended up looking ok, but it has a few imperfections (yep, that’s what I choose to call them) on the inside of the dress.

I gotta tell you though, on the positive side, one of the highlights of making this dress was the zipper. For Christmas I got an invisible zipper foot for my Pfaff 2027, and even though you do still have to make sure everything’s aligned and stuff like that, it just totally takes care of the most difficult thing about attaching the zipper for you – well, almost anyway. It worked wonders, and I’m really happy with the result – if you do a lot of invisible zipper sewing, I would definitely recommend this little thingy. I just realized, I didn’t even get a photo of the back – that’ll be included when Ronja models it.

Another highlight was just the thrill of making it – because even though I didn’t find it easy at all times, it was so pleasing to get out the sewing machine and work on a project. Oh, and Ronja loves the dress, so what’s not to be happy about?

Next up is making her a costume for shrovetide – she wants to go as an angel…