New cushions

We are renovating our home and right now we are working on our guest room. I had the Marimekko cushion cover from "Kulkue" fabric and decided that it could be the base for the colours in the guest room. I also had some fabric scraps from stripey Ikea fabrics and I made two pillow covers from them. Very simple, but I rather like them :)

A dress remake

 

This dress used to be another dress. It was a lovely dress with puffy sleeves and shirred bodice but unfortunately Emma grew and the dress became too small. At first I thought about making a skirt but since Emma prefers dresses, I got the idea of just cutting the top part off the dress, attaching shoulder straps (made from the puffy sleeves), and adding some of the shirred fabric to the back of the dress (the skirt part was a bit too narrow to fit as it was). Easy and cute. Very comfortable now when the weather is really hot!

Edit. I forgot to add a picture of the backside of the dress. Here it is, although a bit grainy. But I think it shows the shirred panel quite well anyway!

Dresses for sisters

I made this set for Emma's cousins. The older girl is three years old and the younger one is a newborn. The baby outfit was a gift for the baby's Christening party and I wanted to make the big sister her own dress as well. I used patterns from Ottobre design magazine (summer 3/2010) for the baby outfit and a pattern from the Japanese book Happy Homemade Wardrobe, vol. 2 for the toddler dress. I have made a nightgown for Emma from the same book earlier and I really recommend it. Lots of great, simple patterns. I wanted the dresses to match, so even though I used different patterns, I chose the same fabrics and also add a little butterfly applique to both dresses.

Sorry for the crappy images, we were almost late for the christening party and I still had to gift wrap the dresses. I am never on time...

The baby outfit has pants and a tunic. I modified the pattern a bit, since it would have required a zipper which I did not have. I left the back completely open and used snaps for closure, it is easier to put on that way.  The butterfly is smaller in the baby tunic than in the toddler dress even though it does not show well in the pictures.

We have a winner!

 

 

 

Congratulations, Hanna!

Party dress

Last weekend we went to Emma's cousin's christening party and even though I had a terrible cold, I just had to make Emma a new dress for the party. I have sewn her lots of skirts and pants and whatnot but she really wanted a dress, so I made her one. A very easy one, I should say. In that condition I could not have made anything complicated anyway...

The dress is made from a curtain, I just added some satin ribbon to make it a bit more interesting at the top. The pattern is again from one of my Japanese sewing books.

Let's Go Out Girls Clothes

Paperback: 88 pages

Publisher: Nihon Vogue Sha (March 2010)

Language: Japanese

25 patterns for girls' clothes, sizes from 90 to 130cm

As you can probably tell, my model was not very enthusiastic about having her picture taken. The dress is already a mess in these pictures, since she had been hopping in a trampoline and running a round with the other kids. I made one mistake in making this dress: I think I cannot wash it. The satin ribbon was not prewashed so I guess the colour will leak if I try to wash it and sending this dress to dry cleaners would be a bit too expensive. I think I'll just have to try washing it, we'll see what happens.

Another cap

I had a lot of jeans scraps left from making the harem pants, so I made another hat for Emma. Jeans were sturdy enough, so this cap is more useful than the very light-weight hat I made earlier.

The pattern is from Ottobre design magazine (summer 3/2010), the same magazine as the previous hat was from. I used a blue Amy Butler fabric as the lining, but unfortunately I did not take a picture of it. The pictures are a bit blurry, not sure why (icecream on the lense? More than likely.).

One more day to participate in my giveaway!