Sunday, December 21, 2014

Yes, this is another circle skirt.

One of the stores I go to regularly has a large selection of this shiny spandex that I keep using. I've posted 5 projects with this fabric already, and can tell you there's at least one other I didn't get pictures of. (For the curious: these skirts, this fitted dress, and these two circle skirt dresses.)

Recently, they had this variant of it that has dots cut out. I know I make a ton of circle skirts, but I really wanted to make something I would definitely wear with this awesome fabric. I had some trouble deciding what color to line it with, and eventually went with this bright yellow/green.




Saturday, December 20, 2014

How many times have I said I'm not making another hat?

Every time I make a new type of hat I tell myself, "never again." I've even started telling my friends to stop me. It's always a crazy fiddly mess.

No matter how many times I say it, I inevitably make another hat. Half way through this one my serger just quit. It was also my first time working with PUL fabric. Great!

One of my friends asked for a warm, waterproof winter hat and sent me a bunch of pictures of helmets (the armor type) and some knit hats. From that we came up with an actually technically possible design for a sewn knight helmet hat with a movable visor.

(I asked Bria to help model again since she was available)




Thursday, December 18, 2014

Vertical stripes > horizontal stripes

After I made the catsuit in my last post, I had a bunch of leftover striped fabric. I combined that with some leftover black spandex from this project to make a quick color-blocked dress. The whole thing is serged together, and I used my standard fitted knit dress pattern. (You can find the tutorial for it here).

You'll notice a strange collar in the photos as well. I saw some cool collars and other accessories made out of boning a couple weeks ago and wanted to give it a shot. More on that later.

Back to the dress: To figure out the color-blocking, I traced my plain dress pattern and eyeballed a line where I wanted the center panel to be. It follows the curves of the side seams on the dress, but slightly exaggerated. I cut on the line and made a note to add seam allowance on the new edges.


Friday, December 5, 2014

I'm longer than I thought.

This project was sort of a personal challenge. I've been making a lot of quick and easy spandex items on my serger this year, and wanted to see if I could make something more complex. A catsuit seemed like a good candidate, and I can use it for costumes, as long underwear, etc.

I own a catsuit in plain black so I started by tracing it to make a pattern. I figured tracing would work because there's a lot of leeway in getting the fit right with a stretchy fabric. The basic suit is 8 pieces: two front, one back, collar, a crotch gusset cut in half for a zipper, and sleeves. You might notice my suit has a couple more pieces, but I'll get to that in a minute.


Since this was sort of a "trial run" of this pattern, I didn't want to spend a lot on fabric. This was the best I could find that didn't have an obnoxious print and was reasonably priced, even though the stripes made it a little more challenging to work with.

[Some of the following pictures might be a bit nsfw.]

Thursday, December 4, 2014

Starry starry skirt ~

As you might recall, I posted about a ruffled star print chiffon skirt a little while ago here and also on Reddit. One of the commenters there mentioned using a sparkly fabric under the chiffon for a different effect. I've done something similar with other clothes, and I had the same fabric in some other colors, so I figured I'd try it out! For the lining, I used the same holographic print fabric as in this top from earlier in the year.